1991 begins under the threat of an appallingly bloody war, involving a massive intervention by the army of the world's greatest capitalist power, the United States, alongside a plunge into open recession for the whole world economy, huge attacks against the working class in the developed countries and an ever more dreadful misery not only in the "Third World" but also in the countries of the one-time "Eastern bloc", with the USSR, ravaged by famine, in the forefront.

The world is not beginning a "new international order", but is already in the final phase of the capitalist mode of production's decadence: decomposition[1]; At the heart of this turmoil of war of all against all, the United States is determined to defend by every means lit its disposal its worldwide domination of the existing "order".

War in the Gulf: Towards the massacre

As we write, James Baker, the second personal­ity of the US state, has just completed a tour of meetings with heads of state in Saudi Arabia, Syria, the USSR, and France, during which he reminded his audience of the USA's determina­tion against Iraq in the "Gulf crisis". Bush has returned from Czechoslovakia, where he repeated his call to follow behind the US in its military crusade. The American army is coducting large scale maneuvers. The number of troops is to be raised to 400,000. Hundreds of thousands of press-ganged Iraqis are ate front. The Israeli army is on war alert, and all the region's armies, police, and militia are in turmoil. The Middle East is on the verge of a new and unprecedentedly violent bloodbath.

Contrary to the propaganda on the end of the "Cold War", which was to mark the beginning of a new "world order" of peace, war has "heated up" at every level, and it is the chaos of the international situation, the decomposition of the capitalist system, that are accelerating.

"Disarmament"? A race for still more effective weapons, better adapted to "modern" warfare, while old, useless weapons are sent to scrap; the principal countries involved in the "conferences" and "agreements" are more and more directly involved in military conflicts, with the USA at their head.

"Peace"? The proliferation of conflicts, the direct involvement of the American army, the dispatch of troops and equipment to the battle­field by several countries, including the most developed, in quantities unheard of for decades, with an unprecedented recession of the whole world economy as backdrop[2].

The "international community"? The resistance and opposition is sharpening between the United States and their erstwhile "allies" of a "Western bloc" henceforth consigned to the dustbin of history.

The resistance of the developed countries

The dislocation of the anti-Iraq coalition: toward "every man for himself"

Hardly two months after the US managed, in August 1990, to create a facade of unity within the "international community" against the "madman Hussein" by unleashing the "Gulf cri­sis", every member of the same "community" is now out for its own interests.

Saddam Hussein's liberation of all the French hostages, without any apparent negotiation, has shown the real worth of the USA's "allies'" solemn promise a few days previously not to negotiate separately with Iraq. Apparently, Claude Cheysson (previously French Minister of Foreign Affairs) has held discussions with his Iraqi opposite number during his recent voyage to Amman. A whole galaxy of top personalities has been to Baghdad to negotiate the liberation of hostages officially, and certainly other things more discreetly: Willy Brandt, ex-Chancellor of West Germany and both Nobel peace prize win­ner and President of the "Socialist International"; Nakasone, ex-Prime Minister of Japan, Gorbachev's adviser Primakov, the Chinese Foreign Affairs minister, and the ex­-PM's of more secondary countries such as Denmark and New Zealand, parliamentary delega­tions from Italy and Ireland, etc.

All this coming and going is not the result of individual initiatives. Willy Brandt's visit was certainly approved by the German government; the Chinese minister's visit is obviously official; Cheysson made no denials when he gave the game away as to his own mission.

We have come a long way since the general condemnation that greeted this summer's voyage by Kurt Waldheim. Nor is this a division of labor designed to trap Iraq, with the Americans playing the "tough guys" and the rest the conciliators. The British and American reactions show this clearly enough. The brutal refusal to negotiate with Iraq, the outraged criticisms by Bush, Thatcher, and Baker, prove the extent of the disagreements that are spreading within the "ONU" coalition.

Clearly, Hussein's "special treatment" of cer­tain countries (France especially) is not disin­terested. He is obviously aiming to drive a wedge between the different "allies" of the anti­-Iraq coalition. If Saddam has bargained like this with his stock of hostages to obtain the visit of this or that well-known political figure, it is because he was well aware of the splits existing between the various countries. And this policy has encountered a certain success.

When the US demanded from the UN Security Council a resolution authorizing the recourse to armed force, the resistance of France, the USSR, and China, all permanent members of the Security Council, meant that in the end the res­olution called for nothing more than strengthening the embargo!

While the USA is constantly reinforcing its military potential in the Gulf, faithfully aided and abetted by Britain, and as its stance be­comes increasingly threatening and intransigent, France drags its feet, withdraws its troops from the front, reopens the diplomatic option with Mitterrand's UN speech, his meeting with Gorbachev, and Rocard's first declaration since the beginning of the crisis on the need to "explore every possibility of negotiation". Japan and Germany remain silent.

The unity of the "free world" has come to an end. The events of October 1990 were the first real signs of the basic tendency underlying the new conditions created by the disappearance of the Russian imperialist bloc in 1989: the disap­pearance of the Western bloc, the acceleration of decomposition, the struggle of every capitalist state against its rivals, for its own interests, and in the forefront the set-to between the major industrialized countries.

Might makes right

The USA is ready to act without consulting the "allies", the UN, or anybody else. If the American bourgeoisie is ready for war against Iraq, to sacrifice thousands of its "boys and girls", then this is not for Kuwait, nor to defend "international law", but to show off its strength and determination to the other devel­oped countries. The French bourgeoisie, for ex­ample, has been forced out of its traditional zones of influence in the Middle East, first of all from Iraq itself, but also from Beirut since the USA gave Syria t the green light for the an­nexation of Lebanon in an operation every bit as bloody and violent as Hussein's of Kuwait.

Quarrels proliferate in every domain:

- dissolution of the secret network of influ­ence and control set up by the USA following World War II (the Gladio "scandal" which started in Italy, but has since spread to Belgium, France, Holland and Germany);

- US diktat in the GATT negotiations over European subsidies to the farming sector; proliferation of industrial espionage "affairs", against the Japanese in particular, but also against the French.

And all this is chickenfeed compared to the divergence of interests between the great industrialized powers, which will widen, and be­come more and more open, as the economic and trade war doubles in intensity with the brutal acceleration of the crisis.

The opposition between the USA, abetted by Britain, and the rest

The collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc has overthrown the planet's entire politico-military and geo-strategic balance of forces. And this situation has not only opened a period of com­plete chaos in the countries and regions of the ex-Eastern bloc, it has accelerated the tenden­cies towards chaos everywhere, threatening the world capitalist "order" of which the USA was the principal beneficiary. The latter has been the first to react. The US provoked the "Gulf crisis" in August 1990 not only to gain a definitive foothold in the region, but above all, and this was decisive in the decision, to make an example, as a warning to anyone who might want to oppose their status as the capitalist world's mightiest super-power.

For the USA, the situation is clear. Its na­tional interest as the world's greatest power (by far) is absolutely identical with the global interest of capital faced with the dynamic of de­composition which is leading to the break-up of the whole system of international relations. Amongst the great powers, only Britain has show unswerving support for the US, because of the traditional orientation of its foreign pol­icy, of its interests in Kuwait, and above all be­cause its own previous experience as world "leader" has allowed the British ruling class to understand much better what is at stake in the present period.

For the other powers (2), by contrast, the situation is much more contradictory. While all have an interest in slowing the tendency to­wards decomposition, which is behind the unanimous condemnation of the invasion of Kuwait, the reinforcement of the USA nonethe­less goes against their own interests.

The military operation undertaken by the US, which was supposed to bring peace to the Middle East through a war justified in every­one's eyes because it was defending "democracy" and "freedom", has proved to be the beginning of the rout rather than the welding of the great "democratic" powers.

In fact, these different countries are caught in a trap. By playing its part as world police­man right from the start, against a second-rate country, the US aims not only to contain the chaos developing in the Third World, but also that threatening to become endemic among the developed countries. The US proposes to con­tain not just the ambitions of small peripheral states, but also and above all those of the cen­tral states. By contrast, while the latter clearly have an interest in the first US objective - the maintenance of order in the peripheral zones ­they have none in the second.

By flaunting its military might, the US demon­strates the others' relative weakness. Right from the start, the US sent in its troops with­out waiting for its "allies'" agreement; the latter were forced to rally round under pressure rather than out of conviction. As long as the action against Iraq takes the form of an em­bargo or diplomatic isolation, they can pretend to play minor roles, and so insist on their own minor individual interests. By contrast, a mili­tary offensive can only emphasize the enormous superiority of the US, and its allies impotence. This is why the latter are much less interested in a military solution which can only strengthen the US position, and allow it to impose its will still more strongly.

These countries are incapable today, and will remain so for a long time, of rivaling the USA on the political and military level. Japan and Germany are seriously backward in the military domain. French mobilization and armament only exist inasmuch as they are integrated into the American military system, as we can see from the lamentable French effort in Saudi Arabia, which remains utterly dependent on US support. The same is true of Great Britain. The US' main economic rivals are either unarmed, or com­pletely incapable of standing up to the USA. Iraq provided the opportunity, and it is public knowledge today that the US knew in advance about Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and let it hap­pen, if not more.

The USA: Middle East giant, world giant

The general context in which world capitalism's greatest power is floundering cannot but push it into war, to defend its own hegemony against the collapse of whole sections of the capitalist world, dragging their suffocating local bour­geoisies or regional imperialisms into military adventures that present a danger for the "pax americana" called into question by the new situ­ation. Ever since the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the United States has been determined to pre­vent Iraq from upsetting the "equilibrium" of forces in the region. It is this "equilibrium" on the military level between the different coun­tries that lets the US enforces its control, under the disguise of an "umpire".

As the economy collapses, the USA knows that it must use military force to keep control of the world economy. While the US used the economic weapon against its Russian imperialist rival during the decades since Vietnam, it will in­creasingly have to use its military supremacy to keep its "leadership" of the capitalist system.

Only the solution: the class struggle

There will be no war between USA and USSR, but the "logic of war" under way today shows that imperialism's rampage has not stopped even for a second. Today it is threatening to put the Middle East to fire and sword. And this is only the beginning of a whole series of armed conflicts and military operations, of bloody "ethnic" and national wars.

In the developed countries, the proletariat is not confronted with a general mobilization, as it was at the outbreak of World Wars I and II. It has not been enrolled for war, as is the case for the proletariat in Iraq and other countries. But nonetheless, the war in the Middle East, the total imbalance throughout the region, the enor­mous destruction that would be caused by a war, the bloodbath being plotted today by world capital to maintain a residue of international "order", none of these things are "far away", or foreign to the working class in the industrialized metropoles. This proletariat is not yet paying with its blood in the trenches or under the bombs, but it is in the forefront to pay the bill for the maintenance of capitalist "order", with a redoubled attack on its living conditions.

Reinforced exploitation, inflation and unem­ployment, falling wages, pensions, and benefits, "flexible" working hours, the constant decline in standards of health, transport, housing, educa­tion and security, all add up to economic at­tacks on a scale unprecedented since World War II.

General mobilization under the national flag to fight in the national army is not on the agenda in the developed countries, because the prole­tariat has not suffered a massive and decisive defeat in its economic struggles against auster­ity, in its attempts to extend and control its struggles throughout the 1980's. But the heavy price already paid in the blood of workers en­rolled directly for imperialist massacre, heralds that which threatens the workers in the great industrial concentrations.

For the last twenty years, the working class has been able to hold back the planet's total destruction in an inter-imperialist holocaust, es­pecially during the period of great workers' struggles, internationally, in 1968-75, 1978-81, and 1983-89.

Today, capitalism is rotting where it stands, and the threat of total destruction is there more than ever. The "balance of terror" no longer exists: the "balance" that was formed by the two great super-powers has certainly gone, but the "terror" remains, and will get worse.

The alternative of socialism or barbarism is more than ever on the agenda. Capitalism will not die of its own accord. It will not drag hu­manity down into instant nuclear terror, but its own dynamic means that its continued survival can only mean a bottomless horror; its survival will lead to the same result.

This catastrophic course on which the contin­ued existence of production relations in the world has engaged us can only be stopped by the development of the proletariat' class strug­gle, an awareness of its own strength as a so­cial force, of its own interests distinct from those of other classes, and antagonistic to all the particular interests of all the other classes and strata in society. By defending its own interests, the proletariat is the only force capa­ble of taking charge of the destruction of capi­talism's political power on a world scale, which guarantees the "order" of this agonizing world order.

Only the struggles of the working class inter­nationally, and first and foremost those of the workers in the major industrialized countries, can block the armed power of world capitalism. The dynamic of the capitalist system itself can only lead to war-mongering barbarism. There can be no "peace" under capitalism, still less today than during the preceding twenty years.

JM, 18th November 1990

[1] See "Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism", in International Review no 62, 3rd quarter 1990.

[2] See the articles "The world economy of the edge of the abyss" and "Militarism and decomposition" in this issue.

The incomprehensions affecting the proletarian milieu are nothing compared to the utter stupidity revealed by the leaflet published on 28 September 1990 on the Gulf crisis by the 'External fraction of the ICC' (EFICC). The title of the leaflet, 'Don't Take Sides in the Gulf War' is itself indicative of the EFICC's councilist leanings. This group hasn't managed to grasp the fact that, in the face of war, the role of revolutionaries isn't to place themselves 'outside of the melee' like the pacifist Romain Rolland during world war one, but to call on the proletariat to defend its own side, its own class interests against all bourgeois camps. This incapacity to see the organization of revolutionaries as an active, integral part of the workers' combat is also shown, in an even crazier manner, in the content of the leaflet itself. Whereas the aim of such a leaflet today ought to be to disseminate the communist position on war as widely as possible within the working class, in particular against all the lies of the bourgeoisie, this document appears mainly as a polemic ... against the ICC. A fine aim!

But the real stupidity of the EFICC comes out when it tries to produce an 'analysis' of the current world situation. This little circle claims that it took up the torch of 'theoretical deepening' which the ICC has allegedly abandoned. And so very 'deeply', the EFICC explains the Gulf war by plunging into ... oil. A wonderful theoretical effort! But this isn't all. What's blindingly obvious to everyone, especially with this war - the disappearance of the former eastern bloc - escapes the profundity of the EFICC:

"Neither does this crisis prove that Moscow is no longer a factor on the inter-imperialist chessboard. The Kremlin, which had thousands of military advisers in Iraq, must have known about the Iraqi plans weeks in advance. The fact that it did nothing to prevent the invasion of Kuwait and that it didn't seek to play a ma­jor role in 'solving' the crisis that followed, does not betray impotence, but rather the fact that the crisis and its prolongation serves Russia's capitalist interests. The increase in oil prices gives its economy a desperately needed shot in the arm (80% of its hard currency earnings come from oil and gas) and make Eastern Europe more dependent on trade relations with Moscow."

Reading these meanderings, you'd think that you sere dreaming.

It's not even necessary to refute them just reproducing them makes the EFICC look completely ridiculous. In fact it's been clear for a long time (since its origins, actually) that the EFICC's only reason for existing is to 'annoy the Martians', in this case, the ICC. Its very name proves it. Thus, as with two-year old children, in order to affirm their personality, the members of the EFICC have to be against everything the ICC has said since they left it. And since nearly a year and a half ago we announced the collapse of the eastern bloc - something that has since become evident - the EFICC has had to maintain the opposite against us and against reality itself, which has shown quite clearly that Gorbachev's policies had nothing to do with (don't laugh!) a Machiavellian plan "aimed at detaching western Europe from the American bloc".

It's true that, before that, the EFICC had blessed us with another analysis (which was thrown in the bin as soon as it had been ex­hibited), according to which 'perestroika' was the USSR's transition "from the formal to the real domination of capital" (a phenomenon which the EFICC discovered 140 years after Marx and 20 years after Canatte, a defrocked Bordigist).

This same stupid rancor against the ICC, this propensity for combining lies and foolery can also be found in JA's article 'Making Sense of Events in eastern Europe' published in International Perspectives no 17. By peremptorily affirming that "the theory of state capitalism is based on the existence of military blocs", JA (and the whole EFICC, which finds nothing objectionable here) prove their ignorance and mental confusions: marxists have never said that state capitalism derives from the formation of blocs. The two phenomena indeed have a common origin: imperialism, and, more generally, capitalist decadence, but this doesn't mean that they have a cause and effect relationship to each other. With JA's logic, from the observation that measles causes both spots and fever, you'd have to conclude that the spots cause the fever.

But JA really gives the game away when she has the ICC saying that "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll have finally been the death of Western civilization". One wonders how much this is bad faith and how much plain stupidity. Probably the latter most of all, because any reader of our press can recognize the absurdity of such an accusation. Unless it's more a matter of pathology: such behavior can only be seen as the product of delirium brought on by extreme rancor.

Today the EFICC is at a dead-end: either it recognizes that it was wrong all down the line about the 'theoretical degeneration' of the ICC (which would mean recognizing that it never had any reason for existing) or it will go on with its absurdities. What will then happen to it is what has probably happened to the FOR with its obstinate refusal to recognize the existence of the capitali.st crisis: unable to recognize an obvious reality, it will go down to its death. That would anyway be for the best all round: it would be its first intelligent act since its creation.

FM

On several occasions, the organization has been led to insist on the importance of the question of militarism and war in the period of decadence[1], both from the viewpoint of the life of capi­talism itself, and from the proletarian stand­point. With the rapid succession of historically important: events during the last year (collapse of the Eastern bloc, war in the Gulf) which have transformed the whole world situation, with capitalism's entry into its final phase of decom­position[2], it is vital that revolutionaries be absolutely clear on this essential question: militarism's place within the new conditions of today's world.

Marxism is a living theory

1) Contrary to the Bordigist current, the ICC has never considered marxism as an "invariant doctrine", but as living thought enriched by each important historical event. Such events make it possible either to confirm a framework and analyses developed previously, and so to support them, or to highlight the fact that some have become out of date, and that an effort of reflection is required in order to widen the ap­plication of schemas which had previously been valid but which have been overtaken by events, or to work out new ones which are capable of encompassing the new reality.

Revolutionary organizations and militants have the specific and fundamental responsibility of carrying out this effort of reflection, always moving forward, as did our predecessors such as Lenin, Rosa, Bilan, the French Communist Left, etc, with both caution and boldness:

- basing ourselves always and firmly on the basic acquisitions of marxism,

- examining reality without blinkers, and de­veloping our thought "without ostracism of any kind" (Bilan).

In particular, faced with such historic events, it is important that revolutionaries should be capable of distinguishing between those analyses which have been overtaken by events and those which still remain valid, in order to avoid a double trap: either succumbing to sclerosis, or "throwing the baby out with the bath water". More precisely, it is necessary to highlight what in our analyses is essential and fundamental, and remains entirely valid in different historical circumstances, and what is secondary and cir­cumstantial - in short, to know how to make the difference between the essence of a reality and its various specific manifestations.

2) For a year, the world situation has under­gone considerable upheavals, which have greatly modified the world which emerged from the sec­ond imperialist war. The ICC has done its best to follow these events closely:

- to set out their historical significance,

- to examine how far they confirm or invalidate analytical frameworks which had been valid previously.

Although we had not foreseen exactly how these historic events would take place (Stalinism's death-agony, the disappearance of the Eastern bloc, the disintegration of the Western bloc), they integrate perfectly into the analytical framework and understanding of the present historical period that the ICC had worked out previously: the phase of decomposi­tion.

The same is true of the present war in the Persian Gulf. But the very importance of this event and the confusion that it highlights among revolutionaries gives our organization the responsibility of understanding clearly the im­pact and repercussion of the phase of decompo­sition's characteristics on the question of mili­tarism and war, of examining how this question will be posed in this new historical period.

Militarism at the heart of capitalist decadence

3) Militarism and war have been a fundamental given of capitalism's life since its entry into decadence. Since the complete formation of the world market at the beginning of this century, and the world's division into colonial and com­mercial reserves by the different advanced cap­italist nations, the resulting intensification of commercial competition has necessarily led to the aggravation of military tensions, the constitution of ever more imposing arsenals, and the growing subjection of the whole of economic and social life to the imperatives of the military sphere. In fact, militarism and imperialist war are the central manifestations of capitalism's entry into its decadent period (indeed the beginning of the period was marked by the outbreak of World War I), to such an extent that for revolutionar­ies at the time, imperialism and decadent capi­talism became synonymous.

As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, since imperi­alism is not a specific manifestation of capitalism but its mode of existence throughout the new historical period, it is not particular states that are imperialist, but all states.

In reality, if militarism, imperialism, and war are identified to such an extent with the period of decadence, it is because the latter corre­sponds to the fact that capitalist relations of production have become a barrier to the devel­opment of the productive forces: the perfectly irrational nature, on the global economic level, of military spending and war only expresses the aberration of these production relations' contin­ued existence. In particular, the permanent and increasing self-destruction of capital which re­sults from this mode of life symbolizes this system's death-agony, and reveals clearly that it has been condemned by history.

State capitalism and imperialist blocs

4) Confronted with a situation where war is om­nipresent in social life, decadent' capitalism has developed two phenomena which constitute the major characteristics of this period: state capi­talism and the imperialist blocs. State capital­ism, whose first significant appearance dates from World War I, corresponds to the need for each country to ensure the maximum discipline from the different sectors of society and to re­duce as far as possible the confrontations both between classes and between fractions of the ruling class, in order to mobilize and control its entire economic potential with a view to con­frontation with other nations. In the same way, the formation of imperialist blocs corresponds to the need to impose a similar discipline amongst different national bourgeoisies, in order to limit their mutual antagonisms and to draw them to­gether for the supreme confrontation between two military camps.

And the more capitalism plunges into its deca­dence and historic crisis; these two characteris­tics have only become stronger. They were ex­pressed ·especially by the development of state capitalism on the scale of an entire imperialist bloc since World War II. Neither state capital­ism, nor imperialism, nor the conjuncture of the two, express any kind of "pacification" of the relationships between the different sectors of capital, still less their "reinforcement". On the contrary, they are nothing other than capitalist society's attempts to resist a growing tendency to dislocation[3].

Imperialism in the phase of capitalist decomposition

5) Society's general decomposition is the final phase of capitalism's decadence. In this sense, this phase does not call into question the spe­cific characteristics of the decadent period: the historic crisis of the capitalist economy, state capitalism, and the fundamental phenomena of militarism and imperialism.

Moreover, in as far as decomposition appears as the culmination of the contradictions into which capitalism has plunged throughout its deca­dence, the specific characteristics of this period are still further exacerbated in its ultimate phase:

- decomposition can only get worse, since it results from capitalism's inexorable plunge into crisis;

- the tendency towards state capitalism is not called into question by the disappearance of some of its most parasitic and aberrant forms, such as Stalinism today; on the contrary[4].

The same is true of militarism and imperialism, as we have seen throughout the 1980's during which the phenomenon of decomposition has ap­peared and developed. And this reality will not be called into question by the disappearance of the world's division into two imperialist constel­lations as a result of the Eastern bloc's collapse.

The constitution of imperialist blocs is not the origin of militarism and imperialism. The oppo­site is true: the formation of these blocs is only the extreme consequence (which at certain mo­ments can aggravate the causes), an expression (and not the only one), of decadent capitalism's plunge into militarism and war.

In a sense, the formation of blocs is to impe­rialism as Stalinism is to state capitalism. Just as the end of Stalinism does not mean the end of the historical tendency towards state capital­ism, of which it was one manifestation, so the present disappearance of imperialist blocs does not imply the slightest calling into question of imperialism's grip on social life. The funda­mental difference lies in the fact that whereas the end of Stalinism corresponds to the elimina­tion of a particularly aberrant form of state capitalism, the end of the blocs only opens the door to a still more barbaric, aberrant, and chaotic form of imperialism.

6) The ICC had already worked out this analysis when it highlighted the collapse of the Eastern bloc:

"In the period of capitalist decadence, all states are imperialist, and take the necessary measures to satisfy their appetites: war econ­omy, arms production, etc. We must state clearly that the deepening convulsions of the world economy can only sharpen the opposition between different states, including and increas­ingly on the military level. The difference, in the coming period, will be that these antago­nisms which were previously contained and used by the two great imperialist blocs will now come to the fore. The disappearance of the Russian imperialist gendarme, and that to come of the American gendarme as far as its erstwhile "partners" are concerned, opens the door to the unleashing of a whole series of more local rival­ries. For the moment, these rivalries and confrontations cannot degenerate into a world war (even supposing that the proletariat were no longer capable of putting up a resistance). However, with the disappearance of the disci­pline imposed by the two blocs, these conflicts are liable to become more frequent and more vi­olent, especially of course in those areas where the proletariat is weakest" (International Review, no 61).

"The aggravation of the capitalist economy's worldwide economic crisis will necessarily pro­voke a new exacerbation of the bourgeoisie's own internal contradictions. As in the past, these contradictions will appear on the level of military antagonisms: in decadent capitalism, trade war cannot but lead to armed conflict. In this sense, the pacifist illusions which may de­velop following the "warming" of relations be­tween the USSR and the USA must be resolutely combated: military confrontations between states are not going to disappear, even though they may no longer be used and manipulated by the great powers. On the contrary, as we have seen in the past, militarism and war are decadent capitalism's way of life, and the deepening of the crisis can only confirm this. In contrast with the previous period, however, these mili­tary conflicts no longer take the form of a confrontation between the two great imperialist blocs ... " (International Review, no 63, 'Resolution on the International Situation').

Today, this analysis is fully confirmed by the war in the Persian Gulf.

The war in the Gulf: first signs of the new world situation

7) This war is the first major manifestation of the new world situation since the collapse of the Eastern bloc (in this sense, its importance today is a good deal greater):

- Iraq's "uncontrolled" adventure, grabbing another country belonging to its own one-time dominant bloc, confirms the disappearance of the Western bloc itself;

- it reveals the accentuation of the tendency (specific to capitalist decadence) for all coun­tries to use armed force to try to break the in­creasingly intolerable grip of the crisis;

- the fantastic military deployment by the USA and its "allies" highlights the fact that in­creasingly, only military force will be able to maintain a minimum of stability in a world threatened by growing chaos.

In this sense the war in the Gulf is not, as most of the proletarian political milieu claims, "a war over the price of oil". Nor can it be re­duced simply to a "war for control of the Middle East", however important this region may be. Similarly, the military operation in the Gulf is not just aimed at forestalling the chaos developing in the Third World.

Of course, all these elements have a role to play. It is true that most Western countries have an interest in cheap oil (unlike the USSR, which is nonetheless participating in the action against Iraq as far as its limited means will al­low), but it is not the means that have been put in motion that will make oil prices fall (they have already pushed crude prices up far higher than what Iraq was demanding).

It is also true that the USA has an undeniable interest in controlling the oil-fields, and that this strengthens its' position relative to its com­mercial rivals: but then, what makes these same rivals support the US efforts?

Similarly, it is obvious that the USSR has a prime interest in the stabilization of the Middle Eastern region, close as it is to Russia's central Asian and Caucasian provinces, which are al­ready agitated enough. But the chaos develop­ing in the USSR does not concern this country alone. The countries of Central, and then of Western Europe are particularly concerned by what is happening in the old Eastern bloc.

More generally, if the advanced countries are preoccupied by the chaos developing in certain regions of the Third World, this is because they themselves are more fragile as a result of this chaos, because of the new situation in the world today.

8) In reality, the fundamental object of the "Desert Shield" operation is to try to contain the chaos which is threatening the major developed countries and their inter-relations.

The disappearance of the world's division into two great imperialist blocs has meant the disappearance of one of the essential factors which maintained a certain cohesion between these states. The tendency of the new period is one of "every man for himself", and eventually for the most powerful states to pose their candida­ture to the "leadership" of a new bloc. But at the same time, the bourgeoisie in these coun­tries is well aware of the dangers of this new situation, and is trying to react against this tendency.

Faced with the new degree of general chaos represented by the Iraqi adventure (secretly encouraged by the United States' "conciliatory" stance towards Iraq before the 2nd August with the aim of "making an example" of it after­wards), the "international community" as the media call it, which is far from covering only the old Western bloc since it also includes the USSR, had no other choice than to place itself behind the world's greatest power, and more especially behind its military power which is the only one capable of policing any corner of the world.

The war in the Gulf shows that, faced with the tendency towards generalized chaos which is specific to decomposition and which has been considerably accelerated by the Eastern bloc's collapse, capitalism has no other way out in its attempt to hold together its different compo­nents, than to impose the iron strait-jacket of military force[5]. In this sense, the methods it uses to try to contain an increasingly bloody state of chaos are themselves a factor in the aggravation of military barbarism into which capitalism is plunging.

No prospect of the formation of new military blocs

9) Although the formation of blocs appears his­torically as the consequence of the development of militarism and imperialism, the exacerbation of the latter in the present phase of capitalism's life paradoxically constitutes a major barrier to the re-formation of a new system of blocs tak­ing the place of the one which has just disappeared. History (especially of the post-war pe­riod) has shown that the disappearance of one imperialist bloc (eg the Axis) implies the dislo­cation of the other (the "Allies"), but also the reconstitution of a new pair of opposing blocs (East and West). This is why the present situ­ation implies, under the pressure of the crisis and military tensions, a tendency towards the re-formation of two new imperialist blocs.

However, the very fact that military force has become - as the Gulf conflict confirms - a pre­ponderant factor in any attempt by the ad­vanced countries to limit world chaos is a con­siderable barrier to this tendency. This same conflict has in fact highlighted the crushing superiority (to say the least) of US military power relative to that of other developed coun­tries (and to demonstrate this fact was a major US objective): in reality, US military power is at least the equal of the rest or the world put to­gether. And this imbalance is not likely to change, since there exists no country capable in the years to come of opposing the military potential of the USA to a point where it could set itself up as a rival bloc leader. Even in the future, the list of candidates for such a position is very limited.

10) It is, for example, out of the question that the head of the bloc which has just collapsed ­the USSR - could ever reconquer this position. The fact that this countr y was able to play such a part in the past is in itself a kind of aberration, a historical accident. Because of its serious backwardness on every level (economic, but also political and cultural), the USSR did not possess the attributes which would have al­lowed to form an imperialist bloc "naturally" around itself[6]. It was able to do so "thanks" to Hitler (who brought it into the war in 1941) and to the "Allies" who at Yalta paid Russia for having formed a second front against Germany, and for the tribute of 20 million dead paid by its population, by allowing it control over the area of Eastern Europe occupied by its troops at the end of the German collapse [7].

Moreover; it was because the USSR was inca­pable of keeping up this role of bloc leader that it was forced to impose a ruinous war economy on its productive apparatus in order to pre­serve its empire. The Eastern bloc's spectacu­lar collapse, apart from confirming the bankruptcy of a particularly aberrant form of state capitalism (which did not spring from an "organic" development of capital either, but from the elimination of the "classical" bour­geoisie by the 1917 revolution), could not but express history's revenge on this original aberration. This is why, despite its enormous arse­nals, the USSR will never again be able to play a major role on the international stage. All the more so, since the dynamic behind the disloca­tion of its external empire will continue to work internally, and will finish by stripping Russia of the territories it colonized during previous centuries.

Because it tried to play the part of a world power, which was beyond its capacities, Russia is condemned to return to the third-rate posi­tion it occupied before Peter the Great.

Nor will Germany and Japan, the only two po­tential candidates to the title of bloc leader, be able to assume such a role within the foresee­able future. Japan, despite its industrial power and economic dynamism, could never pretend to such rank because it is too far removed from the world's greatest industrial concentration: Western Europe. As (or Germany, the only country which could eventually play such a role, as it already has in the past, it will be several decades before it can rival the USA on the military level (it does not even possess atomic weapons!). And as capitalism plunges ever deeper into its decadence, it becomes ever more necessary for a bloc leader to a crushing military superiority over its vassals in order to maintain its place.

The USA: the world's only gendarme

11) At the beginning of the decadent period, and even until the first years of World War II, there could still exist a certain "parity" between the different partners of an imperialist coalition, although it remained necessary for there to be a bloc leader. For example, in World War I there did not exist any fundamental disparity at the level of operational military capacity be­tween the three "victors": Great Britain, France and the USA. This situation had already changed considerably by World War II, when the "victors" were closely dependent on the US, which was already vastly more powerful than its "allies". It was accentuated during the "Cold War" (which has just ended) where each bloc leader, both USA and USSR, held an absolutely crushing superiority over the other countries in the bloc, in particular thanks to their posses­sion of nuclear weapons.

This tendency can be explained by the fact that as capitalism plunges further into deca­dence:

- the scale of conflicts between the blocs, and what is at stake in them takes on an in­creasingly world-wide and general character (the more gangsters there are to control, the more powerful must be the "godfather");

- weapons systems demand ever more fantas­tic levels of investment (in particular, only the major powers could devote the necessary re­sources to the development of a complete nu­clear arsenal, and to the research into ever more sophisticated armaments);

- and above all, the centrifugal tendencies amongst all the states as a result of the exacer­bation of national antagonisms, cannot but be accentuated.

The same is true of this last factor as of state capitalism: the more the bourgeoisie's different fractions tend to tear each other apart, as the crisis sharpens their mutual competition, so the more the state must be reinforced in order to exercise its authority over them. In the same way, the more the open historic crisis ravages the world economy, so the stronger must be a bloc leader in order to contain and control the tendencies towards the dislocation of its differ­ent national components. And it is clear that in the final phase of decadence, the phase of de­composition, this phenomenon cannot but be se­riously aggravated.

For all these reasons, especially the last, the reconstitution of a new pair of imperialist blocs is not only impossible for a number of years to come, but may very well never take place again: either the revolution, or the destruction of hu­manity will come first.

In the new historical period we have entered, and which the Gulf events have confirmed, the world appears as a vast free-for-all, where the tendency of "every man for himself" will operate to the full, and where the alliances between states will be far from having the stability that characterized the imperialist blocs, but will be dominated by the immediate needs of the mo­ment. A world of bloody chaos, where the American policeman will try to maintain a mini­mum of order by the increasingly massive and brutal use of military force.

Towards "super-imperialism"?

12) The fact that in the coming period the world will no longer be divided into imperialist blocs, and that world "leadership" will be left to the United States alone, in no way validates Kautsky's thesis of "super-imperialism" (or "ultra-imperialism") as it was developed during World War I. This thesis had already been worked out before the War by the Social­-Democracy's opportunist wing. Its roots lay in the gradualist and reformist vision which con­sidered that the contradictions (between classes and nations) within capitalist society would di­minish to the point of disappearing. Kautsky's thesis supposed that the different sectors of international financial capital would be capable of uniting to establish their own stable and pa­cific domination over the entire world. This thesis, presented as "marxist", was obviously fought by all the revolutionaries, end especially by Lenin (notably in Imperialism, highest stage of capitalism), who pointed out that a capitalism which had been amputated of exploitation and competition between capitals was no longer cap­italist. It is obvious that this revolutionary position remains completely valid today.

Nor should our analysis be confused with that of Chaulieu (Castoriadis), which at least had the advantage of explicitly rejecting "marxism". According to this analysis, the world was mov­ing towards a "third system", not of the har­mony so dear to reformists, but through brutal convulsions. Each world war led to the elimina­tion of one imperialist power (Germany in World War II). World War III would only leave one bloc, which would impose its order on a world where economic crises would have disappeared and where the capitalist exploitation of labor power would be replaced by a sort of slavery, the reign of the "rulers" over the "ruled".

Today's world, emerging from the collapse of the Eastern bloc to face a generalized decompo­sition, is nonetheless totally capitalist. An in­soluble and deepening economic crisis, increas­ingly ferocious exploitation of labor power, the dictatorship of the law of value, exacerbated competition between capitals and imperialist antagonisms between nations, unrestrained militarism, massive destruction and endless mas­sacres: this is its only possible reality. And its only ultimate perspective is the destruction of humanity.

The proletariat and imperialist war

13) More than ever then, the question of war remains central to the life of capitalism. Consequently, it is more than ever fundamental for the working class. Obviously, this ques­tion's importance is not new. It was already central before World War I (as the international congresses of Stuttgart (1907) and Basel (1912) highlighted).

It became still more decisive during the first imperialist butchery (with the combat of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Liebknecht, and the revolutions in Germany and Russia). Its importance re­mained unchanged throughout the inter-war pe­riod, in particular during the Spanish Civil war, not to mention of course its importance during the greatest holocaust of the century between 1939-45. And this remained true, finally, during the various "national liberation" wars after 1945 which served as moments in the confrontation between the two imperialist blocs.

In fact, since the beginning of the century, war has been the most decisive question that the proletariat and its revolutionary minorities have had to confront, much more so than the trade union or parliamentary questions for ex­ample. It could not be otherwise, in that war is the most concentrated form of decadent capital­ism's barbarity, which expresses its death-agony and the threat that hangs over humanity's sur­vival as a result.

In the present period, where the barbarity of war will, far more than in previous decades, be­come a permanent and omnipresent element of the world situation (whether Bush and Mitterrand with their prophecies of a "new order of peace" like it or not), involving more and more the de­veloped countries (limited only by the prole­tariat in these countries), the question of war is still more essential for the working class.

The ICC has long insisted that, contrary to the past, the development of a new revolutionary wave will come not from a war but from the aggravation of the economic crisis. This analy­sis remains entirely valid: working class mobilization, the starting point for large-scale class combats, will come from economic attacks. In the same way, at the level of consciousness, the aggravation of the crisis will be a fundamental factor in revealing the historical dead-end of the capitalist mode of production. But on this same level of consciousness, the question of war is once again destined to play a part of the first order:

- by highlighting the fundamental conse­quences of this historical dead-end: the de­struction of humanity,

- by constituting the only objective conse­quence of the crisis, decadence and decomposi­tion that the proletariat can today set a limit to (unlike any of the other manifestations of de­composition), to the extent that in the central countries it is not at present enrolled under the flags of nationalism.

War's impact on class consciousness

14) It is true that the war can be used against the working class much more easily than the crisis itself, and economic attacks:

- it can encourage the development of paci­fism;

- it can give the proletariat the feeling of impotence, allowing the bourgeoisie to carry out its economic attacks.

This in fact is what has happened to date with the Gulf crisis. But this kind of impact cannot but be limited in time. Eventually:

- the permanence of military barbarity will highlight the vanity of all the pacifist talk;

- it will become clear that the working class is the main victim of this barbarity, that it pays the price as cannon-fodder and through in­creased exploitation;

- and combativity will recover, against in­creasingly massive and brutal economic attacks.

This tendency will then be reversed. And it is obviously up to revolutionaries to be in the forefront of the development of this conscious­ness: their responsibility will be ever more de­cisive.

15) In the present historic situation, our inter­vention in the class, apart of course from the serious aggravation of the economic crisis and the resulting attacks against the whole working class, is determined by:

- the fundamental importance of the question of war;

- the decisive role of revolutionaries in the class' coming to consciousness of the gravity of what is at stake today.

It is therefore necessary that this question figure constantly at the forefront of our press. And in periods like today, where this question is at the forefront of international events, we must profit from the workers' particular sensitivity to it by giving it special emphasis and priority.

The ICC: 4/10/90

[1] See ‘War, militarism, and imperialist blocs' in International Review nos 52 and 53.

[2] For the ICC's analysis on the question of decomposition, see International Review nos 57 and 62.

[3] Nonetheless, we should emphasize a major difference between state capitalism and imperialist blocs. The former cannot be called into question by conflicts between different factions of the capitalist class (except in cases of civil war, which may be characteristic of certain backward zones of capitalism, but not of its advanced sectors): as a general rule, the state, which represents the national capital as a whole, succeeds in imposing its authority on the different components of that capital. By contrast, imperialist blocs do not have the same permanent nature. In the first place, they are only formed with a view to world war: in a period when this is not an immediate possibility (as in the 1920s), they may be very well disappear. Secondly, no state is particularly ‘predisposed' towards membership of a particular bloc: blocs are forced haphazardly, as a function of economic, political, geographical and military factors. There is nothing mysterious between this difference in stability between the capitalist state and imperialist blocs. It corresponds to the fact that the bourgeoisie cannot aspire to a level of unity higher than the nation, since the national state is par excellence the instrument for the defense of its interests (maintaining "order", massive state purchasing, monetary policies, customs protection, etc). This is why an alliance within imperialist bloc is nothing other than a conglomerate of fundamentally antagonistic national interests, designed to preserve these interests in the international jungle. In deciding to align itself with one bloc or another, the bourgeoisie has no concern other than to guarantee its own national interests. In the final analysis, although we can consider capitalism as a global entity, we must never forget that it exists concretely in the form of rival and competing capitals.

[4] In reality, it is the capitalist mode of production as a whole, in decadence and still more in its phase of decomposition, which is an aberration from the viewpoint of the interests of humanity. But within capitalism's barbaric death-agony, certain of its forms, such as Stalinism, which spring from specific historic circumstances, have characteristics which make them still more vulnerable, and condemn them to disappear even before the whole system is destroyed either through the proletarian revolution, or the destruction of humanity.

[5] In this sense, the way that the world "order" is maintained in the new period will more and more resemble the way the USSR maintained order in its ex-bloc: terror and military force. In the period of decomposition, and with the economic convulsions of a dying capitalism, the most barbaric and brutal forms of international relations will tend to become the norm for every country in the world.

[6] In fact, the reasons behind Russia's inability to act as locomotive of the world revolution (which was why revolutionaries like Lenin and Trotsky expected that the revolution in Germany would take Russia in tow) were the same as those which made Russia a wholly inappropriate candidate for the role of a bloc leader.

[7] Another reason that the Western powers gave the USSR a free hand in Central Europe, was that they expected the latter to police the proletariat in the region. History has shown (in Warsaw in particular) how well-placed their confidence was.

Imperialist war is a test of fire for the organizations which claim to belong to the working class. It is in fact one of the questions that enables one to determine the class nature of a political formation. The Gulf conflict is a new illustration of this. The classical bourgeois parties, including the 'Socialist' and 'Communist' parties, have obviously acted in conformity with their nature by aligning themselves openly with the policy of war, or by calling for 'international arbitration' which is simply a fig-leaf for the war-drive. As for the organizations that call themselves 'revolutionary', like the Trotskyists, they have also shown what camp they're in by calling openly or hypocritically, according to circumstance[1], for support for Iraq. This test has thus made it possible for the groups who are on a proletarian class terrain to stand out clearly, it has given them the opportunity to make the voice of internationalism be heard, like the revolutionary currents during the two world wars.

But while the groups of the milieu have on the whole affirmed a principled class position against the war, most of them have done so with arguments and analyses which, far from bringing clarity to the proletariat, are more a factor of confusion.

Since the beginning of the Gulf crisis, the ma­jority of the proletarian organizations have not failed in their basic internationalist responsibil­ity: whether in their press on in the form of leaflets, the whole proletarian milieu has taken a clear position of denouncing imperialist war, rejecting any participation in either camp, and calling on the workers to wage their struggle against capitalism in all its forms and in all countries[2]. In brief, the existing proletarian organizations have shown ... that they are in the camp of the proletariat.

However, in order to be able to take an inter­nationalist position, some of them have had to draw a prudent veil over the arguments that are their stock-in-trade. This is the case, for example, with the support the proletariat is supposed to give to 'struggles for national in­dependence' in certain under-developed coun­tries.

Internationalism and ‘struggles for independence'

At the beginning of this century, the workers' movement witnessed a very animated debate on the question of national liberation struggles (see in particular our series of articles in International Reviews 34 and 36). In this debate, Lenin was the leading light of a position which held that the proletariat could support certain struggles for national independence even though the phenomenon of imperialism had already in­vaded the whole of society. However, this did not prevent him, during the course of the first world war, from taking up a completely interna­tionalist position - clearer, in certain respects, than that of Rosa Luxemburg, who defended the opposing point of view on the national question. At the Second Congress of the Communist International, it was Lenin's position which be­came that of the international. However, reality (especially the Chinese revolution of 1927.) rapidly demonstrated the falsity of Lenin and the CI's position, so that by the 1930s, the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy - even though it was from the 'Leninist' tradition - had abandoned this position.

But even so, the majority of the groups who claim descent from the 'Italian Left' continue to defend the positions of the CI as though noth­ing had changed. This leads them into the most amazing contortions.

Thus we can only salute the internationalist concern of the International Communist Party when it writes that:

"The workers have nothing to gain and ev­erything to lose from supporting imperialist conflicts ...Whether oil rent enriches the Iraqi, Kuwaiti or French bourgeoisie won't change the lot of the proletarians of Iraq, Kuwait or France: only the class struggle against capitalist exploitation can do that. And this class struggle is only possible if it breaks out of the 'national union' between classes, which always means sac­rifices for the workers, who are divided by pa­triotism and racism before being massacred on the battlefronts," (Leaflet of 24 August, 1990, published by Le Proletaire).

But this organization would do well to ask it­self how the Arab proletarians could defend their class interests by enrolling in a war for the constitution of a Palestinian state, as the ICP calls on them to do.

Such a Palestinian state, if it ever saw the light of day, would be no less imperialist (if less powerful) than Iraq is today, and the workers there would be no less ferociously ex­ploited. It's no accident that Yasser Arafat is one of Saddam Hussein's best friends. For the 'Bordigist' current (to which Le Proletaire) be­longs, it is time to recognize that over the last 70 years, history has frequently demonstrated the falseness of these positions.

Otherwise, its tight-rope walk between inter­nationalism and nationalism can only end in it falling either into the void, or the bourgeois camp (which is what happened, at the beginning of the 80s, to a good part of its components like Combat in Italy and El Oumami in France).

This contradiction between internationalism and nationalism, which is an essential condition for belonging to the proletarian camp, and the support for national struggles is 'resolved' by another Bordigist organization, but not in a very clear way. In October 1990, we read in Il Programa Comunista:

"One can understand that, in their despair, the Palestinian masses cling to the myth of Saddam, as they did yesterday and in different circumstances to the myth of Assad; the devel­opment of events will soon show that the 'heroes' of today, like those of yesterday are just repre­sentatives of the state's will to power, and that the path to their emancipation lies only through the socialist revolution against all potentates, Arab or non-Arab, in the Middle East."

Here we can see all the ambiguity of Programa's position.

In the first place, the concept of the 'masses' is confusionist par excellence. The 'masses' can mean anything, including social classes like the peasantry which, as history has shown, is far from being allies of the proletarian revolution. For communists, the essential issue is the com­ing to consciousness of the proletariat - this is the reason for their existence. Now, there does exist a Palestinian proletariat and it is relatively numerous and concentrated, but it's particularly intoxicated with nationalism (just as the Israeli proletariat is).

In the second place, we don't see why we have to be particularly 'understanding' about the Palestinian population's submission to na­tionalist ideology. The fact that the petty bour­geois strata who constitute a large part of this population are infected by nationalism is not surprising, since it corresponds to their nature and place in society. But the fact that the pro­letariat itself is a victim of this infection is a real tragedy expressing its weakness in relation to the bourgeoisie.

One can always 'understand' the historic, so­cial and political causes of such a weakness (as, for example, one could 'understand' the reasons why the European proletariat was mobilized be­hind the banners of the fatherland in 1914), but this doesn't mean that one should make the slightest political concession to this weakness. Those who, during the First World War, spent their time 'understanding' the nationalism of the French, German or Russian workers were the 'social chauvinists' a la' Plekhanov or the 'centrists' a la Kautsky, and certainly not rev­olutionaries like Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht who devoted all their energies to fighting this nationalism.

Why this particular interest in the Palestinian 'masses' if one is calling on them to make the socialist revolution? Only the proletariat is re­ally capable of responding to such an appeal ­and it is an appeal that has to be addressed to the workers of all countries.

The revolutionary combat can't only be waged in the Middle East; it has to be world-wide. And the enemies to be overthrown aren't just all the 'potentates' but all the bourgeois regimes, and especially the 'democratic' regimes which domi­nate the most advanced countries.

Here we can see all the absurdity of the Bordigist position. Out of a stupid loyalty to the 'classic' position of Lenin and the Communist International, the Bordigists continue to recite, like a litany, all the old phrases about the 'masses' in the colonial or semi-colonial coun­tries. After what happened in Vietnam, Cambodia and other 'liberated' nations, Palestine is one of the last places where illusions in 'national liber­ation' still exist (among those, of course, who want to delude themselves).

Today, however, it's obvious that the struggle for an 'independent and democratic' Palestinian state has reached an impasse, and we're seeing an effort to abandon the classic position which held that workers could support certain national struggles. But it's done without openly saying so, in the same shamefaced way that they 'understand' bourgeois mystifications.

However, the fundamental problem posed by this 'loyalty' to the erroneous positions of the Communist International is that it leads to ridiculous contortions. The real gravity of holding desperately to this position (even if the pressure of reality forces one to abandon its substance) resides in the fact that it is the fig­-leaf that different varieties of leftism hide be­hind so ignominiously in their support for impe­rialist war.

It's in the name of 'national liberation' strug­gles 'against imperialism' that these leftists, like the 'Pure Juice' Stalinists, have helped to enroll large numbers of workers in inter-imperialist massacres (remember Vietnam!).

Today the leftists, and particularly the Trotskyists, are calling on the Iraqi workers to go out and get themselves butchered, and once again it's in the name of this 'anti-imperialist' struggle. In this sense, any lack of clarity on the national question can only facilitate the dirty work of the 'radical' sectors of the bour­geoisie.

'Revolutionary defeatism' and internationalism

It's not only the position supporting 'national liberation' struggles which leads to concessions to leftist campaigns. It's the same with the slo­gan of 'revolutionary defeatism' which, also in the name of 'tradition', has been employed by certain groups in relation to the Gulf war.

This slogan was put forward by Lenin during the First World War. It was designed to respond to the sophistries of the 'centrists', who while being 'in principle' against any participation in imperialist war, advised that you should wait until the workers in the 'enemy' countries were ready to enter into struggle against the war before calling on workers in 'your' country to do the same. In support of this position, they put forward the argument that if the workers of one country rose up before those in the oppos­ing countries, they would facilitate the imperi­alist victory of the latter.

Against this conditional 'internationalism', Lenin replied very correctly that the working class of any given country had no common in­terest with 'its' bourgeoisie. In particular, he pointed out that the latter's defeat could only facilitate the workers' struggle, as had been the case with the Paris Commune (following France's defeat by Prussia) and the 1905 revolution in Russia (which was beaten in the war with Japan). From this observation he concluded that each proletariat should 'wish for' the defeat of 'its' bourgeoisie.

This last position was already wrong at the time, since it led the revolutionaries of each country to demand for 'their' proletariat the most favorable conditions for the proletarian revolution, whereas the revolution had to take place on a world-wide level, and above all in the big advanced countries, which were all in­volved in the war. However, with Lenin, the weakness of this position never put his intran­sigent internationalism in question (we can even say it was precisely his intransigence which led to the error). In particular, Lenin never had the idea of supporting the bourgeoisie of an 'enemy' country - even if this might be the logical conclusion of his 'wishes'.

But the incoherence of the position was used later on a number of occasions by bourgeois parties draped in 'communist' colors, in order to justify their participation in imperialist war. Thus, for example, after the signing of the Russo-German pact in 1939, the French Stalinists suddenly discovered the virtues of 'proletarian internationalism' and 'revolutionary defeatism', virtues they had long ago forgotten and which they repudiated no less rapidly as soon as Germany launched its attack on the USSR in 1941. The Italian Stalinists also used the term 'revolutionary defeatism' after 1941 to justify their policy of heading the resistance against Mussolini. Today, the Trotskyists in the numer­ous countries allied against Saddam Hussein use the same term to justify their support for the latter.

This is why, in the Gulf war, revolutionaries have to be particularly clear on the slogan of 'revolutionary defeatism' if they don't want to give an involuntary aid to the leftists.

This weakness, from the internationalist point of view, in the slogan of 'revolutionary de­featism' can be seen in II Partito Comunista no 186:

"We are not however indifferent to the out­come of the war: as revolutionary communists, we are defeatists, and thus favor the defeat of our country and more generally of the western countries; we wish for the most resounding defeat of US imperialism which, being the most powerful in the world, is the worst enemy of the international proletarian movement, the guard-dog of planetary capitalism."

Il Partito "wishes for" the defeat of American imperialism ... like the leftists, whose 'anti-impe­rialist' crusades are just pretexts for calling on workers to participate in imperialist war.

Obviously, Il Partito rejects such participa­tion. But what's the use of "wishing" for some­thing if you renounce any means of turning this "wish" into reality? For communists, theoretical reflection isn't a kind of gratuitous speculation; it's a guide for action.

As for the leftists, they're consistent in their position. And here precisely is the great danger of Il Partito's position. With its "wishes", this organization encourages rather than combats the 'anti-imperialist' mystifications which weigh on a part of the working class. And in doing so, its internationalist protestations don't carry much weight against the logic of leftism.

Whether it wants to or not, Il Partito becomes a conduit for the leftists' ideology. Fortunately, however, the position of this group doesn't stand much chance of being heard.

It's 't rue that the defeat of the world's main gendarme would weaken the whole bourgeoisie much more than its victory. The annoying thing is that this sort of scenario exists only in the abstract, where you can plan anything you like.

In reality, unhappily, in the absence of divine intervention, victory goes to the strongest ­even Saddam Hussein, despite his megalomania, doesn't believe he can defeat the USA[3]. Thus, by openly revealing itself as a species of futile and puerile speculation, by showing how ridicu­lous and absurd it is, Il Partito's 'analysis' at least has the merit of reducing the danger in­herent in this false position of 'revolutionary defeatism'.

However, the errors of revolutionaries aren't always so inoffensive. In particular, we should guard against slogans like "For us, the workers of all countries, the main enemy is 'our' own state", a slogan which is included in the state­ment by the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP), entitled 'Against Bush and western imperialism; against Saddam and Iraqi expansionism; No to war in the Middle East', (reproduced in Battaglia Communista September 90 and Workers Voice no 53).

It's no accident that this slogan is the same as 'The main enemy is our own bourgeoisie', which is a leaflet distributed in France by a group called ‘Internationale Ouvriere pour Reconstruire la IVeme Internationale', ie a Trotskyist group. This slogan (which is similar to that of 'revolutionary defeatism') was also put forward during the first world war, notably by the Spartatists in Germany. Today we can see how easily it can be recuperated by the bourgeoisie.

In fact, any slogan addressed to this or that sector of the proletariat, attributing it with tasks that are distinct or different from those of other sectors, is ambiguous and can easily be turned against the working class by the leftists. Even if the world proletariat is separated in to national sectors because of the divisions in bourgeois society itself, its historic struggle has to head in the direction of a world-wide unity. It's precisely the task of revolutionaries to contribute actively to this world-wide unity.

This is why a communist organization today can only have one single program - as is the case with the ICC - not a different one for each country. As Marx wrote: "the proletariat can only exist on the scale of world history, just as communism, which is its activity, can only have a world historic existence."

In the same sense, the perspectives revolu­tionaries have to put forward are the same for all countries and all sectors of the world prole­tariat, contrary to what the IBRP does in its document when it tries to concretize the afore­mentioned slogan. In fact, this document, pre­sented as the emanation of the same organization, exists in two versions, and we have to say that the one aimed at English-speaking workers has a much more leftist ring than the Italian version (we await the French and German ver­sions). In the English version, but not the other, we read:

"We have to fight its [our 'own' state's] war plans and preparations in every possible way. This means in the first instance that we demand the immediate recall of all Western forces sent to the Gulf. All attempts to send further forces must be opposed by strikes at ports and airports, for example. If fighting breaks out we must call for fraternization between western and Iraqi soldiers and turning the guns on the offi­cers.

"Second, it means fighting attempts to impose more austerity and cuts in services in the name of the 'national interest' ...

"This oil crisis, as in 1974, will provide them with the perfect alibi to explain away the fail­ings of the system. Our response must be to ig­nore the lies, ignore the nationalist hysteria, and fight for a higher standard of living. In particular, we call on the British North Sea oil workers to step up their struggle and prevent the bosses increasing production. This strike must be extended to include all oil workers and extended to other workers. No sacrifice for im­perialism's war!"

In the first place, we must unfortunately point out that the British branch of the IBRP makes the first point of its intervention the classic slogan of all the leftists within the so-called 'anti-war' movement: "western troops out of the Gulf". It thus makes its own little contribution to the campaigns of the extreme left of the bourgeoisie which not only aim at ensuring that the Gulf is controlled by the 'Arab people' (ie , the local imperialisms), but above all at peddling the illusion that you can block the bourgeoisie's war-drive through legalistic campaigns based on 'peace demonstrations' and the 'mobilization of public opinion'. And we know that these illu­sions are the best way of diverting workers from using the only weapon they have against the development of the war: the struggle on their own class terrain, rejecting the inter-classism of the pacifist campaigns.

Such erroneous positions aren't new for the CWO, the British branch of the IBRP, they put forward the same leftist "Imperialism out of the Gulf", when the armada intervened in the Iran-Iraq war[4].

Concerning the CWO's call for strikes in the ports and airports, we can say that it received an echo in France where the sailors in Marseille stopped work to delay (for one day) the de­parture of troops for the Gulf. We should how­ever point out that this strike was called by the Stalinist-controlled CGT. And there's nothing surprising in this: if these crap-heads decided to launch such a 'spectacular' action, it's because they knew perfectly well that at the present time such a method of 'struggle' holds no dan­gers at all for the bourgeoisie.

The point is that it's not through particular struggles in this or that sector that the work­ing class can fight the bourgeoisie's war-drive (and this is equally true for the oil workers, whose solidarity with their Iraqi class brothers can't take the form of a specific struggle in 'their' sector, even if, suddenly seized by scru­ples, the CWO then calls for its extension).

The war-drive is the only response the bour­geoisie as a whole can have to the irreversible crisis of its system, and to the generalized de­composition that this crisis is engendering to­day. Only the struggle of the whole working class, as a class, on the terrain of the class, and not as this or that specific category, can really serve to counter imperialist war. It alone can open the door to the proletariat's only his­toric response to imperialist war: the overthrow of capitalism itself.

For the same reasons, the call for "fraternization between western soldiers and Iraqi's soldiers" and "turning the guns on the officers" isn't valid as an immediate perspective in the present situation.

This slogan is perfectly correct in general. It is an application of the internationalist position of calling on workers to 'turn the imperialist war into a civil war'; and it was one of the ways this call was concretized at the end of the first world war, notably between the Russian and German soldiers. But such a concretization presupposed a considerable degree of maturity in the consciousness of the proletariat: this didn't exist at the beginning of the war but de­veloped during the course of it. On the other hand, this consciousness didn't exist at the end of the second world war. For example, the German workers who were ready to desert gen­erally advanced the idea because in the occu­pied countries the chauvinism among the work­ers was so great that the German soldiers risked being lynched.

Today, we're obviously not in the period of counter-revolution that prevailed in 1945, but the present situation is also a long way away from the one at the end of the First World War as far as the consciousness of the class is con­cerned. This is why an immediate, on the ground response by the proletariat to the Gulf war is not on the cards. Once again, the prole­tariat's response to this war will essentially be posed away from the main battlefronts, in the big metropoles, and this fundamentally on a historic level.

The role of revolutionaries isn't to engage in a purely verbal radicalism and put forward recipes for stopping the Gulf war there and then. It is to defend, within the proletariat as a whole, a clear view of what's really at stake in the Gulf war, and the responsibility this poses to the class and its struggles.

And here we can see that the political inabil­ity of the different groups of the proletarian milieu to put forward slogans appropriate to the present situation is linked to the problem of understanding what's really at stake in this sit­uation today.

Incomprehension of what the war is about

Like many of the more serious commentators in the bourgeois press, most of the groups have managed to show that the immediate origins of the Iraqi adventure: not Saddam Hussein's 'megalomaniac folly', but the fact that Iraq, af­ter 8 years of a terrible and murderous war with Iran, was gripped by a catastrophic eco­nomic situation and a foreign debt of nearly $80 billion. As Battaglia Communista wrote in its September issue: "the attack on Kuwait was thus the classic gesture of someone who's at the point of drowning and is prepared to risk everything."

But on the other hand, the fundamental rea­sons for the formidable military deployment by the USA and its acolytes completely pass these groups by.

For Le Proletarire: "The USA has clearly de­fined the 'American national interest' which has led them to act: guaranteeing a stable supply of and a reasonable price for the oil produced in the Gulf. The same interest which made them support Iraq against Iran now makes them support Saudi Arabia and the oil sheikdoms against Iraq" (from the leaflet cited above).

The CWO puts forward the same idea, also in a leaflet:

"In fact the crisis in the Gulf is really about oil and who controls it. Without cheap oil, prof­its will fall. Western capitalism's profits are threatened and it's for this reason and no other (our emphasis) that the US is preparing a bloodbath in the Middle East."

As for Battaglia Communista, it defends the same with even more pretentious language:

"Oil, indirectly and directly, in nearly all the productive cycles, in the process of the forma­tion of monopoly income has a determinant weight and, consequently, the control of its price is of vital importance ... With an economy in clear signs of recession, an alarming public debt, a productive apparatus in strong debit compared to European and Japanese competitors, the USA least of anyone can allow at this time a loss of control of one of the variable funda­mentals of the world economy, the price of oil."

On the other hand, Programma Comunista comes up with the beginning of a response to this argument, which is also put forward by many leftist groups whose only aim is to vilify the rapacity of American imperialism in order to justify their 'critical' support for Saddam Hussein:

"In all this, oil only enters as the last factor. In the big industrial countries, the stocks are full and in any case, the majority of OPEC is ready to increase production, and thus stabilize the price of crude oil."

In fact, the oil argument doesn't go very far towards explaining the current situation. Even if the USA, as well as Europe and Japan, are obvi­ously interested in being able to import cheap oil, this doesn't explain the incredible concen­tration of military force that the world's leading power has installed in the Gulf. This operation can only further augment the USA's already vast deficits and will cost its economy a lot more that the increase in oil prices which Iraq originally demanded.

What's more, with the prospect of a major mil­itary confrontation, the price of oil climbed well above the level that could have been set through negotiations with Iraq, had the USA wanted such negotiations (it's certainly not out of a desire to 'respect' the interests of sheikh Jaber and his crew that the USA has been so intransigent about the occupation of Kuwait). And the destruction that will result from the military confrontation will certainly make things a lot worse. If the USA was really, fundamen­tally concerned about the price of oil, you'd have to say that they're not going about things in the best way - their current approach would be comparable to that of a bull in a china shop.

In reality, the very extent of the military de­ployment proves that what's at stake goes well beyond the question of the price of oil. BC puts its finger on this when it tries to broaden its framework of analysis:

"The breakdown of the equilibrium that came out of the second world war has, in reality, opened up a historic phase in which other ones will be constituted, thus accelerating the com­petition between different imperialist appetites ... One thing is sure: whatever the outcome of this conflict, none of the questions that the Gulf crisis has shown up will be solved in this way."

But this seems to be too much for Battaglia. In the next breath, they once more get drowned in .... oil:

"Once Iraq has been eliminated, for example, it won't be long before someone else poses the same question: changing the re-partition of oil rent on a world scale, because it's this re-par­tition which determines the international hierar­chy which the crisis of the USSR has put into question."

This is really original: he who controls the oil (or 'oil rent' to sound more marxist) controls the planet. Poor old USSR, which doesn't know this, and whose economy and imperialist strength collapsed even though it is the world's biggest producer ... of oil.

As for Programma, while it understands that there's something more important involved than oil, it doesn't manage to go beyond generalities:

"The tangled web of a conflict born out of the interests of a colossal power will only be unraveled by creating new ones, undoing and recom­posing alliances ..."

Good luck to anyone who can understand this. But it won't bring much clarity to the working class. And it's clear that Programma doesn't un­derstand much either.

Underestimating the gravity of the situation

In the final analysis, if there is a common ele­ment among the different analyses of the sig­nificance of the Gulf war, it's a dramatic under­estimation of the gravity of the situation facing the capitalist world today. Like stopped clocks, the communist groups, even when they're able to recognize the convulsions that the world im­perialist arena is going through, do no more than try to fit this new situation into the schemas of the past, just as they are satisfied with repeating slogans which were in any case wrong when they were put forward.

This isn't the place to develop our analysis that capitalism has now entered into the final phase of its decadence: the phase of general decomposition (see International Review nos 57 and 61). Neither will we go back over our own positions on the Gulf war (see the editorials of IR 63 and 64 or on the question of militarism in the current period (see our text 'Militarism and Decomposition' in this issue).

But it is our duty say that the refusal of the communist groups to accept the whole gravity of the present situation (and that's when they don't purely and simply deny that capitalism is a decadent system, like the Bordigists) will pre­vent them from fully assuming their responsi­bilities towards the working class.

The war in the Middle East isn't just a war like all others, faced with which it is enough to reaffirm the class positions of internationalism (especially when this takes the erroneous form of 'revolutionary defeatism'. )

The USA's formidable military deployment is not just aimed at Iraq, far from it. Brining Iraq to heel is just a pretext for 'setting an example' in order to dissuade any future threat, wher­ever it comes from, to warn off anyone who might think of destabilizing 'world order'.

This 'order' was to some degree ensured when the world was divided up between the big 'gendarmes'. Although the antagonism between the latter fuelled and kindled a whole series of wars, it also prevented them from escaping the control of the 'superpowers', and, in particular, from spreading to the point where they threat­ened a generalized war - something the ad­vanced countries weren't ready for because the proletariat hadn't been mobilized.

But the complete collapse of the eastern bloc has simply opened up a Pandora's Box of all the imperialist antagonisms between the various components of the western bloc itself, antago­nisms which had been held in check as long as there was the threat from the rival bloc. The demise of the eastern bloc thus condemned the' western bloc to death. This was expressed by Iraq's grab from Kuwait - prior to this, Iraq had acted as a good defender of western inter­ests against Iran.

However, the main imperialist antagonisms be­tween the former 'allies' of the American bloc don't involve the countries of the periphery but the central countries, ie powerful economies like the western European states, Japan and the USA. While the ex-allies of the latter have an interest in disciplining the second-string coun­tries of the 'third world' when they try to step out of line, they have much less of an interest in a police operation whose main aim is to en­sure their allegiance to the USA. The USA's mil­itary intervention, even though this time round it has forced the ex-vassals to limit their pre­tensions, won't put a definitive end to imperial­ist antagonisms, because they are a part of capitalism's life, and they can only be exacer­bated by the aggravation of the crisis, by the system's irreversible plummet into the convul­sions of its decay and decomposition. Without being a world war, the Gulf is thus the first major manifestation of a slide into chaos and barbarism unprecedented in human society.

This is what revolutionary organizations have to affirm clearly to their class if the proletariat is to become fully aware of what's at stake in its combat against capitalism. Otherwise they will be totally incapable of carrying out the task for which the proletariat has engendered them and will be pitilessly swept away by history.

FM 1.11.1990

[1] For certain Trotskyist organizations, the language is different according to whom they're addressing themselves: in their popular press, their support for Iraqi imperialism is hidden behind all sorts of contortions (we mustn't shock the public), but in their ‘theoretical' publications and their public meetings, which are addressed to a more ‘initiated' audience, they openly call for support for Iraq. Here, means and ends are in perfect accord: like any other sector of the bourgeoisie involved in a war. Trotskyism uses the classical technique of dissimulation, disinformation and lies. 

[2] The silence which Ferment Ouvriere has maintained is quite unacceptable. Apparently the FOR is much more lively when it's running stupid trials of other revolutionary organizations, putting all kinds of words into their mouths (see their article, ‘Encore un plat piqnant du CCI in L'arme de la critique no 6) than when called upon to raise an internationalist voice against the barbarity of capitalist war. But it may be that this silence indicates that the FOR has ceased to exist as an organization. This wouldn't be at all surprising: when a revolutionary organization continues to insist, against all the evidence, that capitalism today isn't in crisis, as the FOR has always done, it losses any possibility of contributing to the development of consciousness in the proletariat, and becomes a pointless organization. 

[3] We must render what is Caesar's unto Caesar and give Bordiga the paternity of this position. It was Bordiga who, at the beginning of the Cold War, put forward the idea that the defeat of the American imperialist bloc by the weaker Russian bloc would create the most favorable conditions for the development of the proletarian struggle. This position was dangerous and could easily play into the hands of the Trotskyists and Stalinists. All the more so because it wasn't as stupid as the position of Bordiga's current epigones, owing to the fact that it was talking about imperialist rivals of comparable strength.

Among the epigones we can also include ‘Mouvement Communiste Mondial' which has published a leaflet called ‘To stop the war, we must stop the economy'. In itself, this new grouplet doesn't represent very much but its document is a significant expression of the aberrations of the Bordigist ‘heritage'. As well as the classic ‘wish' for the defeat of the USA this text - in the gold old Bordigist tradition - takes up slogans put forward by Lenin at the beginning of the century, such as ‘against all oppression of nationalities' and ‘against all annexations'.

Today these two slogans can easily be used by the bourgeoisie in its campaigns of mystification. It's in the name of the struggle against the ‘oppression of nationalities' that the proletarians of the different republics of the USSR are today being called - successfully, unfortunately - to abandon their class terrain and to massacre each other on the rotten terrain of nationalism.

Similarly, the ‘struggle against annexations' is, right now, the battle cry of the United Nations, especially the USA, in the crusade against Iraq. 

[4] In the document jointly sign by CWO and Battaglia, Iraq is very correctly stated as an imperialist country. We should however point out that this is the first for the CWO, which up to now has considered that only the super-powers were imperialist. It's a pity that this organization hasn't explained this change of position to readers. Unless the CWO, despite everything, is still holding up to its old (and stupid) position. This might explain the ambiguous title of the joint document which makes a distinction between ‘western imperialism' and ‘Iraqi expansionism'. There's no doubt about it: the IBRP and political clarity are always falling out with each other.  

The convulsions that are shaking the world (which demonstrate that capitalism has entered its phase of decomposition) are subjecting the organizations of the proletarian political milieu to a rigorous political decantation. The confrontation of their positions must contribute to this decantation, permitting an intervention that will be a factor of clarification and not of greater confusion for the whole of the working class. Unfortunately, this is not the case today.

This acceleration of history is exposing the weaknesses and leftovers in the analysis of the proletarian political organizations. But instead of a serious confrontation of positions, we are seeing second-hand, superficial agreements, in order to produce some form of a "common publication", whose only criteria appears to be a tacit agreement to step up the unfounded attacks on the ICC, which is the only organization that is trying to fully develop its analysis of the present situation and which calls on the milieu to take up its responsibilities. The persistence of such an attitude increasingly risks leading them into a parasitic mode of existence ... and if this constitutes a danger for the organizations which have lost their roots in the left communist fractions but are still capable of maintaining themselves on the class terrain, it is an even greater danger for the relatively young proletarian political regroupments who have not been able - or have not wanted to - to take up the thread of the historical class positions. This has happened with the group Emancipacion Obrera (Argentina).

The defense of the proletarian milieu, even from its friends

Some months ago EO published a pamphlet called We want it all with which, apart from spreading its ideas on the defensive struggles of the proletariat and other themes, it clumsily joins in the prevailing fashion in the milieu of slandering the ICC with such orations as:

"The slogans of the ICC are reduced more or less to 'bread, peace and work' well known slogans of all the world's reformists, Stalinism, Trotskyism and all the other isms form the left that form the left of capital and this includes sections of the bourgeoisie which are not of the left" (page 8).

This is more or less the spirit that animates all the pamphlet: the spirit of ambiguity in the position of EO, the spirit of throwing stones and sleight of hand. Already in the introduction we can read that:

"Along with the positions that they hold which are similar to ours, we have important disagreements with the demands which they (the ICC) have in common with the left of capital" (page 1) " ... not because the ICC is exactly the same as them, but because they have not finished their rupture with the left of capital ..." (page 3).

Thus, according to these comrades the ICC has the same position as the organizations of capital ... without however being one of them. This is confused. But the mistake is not that of the organization being analyzed, but the analyst. An organization which is at the same time bourgeois and proletarian (EO do not talk of errors or divergences, but of slogans and positions) simply cannot exist. And, if the ICC is an organization of capital EO must explain why it has maintained relations with the ICC for years, or else EO hold the opportunist position which sees that a proletarian organization can maintain connections with a bourgeois organization. Otherwise the ICC is a proletarian organization and EO is substituting slander for critique and debate.

It is not only about the ICC that they are confused. When they deal with Rosa Luxembourg and particularly her work Reform or Revolution, it is cited with great scorn as the most pure example of reformism, from which the ICC supports (page 7). EO is incapable of understanding that it was precisely this work which constituted a fundamental weapon with which the revolu­tionary wing of which Rosa was one of the principal leaders of the proletarian party of that time (the Social Democracy at the turn of the century) fought reformism.

They also cite Lenin's work An explanation of the project for the program which the y assume to be: "the most traditional expression of the problem (of consciousness) and with which the majority of the political groups which claim to be revolutionary inside or outside the left of capital, agree" (page 50) and further on: "along with correct points, his limitations are also demonstrated. He was not able to break the resistance of the capitalists and the political alternative of gaining influence in the state" (page 56).

In a novel fashion, EO believes that proletarian and capitalist organizations can "agree" on some things, that is to say, have political positions in common. Furthermore, they completely nullify the revolutionary thought of Lenin - the criticized quotation is in fact a comment by Lenin on the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto about how the force of the proletariat is created through converting its defensive struggles into a struggle for political power - EO reduce Lenin to the level of a vulgar trouble maker whose thinking is identical to that of the ICC:

concerning the ICC: "along with positions similar to ours ... common demands with the left of capital ";

and Lenin: "Along with correct points ... his limitations are also demonstrated".

But here the "limitations" are not those of Lenin, but those of EO who mix up, confuse and scorn the history of the proletarian revolutionary movement. In another part of the pamphlet you read:

"The traditional slogan (raised by Engels, social democracy, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Fidel, Tito, etc) that the revolution must immediately pose 'each according to their needs, each according to their abilities' has been exposed as being perpetuated by capitalism" (page 9)                 .

Here EO goes to the extreme of establishing a continuity between the leaders of the proletariat, like Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, with the enemies of the working class, with the most faithful bulldogs of capital such as Stalin, Mao, Fidel or Tito. Neither are Marx and Engels saved from the unbelievable ignorance of these comrades: "The same slogan that made Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto famous, 'Workers of the world unite!', has shown its serious (sic) limitations".

Thus the first thing that the pamphlet We want it all demonstrates is that Emancipacion Obrera has lost its compass and is unable to clearly distinguish the class frontiers which separates a proletarian organization from a capitalist one; neither has it been capable of understanding that the revolutionary positions of the working class, as well as being expressed in the work of this or that revolutionary, have also developed in continuity with the history of the workers' movement. A continuity of class positions which all proletarian political regroupments must take up, if they do not want to be pushed this way and that by bourgeois ideology often dished up as "new" and "original" ideas and concerns.

This is not a question of bowing in front of the revolutionaries of the past as if they were gods who have no limitations or made no errors, neither to ban any criticism of them or any other revolutionary organization. The point is, that in order to try and undertake a critique which better expresses or which takes forward class positions, it is first necessary to under­stand them or at least to be able to tell the difference between them and those of the enemy.

In fact without knowing it, EO has done its bit for the ideological campaign launched by the world bourgeoisie against the proletariat with the aim of using the collapse of the eastern bloc to identify the proletarian revolution of October 1917 with the state capitalism which brought about its defeat, and which also seeks to establish a continuity between Marx and Lenin with Stalin - to 'prove' that Marxism leads to Stalinism.

Likewise, the opportunist silence by the other groups of the milieu in respect to this pamphlet of EO's (a silence which makes them accessories) is worrying. Perhaps bewitched by EO's attacks on the ICC, they have not been worried by the fact that in reality, EO attacks the class frontiers which define the proletarian political milieu and marxism in general. In such conditions the least the ICC can do is to defend the basic positions of the class and the rev­olutionary political milieu, even though on this occasion the attack which we have to confront is not coming from the enemy, but from friends.

Defensive and revolutionary struggles

What is this "serious limitation" which according to EO comes from Marx and Engels, by way of R Luxemburg and Lenin and finally arrives at the ICC? What is this thinking in which "they agree" with the left of capital and which includes sections of the bourgeoisie that are not of the left? It is the question of the most elemental and basic position of Marxism, with which these comrades become entangled throughout the 60 pages of their pamphlet without finding the thread; the position according to which the defensive struggles of the workers against the effects of capitalist exploitation leads to the development (through its extension, unification, radicalization and deepening) of the working class' revolutionary struggle against the whole of capitalism, destroying it and building a communist society.

And seeing that this position has been defended throughout the history of the workers' movement and is repeated constantly in many ways in Marxist literature - just reread the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto - it is "natural" that EO end up wanting to throw Marxism in to the bourgeois camp. The following paragraphs condense its position. Referring to the struggle for pay rises it says:

"... it is a criminal illusion to believe that the unification of the present struggles (we participate in these struggles and therefore we know what they are like) will create the force that will allow it to destroy capitalism and build communism. Principally for four reasons: 1) The majority of the present struggles are on a limited terrain, trying to conserve the workforce; of course it is necessary to do this, but it is wrong to deny their limitations and worse still when they're contained by slogans like 'bread, peace end work' ... other types of struggles are necessary, around other orientations and with other objectives (EO's un­derlining). 2) These struggles do not create that force, nor does their unity allow the destruction of capitalism: this is destroyed with another kind of struggle, which includes another type of methodology (the insurrection is an example) and of course with other objectives. 3) If the proletarian vanguard is not organized in the party... it will not be possible to create a proletarian alternative capable of destroying capital. 4) This party does not arise spontaneously from these struggles though neither will it arise isolated from the real class struggle ... " (p 11).

All of this can be reduced to one con­tradistinction that EO establish between the "present struggles" and the "other types of struggles that are necessary", EO deny that the defensive struggles form part of the process of the unification of the class on the road to the revolution, and therefore are not part of the "real class struggle". This raises two questions:

Why does EO say "of course" we must carry out these struggles? Answer: "We must struggle for the same 'palliatives' because we do not yet have the force to make the revolution" (p 11). Here EO clearly says that for them there does not exist a relationship between the defensive struggles and the revolution, that if we struggle for "palliatives" it is because it's not possible to do anything else, not because this struggle contributes to the revolution, therefore the two things are counterposed.

EO consider that the present struggles only serve "to obtain palliatives" but at the same times says that "they must take place" and that it participates in them. This reduces the role of revolutionary organization to that of a charitable institution. In reality, revolutionaries intervene in the defensive struggles because they're convinced that they constitute the point of departure for the development of the revolutionary struggle: another question arising from this is how will the intervention of the party help develop this struggle?

But the second main question here is what will this "other type of struggle" be, this "real class struggle" which will create the force and unity of the class? Here EO's confusion is great. On the one hand they talk of the insurrection, but this is not what is in question. This is not a question of defining the culminating point for the destruction of bourgeois power, but of what road the proletariat must take in order to reach this point. The history of the working class knows no other road than the development of the defensive struggles, its strike movements. It is in this struggle that it will forge its unity, its consciousness, its organization, which will permit the revolutionary assault.

Likewise, there does not exist in the pamphlet a clear and explicit idea of what EO understands by "the real class struggle" which will have to take the place of the "present struggles", just allusions. For example, when referring to the hunger revolts it says: "It is certain that these are reactions without perspectives ... but they are a part of the struggle which the ICC deny" (p3). In another part dealing with the angry reactions of workers (such as beating up union delegates or fighting with the police) against the abuses to which they are subjected by the forces of capital, at work and in daily life, it says: "These 'small struggles' also form part of the class struggle and in many case have important components for the revolutionary struggle" (p29), or when dealing with such actions as blocking streets, burning cars which have occurred in some strikes, it thinks: "And of course many means, including desperation, have no perspective or  will not have if the working class only responds as individuals ... but today this is not the situation and if we want to intervene in the real struggle, we have to be part of this reality ..." (page 18).

So here we are faced with 3 different situations:

- the revolts of the desperate hungry masses (see IR 63);

- actions by isolated workers,

- the defensive struggles (which elsewhere it rejects but here it salutes, why?).

What do they have in common? What is the most important component of the struggle, this "real struggle"? Quite simply, desperate violence. According to EO: "Seeing that the necessity of destroying the state does not appear in the demands of the ICC (we will return to this question later) it is logical that they despise and underestimate the moments of confrontations with the forces of capitalist order" (page 15).

Here, Emancipacion Obrera is treading on a very slippery slope: indeed class violence is a "component" of the proletarian struggle and clearly not only during the insurrection to destroy bourgeois power, but also in all of the period which precedes it. The defensive struggles, in order to extend under workers' control, already implies a confrontation with the state apparatus, with the unions, the police, lawyers ... What we always oppose, and denounce in all cases, is when workers lock themselves up, or to put it better, they are trapped by the radical petty-bourgeois, the unions, the police, in acts of isolated, meaningless, desperate violence, which block and cut off the tendencies towards the unity of the class - acts that are implicated in the direct confrontations with the organs of repression which have the ability to mobilize and concentrate its superior force against any group of workers or isolated strike. We call on them not to believe in this desperate violence "without perspectives", which leads to dead ends, to defeats and demoralization of sectors of the working class.

There is nothing more dangerous and stupid than the following statement by EO: "It is criminal today to call on workers to arm themselves with firearms in order to defend their pickets from the police, but it is also criminal not to look for means of self defense in the context of the real forces today" (page 16). In essence, we have here the trap of the radical petty-bourgeois provocateur: inciting one group of workers to confront the police, but at the same time telling them not to use firearms, knowing full well that the police can use them whenever they wish.

This dilemma in respect to what kind of self defense workers should use on their pickets is false: workers always defend themselves as best as they can remember the steel strike in Brazil two years ago, in which the workers were trapped in the buildings of the plant and made up weapons from their tools with which they confronted the army. However, despite their great courage, they were defeated. The real dilemma is between whether workers become trapped in their factory until they are repressed by the police, who unfailingly arrive with superior forces, or whether they leave the factory in order to look for class solidarity, the extension of the struggle and the strength of the mass. Although this is a long and difficult road, it is the only one which can lead not only to winning demands and holding back repres­sion, but it is also the only way to contribute to the forging of the class unity that is essential in order to destroy capitalism. Do the comrades of EO now understand our position?

A last point on the class struggle. Along with the attacks on the ICC because it supports the defensive struggles, EO says, at one time or another that the ICC posed: "a unity without any anti-capitalist perspective ... which of necessity leads to new detente" (page 9) "What we really want to ask the ICC about, is not its support for these (the defensive struggles) but its aim of containing them in an economist political schema" (p 29).

Here, it is not a question of the "limited nature of these struggles", but that the Ice wants to limit them! This is a serious accusation, which identifies the ICC with a tool of the bourgeoisie, the unions, whose function is precisely to try to contain and lead the struggles to defeat. Therefore, EO should have some pretty solid arguments to say this. However, it has none.

This accusation is sustained with very ambiguous phrases about how the ICC does not always put forward the final objective or the armed struggle: "this question is not given the importance that it should have ... some isolated texts show an understanding ... but this is not sufficient" (page 15). "Incidentally" (yes comrades: they say nothing more         than "incidentally") "it appears that neither does the ICC defend in its leaflets the dictatorship of the proletariat" (page 38).

What does this mean? It means that EO has lost any ability to delineate the class frontiers, the positions which separate a capitalist organization from a revolutionary organization of the proletariat, and now thinks that a revolutionary organization is defined by the number of times its writes "to take power", "revolutionary war", "we want it all". This is pitiable, but it makes us think that its "political work in the masses" is very radical petty-bour­geois leftism: giving out leaflets and painting ultra-radical and ultra-revolutionary slogans, which are empty of content, on walls.

Well where is this leading the group Emancipacion Obrera ?

Emancipacion Obrera, set adrift

We have had political relations with EO for more than 4 years, including the publication within the pages of this Review of its "International Proposal" and an initial correspondence (IRs 46 & 49). In that time we have saluted the comrades' preoccupation and effort to contribute to the unification of the world-wide revolutionary forces. However, this does not mean that we do not point out, from our point of view, what constitutes the weaknesses of this group. In particular we reject the idea that the criteria for "recognizing" a revolutionary group should be its "practice" and nothing more. We have said that:

"A 'practice' divorced from any political foundations, orientations, or framework of principles is nothing but a practice suspended in mid-air, a narrow mined immediatism, which can never be a truly revolutionary activity. Any separation between theory and practice that opts, either for theory without practice, or for practice without theory, destroys the unity of the immediate struggle and historical goals" (IR 49, page 18)

Likewise, we have pointed out the urgent necessity of making a real effort towards "trying to reestablish the movement's historical and political continuity"(IR 49,page 20), which is very important for the "young" groups, confronted with the organic rupture of more than 50 years, the product of the defeat of the revolutionary wave at the beginning of the century.

We have also warned them about falling into the attitude of some groups who: "find it more profitable to remain ignorant, or even, purely and simply, to wipe out the past and who think that the revolutionary movement begins with them ... that in their desire to wipe out, to imagine that they come out of nowhere, they are condemned merely to come to nothing" (IR 49, page 20).

What at the time could appear as surmountable "weaknesses" for a young group, today have become a chronic illness: scorn for theory and the rejection of the historical continuity of the workers' movement. And what does EO offer us in its place? Little, really very little.

Thus, the problem of class consciousness appears to EO as a "Gordian Knot" which does not need to be untied, but which it prefers to "cut with an axe" (page 50). For EO, two centuries of debate in the workers' movement is "resolved" without difficulty. Marxism is of absolutely no use - all that is needed is a dictionary.

"If we pay attention [instruct EO] in reality spontaneity is not unconscious: something done spontaneously is done voluntarily... according to the dictionary: spontaneity: voluntary and self movement ... " (page 44). And from this infantile word play, EO draws its conclusion: "spontaneity is not opposed to consciousness, but to organization ... our fundamental task is not that the workers become conscious, but to bring them to take a position, to take a party"[1] (page 45). And further on: "The task of the party... is not to ‘develop consciousness' or that it 'becomes consciousness' but that the class 'takes a party' ... The task of the party is to defend a position, a party (sic!) (page 53);

"The situation of the proletariat will not be resolved because they become conscious of the fact that they are exploited, or that the bourgeoisie is the enemy, that capitalism is shit, many working men and women know it already without becoming revolutionaries. Many workmen and women know it already without help from the 'revolutionaries'. And then? Does it change anything of their reality? The question is, first of all, which is the party you take?" (page 53).

We must ask ourselves: why have we never seen a dictionary where it is clearly stated that spontaneity is voluntary, with which the problem of spontaneity would finished? Why is it until now that nobody has understood that "many workers have already become conscious, and yet this has not changed their reality"? Here, the problem of consciousness no longer exists! Why have so many parties been built and how come up until now it has occurred to nobody that the task of the party was - as its name indicates - "to create the party"? Perhaps we are meant to take seriously the stupidities that EO now serve us, seeing they have discovered the "serious limitations" of Marxism .

If we are going to be serious towards EO, we will have to try to explain to them that the problem of consciousness is not a problem of dictionary definition, but that it is the fundamental question of the proletarian struggle. The struggle for class consciousness, which at the same time is the struggle to overcome and break bourgeois ideology, is nothing but the expression of the proletariat's struggle to impose its own historical objectives by overthrowing the prevailing society.

We also have to try and explain that class consciousness is not what each worker "thinks" or believes they think, but what the working class is called on historically to do. That class consciousness cannot be separated from practice - that the consciousness of the proletariat is expressed as a revolutionary struggle.

Perhaps we could also try to define the framework of the debate in the revolutionary camp on the question of class consciousness, showing that it is based around whether it is the masses that come to this consciousness, or only the vanguard and the position adopted determines the type of intervention and orientations a revolutionary organization has inside the class ... But will this serve any purpose for Emancipacion Obrera?

It is certainly possible to recognize in the position of EO a certain influence of the Bordigist current which considers that the consciousness the masses can achieve is limited to the recognition of the revolutionary party ­to "take the party" as EO say - and that the party is the depository of global class consciousness. However, this tinge is deceitful since EO walk another route. Their considerations on the "limits" of Marxist positions; their rejection of the defensive struggles because they are "limited"; their preoccupation with finding a "real struggle"; their difficulties in distinguishing class frontiers; their insistence on "radical phraseology"; their idea that the class is ready conscious and only needs the party ... all of this is not an expression of a coherent and firm political position, but of desperation. Desperation because the party does not exist yet, because the revolution is not immediately realizable. The title of their pamphlet, We want it all, is an expression of this. As if it was only necessary to publish millions of pieces of paper with the same slogan "We want it all, we are going for it all!" in order for the insurrection to take place.

But desperation is not the essence of revolutionary organization which is capable of retaining, at least in its general lines, the historic course of the class struggle, which gives it its steadfastness and patience. Desperation is only the property of the radical petty-bourgeoisie and unfortunately, Emancipacion Obrera is drifting towards this. We consider it our duty to warn the comrades of EO of this threat, we call on them to react against these radicaloid tendencies which are increasingly evident from each of their new publications.

To the other groups of the proletarian milieu, and particularly those who today maintain close relations with EO, we call on them to carry out their responsibilities of debating with EO about weaknesses. The attitude of "Let it pass", the cultivation of a temporary agreement is opportunism: the gangrene of revolutionary organizations.

Ldo

[1] Note (1). In the original Spanish, this phrase ‘to take a party' has a double meaning: it can be understood as the act of taking a political position or in the literal sense of accepting the leadership of the party.

1. From Marx to the Second International

The present acceleration of history, Capitalism's entry into its phase of decomposition, sharply poses the necessity for the proletarian revolution as the only way out of the barbarism of capitalism in crisis. History teaches us that this revolution can only triumph if the class manages to organize itself autonomously from other classes (the workers' councils) and to secrete the vanguard that will guide it towards victory: the class party. However, today, this party doesn't exist, and many are those who simply fold their arms because, faced with the gigantic tasks that await us, the activity of the small revolutionary groups who do exist may appear to be senseless. Within the revolutionary camp itself, the majority of groups respond to the absence of the party by endlessly repeating its very Holy Name, invoking it like some kind of deus ex machina that can solve all the problems of the class. Individual disengagement and overblown declarations about commitment are two classic ways of running away from the struggle for the party, a struggle which is going on here and now, in continuity with the activity of the left fractions who broke with the degener­ating Communist International in the 20s.

In the first two parts of this work, we analyzed the activity of the Italian Communist Left, which was organized as a fraction in the 30s and 40s, and the premature, completely artificial foundation of the Internationalist Communist Party by the comrades of Battaglia Comunista in 1942[1]. In this third part, we will show that the method of working as a fraction in unfavorable periods when there is no possibility of a class party existing, was the very method employed by Marx himself. We will also show that this marxist method of working towards the party found its essential definition through the tenacious struggle of the Bolshevik fraction in the Russian social democracy. Against all those who gargle eulogies to the iron party of Lenin, and who refer ironically to the 'little grouplets that were the left fractions', we reaffirm that its only on the basis of the work that they accomplished that it will be possible to reconstruct to­morrow's world communist party.

In the article already quoted in the previous parts of this work, the comrades of  Battaglia Communista, having criticized the work of the Left Fraction between 1935 and 1945, concluded their presentation with a curt condemnation of the concept of the fraction in general:

"What is the sense of exclusively linking the notion of the party to the possibility of guiding then at least in a way that leaves no room for the broad masses, denying the political organ of the class struggle any possibility of existing except in revolutionary periods, and delegating to organisms that have never been well defined, or to their successors, the task of defending class interests in counter-revolutionary phases ....

"To argue that the party can only arise in revolutionary situations where the question of power is on the agenda, whereas in counter- revolutionary phases the party 'must' disappear or give way to the fractions, means not only depriving the class, in the most difficult and dangerous moments, of a minimum of political ­reference - which in the end means playing into the hands of the bourgeoisie - but also deliberately creates a void which it will be hard to fill in the space of 24 hours ...

"We cannot support the thesis, contradicted by historical experience, which claims that the Bolshevik party itself played the role of a 'fraction' within Russian social democracy up until 1917 (a thesis defended by the ICC in International Review no 3) ... Russia was the only European country involved in the war crisis of 1914-18 in which, despite conditions being less favorable than elsewhere, witnessed a proletarian revolution, due precisely to the fact that there was a party carrying out the work of a party, at least from 1912. From its beginnings, Bolshevism did not limit itself to fighting the opportunism of the Mensheviks on the political level, to theoretically elaborating the principles of the revolution, to forming cadres and proselytizing, but forged the first links between the party and the class, links which later on, in the heat of a rising situation, were to become real collective channels between the spontaneity of the class and the strategic and tactical program of the party...

"Already in 1902, Lenin had laid the tactical and organizational bases for building the alternative which was a party, unless we take What Is To Be Done to be the ten commandments of the fractionalist faith"[2]

To sum up, according to the comrades of BC:

1. nobody knows the origin of the theory which holds that in counter-revolutionary periods, fractions have to take the place of parties;
2. these fractions are "organisms that have never been well defined" and are thus incapable of giving a political orientation to the proletariat;
3. if the Russian revolution happened at all, it was because Lenin had from 1902 on bases of the Bolshevik party, and not the Bolshevik fraction as the ICC claims.

These assertions, three holes in Battaglia's theo­retical-political coherence, three ideas about the history of the workers' movement, don't stand up to examination. 

Marx, the Communist League, the IWA, and the lessons of the counter-revolution

"I would first like to point out, that following the dissolution of the League, which I had called for, in November 1852, I did not and do not belong to any organization, secret or public; in other words, the party, in the ephemeral sense of the term, for me ceased to exist 8 years ago ... As a result of this, I have been attacked on several occasions, if not openly, then at least in a way that leaves no room for doubt, on account of my 'inactivity' ...  Consequently, of the party you talk to me about in your letter, I have known nothing since 1852 ... The League, as well as the Society of Seasons in Paris and a hundred other organizations, was simply an episode in the history of the party which is born spontaneously from the soil of modern society... In addition, I have tried to avoid the misunderstanding which identifies the 'party' with a League that has been dead for 8 years or with the publication of a paper dissolved 12 years ago. When I talk about the party, I mean the. party in the broadest historical sense" (Marx to Freiligrath, 1860).

As we can see, the theory that proletarian par­ties disappear in counter-revolutionary phases was not an invention of Bilan in the 1930s, but was already Marx's firm conviction in the middle of the last century.

In this reply to the ex-militant of the Communist League, Ferdinand Freiligrath, who was inviting Marx to reassume the leadership of the 'party', Marx made it clear that the party had been dis­solved 8 years before, at the end of the revolutionary wave that began in 1848, as the Society of the Seasons of the Parisian workers and other organizations had been before, once the cycle of struggles of which they had been an expression had come to an end.

It is clear that Marx always had this profoundly materialist attitude, in contrast to the activist prejudices of those who refused to recognize the depth of the defeat and wanted to immediately 'start all over again'. In 1850, when Marx declared that the world economic revival had made the revolutionary perspective in Europe of recede into the distance, the majority of the League's militants (the Willich-Schapper tendency) opposed him and denounced him for trying to 'send everyone to sleep'. Only a mi­nority remained loyal to him and attempted - even after the formal dissolution of the League in 1852 - to devote themselves to the difficult task of 'drawing the lessons of the defeat', by understanding its causes and forging the theoretical instruments which would serve the proletariat in the next waves of struggle.

It is important to underline that the comrades who wanted to keep the League alive at any price were compelled to renege on their political positions and engage in all kinds of intrigues, in artificial alliances with the democrats, al­liances which soon dissolved and left no trace, except for the cinders of activism born out of the artificial attempt to hold on to the party.

By contrast, the patient work of clarification, of forming cadres, carried out by the fraction linked to Marx would bear fruit when the work­ers' movement revived: the marxist cadres were naturally to be found at the head of the International Workingmen's Association when it was formed in 1864 (developing "spontaneously from the soil of modern society"), at a time when there was an international resurgence of the workers' movement.

Marx's position didn't change in 1871, when the defeat of the Paris Commune opened up a new period of retreat in the workers' movement. In these conditions, Marx and Engels quickly say that the days of the IWA were numbered, and at the Le Hague congress in 1872, they propose that the General Council should be transferred to New York, which boiled down to dissolving the organization:

"Given the present conditions in Europe, it is absolutely useful, in my opinion, to shelve the formal organization of the International for the moment ... The inevitable evolution of things can lead of themselves to a resurrection of the International in a more perfected form. In the meantime, it will be enough to make sure that we don't let the best elements in various coun­tries slip out of our hands" (Marx to Sorge, 1873).

Once again, for Marx and Engels, keeping the facade of a party artificially alive in a period of counter-revolution was absolutely pointless; on the other hand, it was essential to carry on the collective work of that fraction of militants that was capable of resisting demoralization and of preparing the future resurgence "in a more perfected form".

To console the comrades of BC, who seem to be terrorized by the possibility that someone can 'decide' that the party 'ought' to disappear at certain moments, we should underline that Marx and Engels never thought of taking such 'decisions'. To 'decide' to dissolve the party is a voluntarist act exactly like deciding to maintain it artificially. Marx did not dissolve the League in an authoritarian manner in 1852, any more than he did the IWA in 1872. He simply ex­plained that revolutionaries had to face up to the inevitable dislocation of these parties, by organizing themselves to preserve the red thread of communist activity even in their ab­sence. If the dissolution of these organs subse­quently confirmed, in both cases, Marx's predic­tions, this was because of the force of events, not the force of Marx's orders.

The dialectic between Party and Fraction works itself out in the historic development of the workers' movement

Now that we have clarified that the 'strange' theory about the disappearance of the proletarian parties in counter-revolutionary periods was developed by Marx himself, let's now turn to the organs which, in these periods, ensured the 'continuity of revolutionary activity, ie the frac­tions.

According to Battaglia, these are organs which "have never been well defined". It is of course true that Marx never wrote a nice propagandist piece in the style of Wage, Labor and Capital on the function of the network of comrades who remained around him after the dissolution of the League and of the IWA. But this doesn't mean that for Marx, the task of drawing up a bal­ance-sheet was not important. It was due to the fact that the notion of the fraction of the class party is by definition linked to the notion of the party itself. The definition of its contours goes hand in hand with the process that leads from the Communist League, which "could make alliances with a fraction of the bourgeoisie", to the Communist International, "which gave itself the task of realizing the world-wide revolu­tion"[3].

As the historic experience of the class made the contours of its vanguard party more precise, so there developed the necessary materials for defining the work of the marxist fraction, which appears in reaction to the party's opportunist deviations. It was only when capitalism entered into its final phase, when the communist revolution was finally on the agenda that the class party could develop in its complete form and by the same token, it became able to secrete real fractions in response to a course towards opportunism and degeneration. The Italian Left drew this lesson in the 1930s:

"The problem of the fraction as we see it - ie as a moment in the reconstruction of the class party - was not and could not have been envis­aged within the First and Second Internationals. What was then called 'fractions', or more com­monly 'right wing' or 'left wing', 'transigent' or 'intransigent' currents, 'reformist' or 'revolutionary' were in the great majority of cases - the Bolsheviks being an exception - simply fortuitous alliances made on the eve of or during congresses, with the aim of carrying through certain agendas with no organizational continuity, in a phase where the seizure of power wasn't posed ... [4].

"The collapse of the Second International when the world conflict broke out cannot be seen as a sudden betrayal, but as the conclusion of a whole process.

The exact notion of the task of a fraction could only be the corollary of the exact notion of the class party"[5].

The process of the maturation and definition of the concept of the fraction thus had its origins (but not its conclusion) in this first network of comrades who had survived the dissolution of the Communist League. Because an understand­ing of where we started from is always indis­pensable for understanding where we're going, we will attempt to analyze in depth the activity of this first 'fraction'.

Certain phrases in the letter to Freiligrath, or other isolated citations from the private correspondence between Marx and Engels, have often been used to demonstrate that these com­rades returned to private life, devoting them­selves to theoretical studies which they later put at the disposal of the masses hungry for knowledge. Reality is completely different.

Engels clarified matters very promptly:

"For the moment, the essential thing is that we have the possibility of getting things published, either in a quarterly review in which we will attack directly, and in which we will ensure our positions against those of others, or in larger works where we can do the same thing without having to mention any of these buffoons. Either one of these solutions is alright by me; but it seems to me that if the reaction gets stronger, the first eventuality will prove to be less cer­tain in the long term, and the second will more and more constitute the only resource we can count on". (Engels to Marx, 1851).

Marx reaffirmed this point:

"I said to him we can't collaborate directly on any small journal, not even a party journal[6], unless it's edited by ourselves. But that at the moment, all the necessary conditions for attain­ing this are absent". (Marx to Engels, 1859).

It wasn't at all a matter of withdrawing into private life, of devoting themselves to theoreti­cal studies with the idea of one day returning to militant activity. For Marx and Engels, the essential thing, the thing to which they devoted all the means at their disposal, was the publica­tion, as regularly as possible, of a revolutionary press that could publicly defend and deepen the perspective of communism and the critique of capitalist society. What they rejected was not this organized and formalized activity, but the attempt to make it possible by collaborating with confused and activist elements who would have made their work completely pointless. If they were unable to maintain a formally organized framework of activity, it was not for lack of trying, but because "all the necessary condi­tions for attaining it are absent". And these conditions were absent because the development of the workers' movement was so weak that in phases of reflux it wasn't possible to maintain even a small organized revolutionary group.

Once again, no one decided that the party 'ought' to disappear, or that the fraction 'ought' to be limited to an informal network of com­rades. It was the objective conditions of the class struggle which determined it: the militants had to either recognize this reality and organize themselves accordingly, or close their eyes and deceive themselves and others by playing tricks which kept up the mere name and appearance of a class organ.

In reality, only those who have no interest in Central Committees that float in the void have played a real 'party' role in counter-revolution­ary phases: the small informal group of com­rades around Marx worked in such a continuous and collective way that they were commonly re­ferred to in the revolutionary milieu as the 'Marx party' - so much so that Marx had to make it clear in his letter to Freiligrath that this party didn't exist. He pointed out that when he referred to party activity, he meant it in "the broadest historical sense" as an activity which maintained political continuity between the different parties. The groups of comrades which carried out this work after the dissolution of the League and the IWA, despite their informal character, can be considered as fractions in ev­ery respect, because they weren't new regroup­ments but real fractions of the old parties.

The 'Marx party' of 1853-63 was none other than the 'Marx fraction' within the League in 1850-52.

The "most capable comrades in various coun­tries" in the period from the dissolution of the IWA to the birth of the second International were none other than the old 'authoritarian' marxist fraction with the IWA. The fractions ­- however they define themselves and organize themselves accordingly to the maturity of the period - thus represent the historical continuity between the different episodes in the history of the party.

The problem of the Fraction in the Second International

Merely asserting that Lenin - leader of the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party - had something to do with the fractions, provokes a show of contempt by Battaglia, for whom Lenin is the party man, and that's that: it's because the Bolshevik party existed - and not some ill-defined fraction ­that the revolution was able to triumph in Russia.

Before showing that this is yet another falsifi­cation of history by BC, let's recall the historic framework in which the activities of the Bolsheviks and the socialist left in general de­veloped.

The Second International was founded in a diffi­cult historic period for revolutionaries: on the one hand, throughout Europe it was the end of the phase in which the proletariat could play an autonomous role in bourgeois democratic revolu­tions (which henceforth would be carried out 'from above', as with Bismark in Germany); on the other hand, the proletarian revolution wasn't yet on the agenda, since capitalism was in its last, most impetuous phase of economic development. In these conditions Marx (and Engels after Marx's death) considered the ex­istence of a powerful opportunist wing in "the social democratic parties to be an "inevitable fact". They thus advised the marxist elements to avoid premature splits and concentrate on the intransigent defense of class positions within the party, in the expectation that the approach of the revolutionary crisis would lead "automatically" to a split and the emergence of authentic marxist parties[7].

Revolutionaries had to be the most resolute defenders of the unity of the party, momentarily giving up any idea of organizing themselves into currents that were well-defined organizationally, which would have exposed them to the threat of expulsion, and thus of being trans­formed into sects detached from the real move­ment, This was the only effective line of action in this situation and, in fact, it marked a num­ber of successes (accepting of the marxist Erfurt program in 1881).

However, the prolongation over decades of the phase of economic development and social peace not only meant that the existence of an oppor­tunist wing was "an inevitable fact", but that it infiltrated the majority of the party, which would make it difficult for the organization to purge itself when faced with a pre-revolution­ary situation,

At the beginning of the new century marxists were posed with the question of reacting against this negative evolution, moving away from the defense of marxism in "dispersed or­der" to a more coordinated activity within the party. This, however, was by no means easy, because the myth of unity had deep roots in the party leaders were well-placed to present the radicals as divisive elements.  In 1909, the attempt of the militants of the Dutch left to organize as a tendency around the publication Die Tribune was nipped in the bud by expelling them en bloc; this led them to form a mini-party which quickly reproduced, on a small scale, the vices of the original one[8]. The prevalent attitude among the militants of the left was the attempt to push things left­wards rather than directly oppose what was going on. Rosa Luxemburg's behaviour in the German' party was the clearest expression of this.

The only exception, as the passages cited from Bilan no.24 show, was the Russian Bolsheviks who were organized as an autonomous fraction of the RSDLP from 1904 on. It may seem astonishing that the first to move had been these 'backward' Russians, but the explanation for their vanguard role derives precisely from the particular conditions of the Russian empire (which then stretched from Siberia to Poland). In this immense zone in the first years of the century, the bourgeois democratic revolution, which had in all essentials already been achieved in Europe, was still on the agenda. But the late development of the Russian bourgeoisie prevented it from playing a vanguard role in the democratic revolution, while the especially backward character of Tsarism prevented it from carrying out the revolution 'from above' as Bismark had done in Germany.

The Russian proletariat, therefore, was not des­tined to seize the last historic chance of playing an autonomous role within a bourgeois revolu­tion. But, as we have seen, Engels had already foreseen that the approach of a revolutionary crisis would place on the agenda an organizational separation between the marxists and the opportunists. The maturation of a revolutionary situation in the Tsarist territories fully con­firmed Engels' predictions, since it became more and more difficult for the marxists to live under the same roof with the opportunists who were logically inclined to make compromises, not only with the democrats, but with the reaction itself. In Poland, the revolutionaries led by Rosa Luxemburg had already resolved the problem in 1894, by creating a new small party, the SDKP, in opposition to a Polish Socialist Party that was profoundly infected by nationalism. In this way, Rosa Luxemburg had a free hand earlier on, but she never had the chance of gaining experience of the struggle of a fraction in defense of a party threatened with degeneration. This is why she never really managed to develop and under­stand the concept of a fraction. This was a weakness that would be paid for dearly during the heroic struggle of the Spartacists against the degeneration of the German SPD, and would to a large extent be responsible for the fatal delay in the constitution of the German Communist Party in 1918.

On the other hand, the whole battle that Lenin fought for ten years took place inside the party, enabling him to develop and elaborate the political notion of the left fraction, and thus to lay the bases for the IIIrd International.

Beyle

[1] The first two parts were published in IRs 59 & 61. For a deeper analysis of the activity of the Italian Communist Left, we recommend reading our two pamphlets ‘La Gauche Communiste d'Italie, 1927-52', and ‘La GCI et l'Opposition Internationale de Gauche'.

[2] ‘Fraction and Party in the Experience of the Italian Left', Prometeo 2, March 1979.

[3] ‘Towards the two and three quarters International?' Bilan 1, November 1933.

[4] Obviously it has to be understood that at that time a fully developed class party could not have existed. The League and the IWA were both class parties corresponding to the level of development of the workers' movement.

[5] ‘The problems of fractions in the IInd International', Bilan 24, 1935.

[6] Marx means an authentically socialist journal. The undifferentiated use of the word party clearly shows that these were only the first steps towards the historic definition of the structure and function of the class party.

[7] For Marx and Engel's tactics in this period, see in particular their correspondence with the leaders of the German party, reproduced in Marx, Engels, and German Social Democracy, Ed 10-18.

[8] During the First World War, the leadership of the Dutch SPD vacillated towards an ambiguous support for Anglo-American imperialism, censoring the international writings of left-wing militants like Gorter. See The History of the Dutch Communist Left that we will be publishing shortly.

Horror, barbarism and terror: the Gulf war has ex­posed the reality of capitalism.

Horror and barbarism. War, war between imperialist gangsters, continues. The coalition forces have begun their ground offensive. And Iraq will meet with defeat. Hundreds of thousands of dead - we don't know ex­actly how many for the moment - and no doubt as many wounded and missing; massive destruction in Iraq and Kuwait: this will be, and is already, the bloody and terrible result of this conflict.

Horror and cynicism of the bourgeoisie of the 'coalition' countries. Without any shame, reveling in blood, it has boasted of its technical prowess in this war. At first, in order to lull people's reticence about the butchery, it talked about a 'clean war': the missiles were only hitting military buildings. They could go through windows and elevator shafts, but they didn't kill anyone, at least not civilians. How marvelous - it' was no more than a 'surgical' operation. But the macabre reality couldn't be hidden for long. Thousands of civilians died under the massive bombardments of the B 52s and the cruise missiles. Will we ever know the frightful truth of all this? The height of cynicism: when the destruction of the Baghdad bunker undoubt­edly left 400 dead, the Pentagon blamed the civilians, who shouldn't have taken refuge in this bunker and so put themselves in the path of the bombs!

The unlimited admiration of the media, the jour­nalists, the military specialists for all this technical and scientific prowess put in the service of death and de­struction is absolutely disgusting. Capitalism today is incapable of dealing with all sorts of epidemics in the world, cholera in Latin America, AIDS, and many oth­ers. Science and technology are at the service of death and destruction on a huge scale. This is the reality of capitalism.

Terror, capitalist terror, the terror of a rotting so­ciety, has descended on the populations. Terror on a huge scale on Iraq and Kuwait. The American coalition uses the most sophisticated, the most murderous, the most 'scientific' and massive weapons. We are not military specialists, and we have no taste for the sinis­ter statistics. How much was it? At the lowest estimate, 100,000 tons of bombs have been dropped, 108,000 aerial sorties flown. How many cruise missiles launched from war ships in the Gulf, in the Mediter­ranean? The American bourgeoisie and its allies don't hesitate to use the most massive means of destruction ­except of course nuclear weapons, they are for next time no doubt - such as fuel air bombs and napalm. In comparison with this, the horrible exactions committed by Saddam' s soldiers were amateur stuff.

Even within the shelters, the civil populations are not safe. Can you imagine the damage, the fear, the panic and anguish of the children, the women, of men old and young in the midst of all the bombing: the ex­plosions - when Basra was hit, the earth trembled in Iran - the sirens, and all the deaths and the injuries? We know that the American planes were often bombing 24 hours a day. We know that during the first night of the war, one and a half times the equivalent of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was unleashed on Iraq. We know that during one month, Iraq and Kuwait were hit by more bombs than Germany throughout World War Two!

One Patriot missile costs one million US dollars. The cost of one Stealth bomber is 100 million dollars. The total cost of the war will certainly be more than 80 million dollars, and that's just the most minimal estimate. In fact it will be a lot more, even if you only take into account the massive destructions in Iraq and Kuwait, and all the oil wells. The lowest estimates are already talking about 100 billion dollars for each of these coun­tries. Twenty years' labor by the Iraqi workers has been annihilated. Is there any need to point out that Iraq's debt before the invasion of Kuwait was 'only' 70 billion? We are seeing a vast squandering of goods and riches.

Right now, three quarters of humanity are underfed and live in destitution. Right now, 40,000 children under five years old are dying of undernourishment all over the world. How many more will be marked by its effects throughout their lives?

The capacities of production are at the service of death and destruction, not of humanity and its well­-being. This is the reality of capitalism.

Capitalist dictatorship and totalitarianism

Horror and shameful lies. Alongside the bombardment of Iraq, we have the propaganda bombardment by the media, aimed at the populations all over the world, and in particular the working class. The media are revealed for what they are: servants of the bourgeoisie and its war effort. From the first day of the war, the time of the 'clean war', the mobilization and enthusiasm of the media were sickening. But the manipulation of the news and the gung-ho prattle of the journalists wasn't enough. The different belligerent states, above all the USA and the most 'democratic' ones, imposed a mili­tary censorship worthy of the most vulgar fascist or Stalinist regimes, in order to ensure a completely dicta­torial control over information and 'public opinion.' This is what the much-vaunted bourgeois democracy amounts to.

Another lie: this was a war for the respect of in­ternational law that had been transgressed by the Iraqi bourgeoisie. What kind of law is this, except the law of the strongest, capitalist law? It was either through naked self interest, as in the case of Egypt, Syria or Britain, or through bribes and threats as in the case of the USSR, China and France that the USA obtained the UN's agreement for a military intervention.

Saddam Hussein made a good move when he made a scandal out of the double standards that are operating in all this, when he pointed out that neither the UN nor of course the USA had used the same armed force to ensure that Israel would respect the resolutions calling on her to leave the occupied territories. The bour­geoisie only cares about law, about its law, when it serves its interests to do so.

After the war, neither peace nor reconstruction, but more imperialist wars

Once the conflict was unleashed, all 'reason' and 'morality' went by the board. The USA wants to bring Iraq to its knees, inflict colossal and irreparable de­struction on the country. No matter what the cost this is the implacable logic of imperialist war. The Ameri­can bourgeoisie has no choice. In order to fulfill its po­litical objectives, to affirm without any ambiguity its imperialist hegemony over the world, it is forced to go all the way and use the enormous means of destruction at its disposal. Razing Iraq and Kuwait and ensuring Saddam's total capitulation are the objectives of the American bourgeoisie. These are the orders given to the military.

Saddam Hussein, in his desperation, has been pushed into the suicidal, unbridled use of everything to hand: Scuds, the oil slick in the Persian Gulf, burning the oil­ wells to protect himself from the incessant waves of bombers. He also has no choice.

Two countries, Iraq and Kuwait, have been covered in fire and blood. Their main wealth, oil, is burning and the wells will certainly be devastated for some time to come. The whole environment of the region is gravely threatened. The damage is already considerable. A large part may even be irreversible.

And in the midst of all this bloodletting, we have heard the lying, hypocritical wailing of the bourgeois 'opposition' to the war. The pacifists, the leftists who ­when they are not overtly supporting Iraqi imperialism like the Trotskyists do - call for demonstrations 'against the war for oil' and for peace. But peace is impossible under capitalism. It is just a moment for preparing war. Capitalism carries imperialist war within itself. The war in the Middle East is yet further proof of that.

Even if controlling oil remains important, it's not the main aim of the war. Since 2 August the oil wells of Iraq and Kuwait have been paralyzed, and after that they have been largely destroyed, but this hasn't led to a rise in the price of oil. On the contrary, prices have fallen. There is no threat of scarcity. There is overpro­duction of oil because there is a generalized overpro­duction of commodities and a world recession.

The war is not yet over and what are we seeing al­ready? The ignoble vultures known as 'businessmen' are hovering over the carnage and hungrily seeking what profit they can make in the name of reconstruc­tion. The British companies have waxed indignant about the rapacity of their American rivals. Making war together is a very moral and just thing to do, but business is business. Against these new lies, let's be clear that there won't be the kind of reconstruction that can lead to a revival of the world economy. A country like Iraq was already incapable of repaying its 70 bil­lion dollar debt before the war. This was one of the reasons for its tragic adventure. So how and with what can it reconstruct? And that at a time when world cap­italism has shown itself incapable of re-launching the ruined economies of the former Stalinist capitalist bloc.

All this is just lies and propaganda in order to sell the war and the sacrifices to the populations, and above all to the working class of the most industrialized coun­tries. In order to offer 'reasons' to support the war ef­fort.

But for humanity as a whole there is no reason to support this war or any imperialist war. Still less for the exploited, revolutionary class, the proletariat. Nei­ther on the historic, nor the economic, nor the human­itarian level (see 'The proletariat and war' in this is­sue). This is just a massacre of human lives, an in­credible waste of technical means and productive forces, which will disappear into a bottomless pit. And at the end of it, there won't be peace, but more wars. Contrary to all the lies, there will be no peace from all this, neither in the Middle East or the rest of the planet.

The war against Iraq prepares tomorrow's wars

The defeat of Iraq will obviously be a great victory for the USA. Despite all its declarations about peace, its moralizing about good and evil, the American bour­geoisie is in reality issuing a warning to all those who may be tempted to follow Saddam Hussein's example. The USA is the world's leading imperialist power, the only 'superpower' after the collapse of the USSR. Be­cause it is the only country that can do it, it cannot stand idly by in the face of the multiplication of local wars, the questioning of frontiers, the development of 'every man for himself' between states, in sum, of chaos. This is the warning. They will guarantee the 'world order' of which they are the main beneficiary. This is one of the reasons for the bloody intransigence of the USA, their insistence on razing Iraq, on waging war to the bitter end. But this warning is not only ad­dressed to Saddam's potential imitators - and there are plenty of them. There is another more fundamental rea­son for the USA's intransigence.

It is also and above all to issue a warning to the other great powers, Germany, Japan, the European countries and to a lesser extent the USSR. America's imperialist domination is still very real. Sending its armed forces to the Middle East, making a clear and murderous demonstration of its immense military superiority, dragging others, like France for example, into the in­tervention, waging the war to its bitter end, crushing Iraq in fire and blood - all this is the means it uses to reinforce its global 'leadership'. And above all to snuff out any pretensions towards independence, towards the emergence of another imperialist pole capable of chal­lenging its domination. Even if the latter is highly im­probable for the moment.

This is the reason for the USA's systematic rejection of all the peace plans and proposals for negotiation involving an Iraqi withdrawal, proposed in turn by France on 15 January and the USSR before the land offensive - each time supported by Germany, Italy, etc ... This is the reason for the increasingly intransigent replies, for the increasingly harsh ultimatums issued in reply to these peace proposals.

War, tens of thousands of tons of bombs, hundreds of thousands of dead, incalculable destruction, the razing of Iraq and Kuwait so that the American bourgeoisie can affirm and strengthen its domination, its imperialist grip over a world sunk in crisis, war and de­composition. These are the real aims of the war!

It was through the perspective and unleashing of war that the American bourgeoisie succeeded despite all the problems in forcing the other powers into 'coalition' behind its war aims. Each time that the pressure eased off, the centrifugal tendencies, the tendencies towards opposition to the USA, towards the emergence of an alternative to the USA's war-drive, came to the surface (see the editorial to IR 64). Proof that these countries were well aware that their American imperialist rival had led them into a trap which would make them weaker than ever.

Once the war is over, the tensions between the USA and the European powers, Germany in particular, and Japan, will inevitably develop. Faced with the eco­nomic strength of these countries, their rise to power, the USA will be led more and more to impose an iron grip over these nascent antagonisms, to use the strength at its disposal, ie its military strength, and thus war.

The war against Iraq is the preparation for other im­perialist wars. Not for peace. On the one hand, the aggravation of the economic crisis and capitalism's slide into chaos and decomposition will inevitably push countries into military adventures like Iraq's. On the other hand, and in this situation, the leading imperialist power, faced with chaos, faced with its potential rivals, will more and more use its military strength and war in order to impose its 'order' and its domination. Every­thing is pushing towards the accentuation of economic and military tensions. Everything is pushing towards the multiplication of imperialist wars.

This is what the bloody military victory of the west­ern coalition announces.

In this imperialist war in the Middle East, as in any other imperialist war, it's above all the working class that pays, that is the main victim. It pays with its life when it is in uniform, enrolled by force at the bat­tlefront, or when it simply finds itself under a rain of bombs and missiles. It pays with its sweat, its labor and its misery when it is 'lucky' enough to not be di­rectly massacred.

Marx and Lenin are dead and buried, claimed the bourgeoisie when Stalinism fell apart. However, Karl Marx's watchword 'workers of the world unite' is as relevant and as urgent as ever faced with the national­ist, warmongering madness that is descending on the whole of humanity.

Yes, the international proletariat is the only force, the only social class that can oppose this increasingly in­sane and hellish machine that is capitalism in decom­position. It is the only force that can do away with this barbarism and build another society where the causes of war and poverty have disappeared.

The road is still a long one. However, we must go along it with determination because the most dramatic deadlines are approaching day by day.

The first steps are to refuse to make economic sacri­fices, to reject the logic of defending the national econ­omy. Rejecting national unity and national discipline, rejecting social peace and the logic of imperialist war, this is the road to follow. These are the slogans that revolutionaries must put forward.

The economic crisis, the sharpening trade war, is exacerbating imperialism and war. Crisis and war are two sides of the capitalist coin. The first, the crisis, leads to war. The latter in turns aggravates the crisis. The two are linked. The workers' struggle for its class demands against attacks and sacrifices, and the struggle against imperialist war, are one and the same struggle: the revolutionary struggle of the working class, the struggle for communism.

Workers of the world unite!

RL 2.3.91

As readers of our territorial press will know already, our comrade Marc is dead. In the December issue of our French territorial press, we published, as usual, the list of donations; one was accompanied with these words: “In reply to many letters which have touched me deeply, and for a first combat fought and won, this donation for the ICC’s press...” As always, our comrade fought against his disease with lucidity and courage. But in the end, it was the disease - one of the most virulent forms of cancer - that had the upper hand, the 20th December 1990. With Marc’s death, not only has our organisation lost its most experienced militant, and its most fertile mind; the whole world proletariat has lost one of its best fighters.

Marxism has long since shown, against all the ideas of bourgeois individualism, that history is not made by great individuals, but that since the appearance of social classes, “The history of all societies, to this day, has been the history of class struggle”. The same is especially true of the history of the workers’ movement whose main protagonist is precisely that class which more than any other engages in associated labour, and struggles collectively. Within the proletariat, the communist minorities that express its revolutionary nature also act collectively. In this sense, these minorities’ activities are above all anonymous, and can have nothing to do with any cult of personality. Revolutionary militants cannot exist as such, outside the whole that is the communist organisation. Nonetheless, while the organisation must be able to count on all its members, it is evident that they do not all make an equal contribution to its activity. Certain militants’ personal history, experience, or character - as well as particular historical circumstances - lead them to play a special role in the organisations to which they belong, as motive forces in their activity, and especially in the one activity which lies at the heart of their very reason for existing: working out and deepening revolutionary political positions.

Marc was one of these. In particular, he belonged to that tiny minority of militants who survived and resisted the terrible counter-revolution which battened on the working class from the 1920’s to the 60’s: militants like Anton Pannekoek, Henk Canne-Meijer, Amadeo Bordiga, Onorato Damen, Paul Mattick, Jan Appel, or Munis. Moreover, not only did he maintain his untiring loyalty to the communist cause and his complete confidence in the proletariat’s revolutionary capabilities, he was able to pass on his experience to a new generation of militants, and to avoid becoming wrapped up in analyses and positions that had been overtaken by historical events. In this sense, his whole activity as a militant is an example of what marxism means: the living, constantly developing thought of the revolutionary class, which bears with it humanity’s future.

Needless to say, our comrade was a dynamic force in pushing forward the thought and action of the political organisation within the ICC. And this remained true until his final hour. In fact, his whole life as a militant was inspired by the same approach, by the same determination to defend communist principles tooth and nail, while always maintaining a critical spirit capable whenever necessary of calling into question what seemed to many to be untouchable and “invariant” dogma[1]. His life as a militant lasted 70 years; it be­gan in the heat of the revolution itself.

THE COMMITMENT TO THE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE

Marc was born on 13th May 1907 in Kishiniev, the capital of Bessarabia (Moldavia), at a time when the region was still part of the old Tsarist Empire. He was not yet 10 years old when the 1917 revolution began. This is how he described, on his 80th birthday, this tremendous experience, which marked his whole life:

“I had the good fortune, while still a child, to live through and experience the Russian Revolution, both in February and October. I lived it intensely. You have to understand what it meant to be a “Gavroche” [2], a child in the streets in a revolutionary period, spending the days in demonstrations, going from one to another, from one meeting to another, spending the nights in clubs full of soldiers and workers, and of discussion, talk and confrontations; a time when on any street corner, suddenly, without any preparation, someone might stand at a window and begin to speak: immediately, a thousand people would gather round and begin to discuss. It was unforgettable, and of course it has marked my whole life. On top of this, I had the luck to have an older brother who was both a soldier and a Bolshevik, the Party secretary in our town, and I ran with him, hand in hand, from one meeting to the next where he defended the positions of the Bolsheviks.

I had the good fortune to be the youngest, the fifth in a family where all, one after the other, became members of the Party until they were either killed or expelled. All this meant that I lived in a house always full of people, of youngsters, where there were always discussions going on, for at first only one was Bolshevik, while the others were more or less socialists. They were in constant debate with their comrades, their workmates... It was an enormous good fortune for a child’s education”.

In 1919 during the civil war, Moldavia was occupied by counter-revolutionary Romanian troops. Marc’s family was under threat from the pogroms (his father was a rabbi), and was forced to flee to Palestine. His brothers and elder sister were among the founders of this country’s Communist Party. Here, in 1921, Marc (still not yet 13 years old) became a militant, entering (or rather helping to found) the Communist Party’s youth organisation. He very quickly came up against the position of the Communist International on the na­tional question: a position that, as he put it, “stuck in his throat”. This disagreement led to his first exclu­sion from the Party in 1923. Already, though still an adolescent, Marc displayed a quality which would re­main with him throughout his life as a militant: an un­failing intransigence in the defence of revolutionary principles, even if this meant opposing “authorities” of the workers’ movement as prestigious as the leaders of the Third International, and especially Lenin and Trot­sky[3]. His complete commitment to the proletarian cause, his militant involvement in the communist or­ganisation, and his deep respect for the great figures of the workers’ movement never made him give up the fight for his own positions, when he felt that those of the organisation went against its principles, or had been overtaken by new historical circumstances. For him, as for all the great revolutionaries like Lenin or Lux­emburg, adherence to marxism, to the proletariat’s revolutionary theory, meant an adherence, not to its letter but to its spirit and method. In fact, our com­rade’s audacious spirit (which, again, he shared with all the great revolutionaries) was the other side of his complete and undying commitment to the cause and programme of the proletariat. Because he was steeped in marxism, he was never paralysed by the fear of abandoning it when he criticised the outdated positions of the workers’ organisations. And he first applied this approach against the support for national liberation struggles, which had become a dogma for both the Second and Third Internationals[4].

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST THE DEGENERATION OF THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL

In 1924, Marc, with one of his brothers, came to live in France. There, he joined the Communist Party’s Jewish section, so becoming once again a member of the same International from which he had just been excluded. He immediately joined the opposition fight­ing against the degeneration of the CI and its commu­nist parties. With Albert Treint (General Secretary of the French CP from 1923-26) and Suzanne Girault (one-time Party treasurer), he took part in the foundation of Unite Léniniste. When Trotsky’s platform of the Russian opposition was published in France, he de­clared himself in agreement. By contrast, and unlike Treint, he rejected Trotsky’s declaration that he had been wrong in all his disagreements with Lenin prior to 1917. Marc considered this attitude absolutely wrong, first because Trotsky did not really believe what he was saying, and secondly because such a declaration could only trap Trotsky in all the incorrect positions which Lenin had defended in the past (in particular during the 1905 revolution on the “democratic dictator­ship of the proletariat and the peasantry”). Once again, our comrade showed his ability to maintain a critical and lucid attitude towards the “authorities” of the workers’ movement. His adhesion to the International Opposition, after his exclusion from the PCF in 1928, did not mean that he shared all positions of its most important leader, despite the admiration he felt for Trotsky. And it was thanks to this critical spirit that he avoided being dragged into the Trotskyist move­ment’s slide into opportunism at the beginning of the 1930’s. After taking part, with Treint, in the forma­tion of Redressement Communiste, in 1930 he joined the Ligue Communiste (the organisation which repre­sented the Opposition in France), and became (with Treint again) a member of its Executive Commission in October 1931.

However, after defending a minority position against the rise of opportunism, both men left the Ligue in May 1932, and helped to found the Fraction Commu­niste de Gauche (known as the Bagnolet Group). In 1933, this organisation split and Marc broke with Treint, who had begun to defend a position on the USSR similar to the one later developed by Chaulieu and Burnham (“Bureaucratic Socialism”). He then took part in November 1933 in the formation of Union Communiste, along with Chaze (Gaston Davoust, died 1984), with whom he had been closely linked since the early 30’s when the latter was still a member of the PCF (he was excluded in 1932), and one of the leaders of the “l5ème Rayon” (in Paris’ western suburbs) which defended opposition orientations.

THE GREAT STRUGGLES OF THE 1930’S

Marc remained a member of Union Communiste until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. This was one of the most tragic periods for the workers’ movement: as Victor Serge put it, this was “midnight in the cen­tury”. And as Marc said himself: “For all the genera­tions which had remained revolutionary, it was a dreadful sadness to live through these years of terrible isolation which saw the French proletariat brandishing the tricolour, the flag of the ‘Versaillais’, and singing the Marseillaise, all in the name of communism”. And this feeling of isolation reached its height in the Span­ish Civil War, when many organisations that had succeeded in remaining firm on class positions were swept away by the wave of “anti-fascism”. This was the case in particular with Union Communiste, which saw the events in Spain as a proletarian revolution, a struggle where the working class held the initiative. To be sure, this organisation did not go so far as to support the “Frente Popular” government. But it did call for enrolment in the anti-fascist militia, and entered into political contact with the left wing of the POUM, an anti-fascist organisation that took part in the gov­ernment of the Catalan “Generalitat”.

Marc was intransigent in the defence of class princi­ples; he could not accept such a capitulation before the ambient anti-fascist ideology, even dressed up as “solidarity with the Spanish proletariat”. He had re­mained in contact with the Fraction of the Italian Left, and when he was unable to turn Union Communiste against its position of support for the war, he left the group at the beginning of 1938, to join the Italian Fraction on an individual basis. The Italian Fraction had been formed in May 1928 in Pantin (a Parisian suburb); in the torment of the Spanish Civil War, and all its betrayals, the Fraction was one of very few groups to remain true to class principles. Its intransi­gent rejection of all the sirens of anti-fascism was based on its analysis of the historic course as one dominated by the counter-revolution. A civil war be­tween, not the bourgeoisie and the working class, but the bourgeois Republic allied to the “democratic” impe­rialist camp, and another bourgeois government allied to the “fascist” imperialist camp, could only end in world war, not revolution. The fact that the Spanish workers took up arms spontaneously against the Franco putsch in July 1936 (a fact which the Fraction wel­comed, of course) opened no revolutionary perspective once they were enrolled in anti-fascist organisations like the PS, the CP, and the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, and gave up the combat on the class terrain to fight as soldiers of the bourgeois Republic led by the “Frente Popular”. And for the Fraction, one of the clearest proofs that the Spanish proletariat was stuck in a tragic dead-end, was the fact that the country wholly lacked a revolutionary party[5].

Marc continued the revolutionary struggle as a militant of the Italian Fraction, exiled in France and Belgium[6]. In particular, he became very close to Vercesi (Ottorino Perrone), who was the Fraction’s main inspi­ration. Many years later, Marc would explain to the young militants of the ICC how much he had learnt from Vercesi, whom he admired greatly. “It was from him that I learnt what it means to be a militant”, he said on several occasions. And indeed, the Fraction’s remarkable firmness was largely thanks to Vercesi, who had fought constantly, first in the PSI (Italian So­cialist Party) at the end of World War I, then in the PCI, for the defence of revolutionary principals against these organisations’ degeneration and opportunism. Unlike Bordiga, who was the PCI’s leading figure at its formation in 1921, and who led the Left in the Party only to abandon militant life after his exclusion from the Party in 1930, Vercesi put all his experience at the service of the continuing struggle against the counter-­revolution. In particular, his contribution was decisive in developing the position on the role of the fraction in a proletarian organisation, especially in periods of re­action and degeneration of the Party[7]. But his con­tribution went much further than this. He understood that the task which falls to revolutionaries after the de­feat of the revolution, and the victory of the counter­-revolution is to draw up a ‘balance-sheet’ (‘bilan’ in French, whence the name of the Italian Fraction’s pub­lication in that language) of past experience, in order to prepare “militants for the new proletarian parties”, and this without “any taboo or ostracism” (Bilan, no 1). On this basis, he inspired within fraction the task of re­flection and theoretical elaboration that made the Italian Fraction one of the most fruitful organisations in the history of the workers’ movement. In particular, although a ‘Leninist’ by training, he was not afraid to adopt Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of the economic causes of imperialism, and her rejection of national lib­eration struggles. On the former point, he made the most of the debates with the Belgian Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes (an organisation which split from Trotskyism, and moved away from it), whose mi­nority adopted the Fraction’s positions on the Spanish Civil War, to form, with the Fraction in 1937, the In­ternational Communist Left. On the basis of the lessons he drew from the degeneration of the Russian revolution and the role of the Soviet state in the counter-revolution, Vercesi (along with Mitchell of the LCI) worked out the position which rejected any identi­fication between the proletarian dictatorship and the state which emerges after the revolution. Lastly, on the organisational level he gave the example, within the Fraction’s Executive Commission, of how debate should be conducted when serious disagreements emerge. Faced with the minority, which broke all or­ganisational discipline by enrolling in the anti-fascist militia and refusing to pay dues, Vercesi fought the idea of an over-hasty organisational split (although by the Fraction’s rules, the minority’s members could per­fectly well have been expelled) in order to let the de­bate develop with maximum clarity. For Vercesi, as for the Fraction’s majority, political clarity was a vital priority in the role and activity of revolutionary organi­sations.

Many aspects of these lessons corresponded to the po­litical method that Marc had already adopted. He as­similated them fully during the days when he worked alongside Vercesi. And he continued to base himself on the same lessons when Vercesi in his turn began to forget them and turn against marxist positions. Just as the International Communist Left (ICL) was formed, and Bilan gave way to Octobre, Vercesi began to de­velop a theory of the war economy as a definitive anti­dote to the capitalist crisis. Disorientated by the tem­porary success of the economic policies of Nazism and the New Deal, he came to the conclusion that arms production, which does not weigh on the supersatu­rated capitalist market, would allow capitalism to over­come its economic contradictions. He considered that the fantastic rearmament effort engaged by all countries at the end of the 1930’s constituted, not preparations for a future world war, but on the contrary a means of escaping it by eliminating its underlying cause: capi­talism’s economic dead-end. In this context, the vari­ous local wars, and especially the Spanish Civil War, were to be considered, not as dress rehearsals for a future generalised conflict, but as a means for the bourgeoisie to crush the working class, and so put down a rising wave of revolutionary combats. This is why the ICL’s International Bureau called its publica­tion Octobre: because it thought a new revolutionary period had begun. These positions were a sort of posthumous victory for the Fraction’s old minority.

These positions called into question Bilan’s most im­portant lessons, and Marc took up the fight to defend the classic positions of both the Fraction and marxism. This was all the more difficult, because he had to fight against the errors of a militant whom he held in great esteem. But the majority of the Fraction’s members were blinded by their admiration for Vercesi, and fol­lowed him in his mistakes, so that Marc found himself in a minority. In the end, Vercesi’s positions led the Italian and Belgian Fractions into complete paralysis at the outbreak of World War II; Vercesi considered that there was no point in intervening against the war be­cause the proletariat had “disappeared socially”. Marc was unable to take up the fight against this conception immediately, since he had been called up in the French army (despite his “stateless” status)[8]. It was not un­til August 1940, in Marseille in southern France, that he was able to renew his political activity and to re­group the elements of the Italian Fraction living in the same city.

AGAINST THE IMPERIALIST WAR

Most of these militants refused to accept the dissolution of the Fractions that had been proclaimed by their In­ternational Bureau, under Vercesi’s influence. In 1941, they held a conference of the Fraction, reconsti­tuted on the basis of a rejection of the direction taken from 1937 onwards: the theory of the war economy as a means of overcoming the crisis, “localised” wars against the working class, the “social disappearance of the proletariat”, etc. The Fraction also abandoned its old position on the USSR as a “degenerated workers’ state”[9], and recognised its capitalist nature. Throughout the war, in the most difficult conditions of clandestinity, the Fraction was to hold annual confer­ences which brought together militants from Marseille, Toulon, Paris and Lyon; despite the German occupa­tion, it was also able establish links with militants in Belgium. It published an internal discussion bulletin, dealing with all the questions that had led to the col­lapse of 1939. On reading through the bulletin’s vari­ous issues, it is clear that most of the fundamental texts combating the direction taken by Vercesi, or elabo­rating the new positions demanded by the evolution of the situation, are signed ‘Marco’. Our comrade, who had only joined the Italian Fraction in 1938 and was its only “foreign” member, remained its main source of inspiration throughout the war.

At the same time, Marc undertook a series of discus­sions with a group of young militants, mostly from Trotskyism, with whom, in May 1942, he formed the French Nucleus of the Communist Left, on the same positions as the ICL. This group gave itself the objec­tive of forming a French Fraction, but under Marc’s in­fluence it refused any hasty proclamation of a new Fraction, rejecting the “recruitment campaigns” and “entryism” typical of the Trotskyists.

In 1942-43, massive class combats in Italy led to the overthrow of Mussolini (25th July 1943) and the cre­ation of the pro-Allied government of Admiral Badoglio. A text from the Fraction’s Executive Com­mission, signed ‘Marco’, declared that “the revolution­ary revolts which will put an end to the imperialist war will create in Europe a chaotic situation which will be extremely dangerous for the bourgeoisie”; at the same time, it warned against the attempts of the “anglo-americano-russian imperialist bloc” to crush these re­volts from outside, and against the efforts by the left parties to “muzzle revolutionary consciousness”. The Fraction’s conference, held in August 1943 despite Vercesi’s opposition, declared that following the events in Italy, “the Fraction’s transformation into the Party” was on the agenda in Italy itself. However, due to material difficulties, compounded by Vercesi’s inertia since he disagreed with this approach, the Fraction was unable to return to Italy to intervene actively in the combats that had begun to break out. In particular, it was unaware that at the end of 1943, Onorato Damen and Bruno Maffi had formed the “Partito Comunista Internazionalista”, with the help of one-time members of the Fraction.

At the same time, both Fraction and Nucleus had un­dertaken contacts and discussions with other revolu­tionary elements, and especially with German and Austrian refugees, the “Revolutionäre Kommunisten Deutschlands” (RKD), who had emerged from Trot­skyism. With them, the French Nucleus in particular was to conduct direct propaganda against the war ad­dressed to the workers and soldiers of all nationalities, including the German workers in uniform. This activ­ity was obviously extremely dangerous, since it had to confront not only the Gestapo, but also the Resistance. Indeed, it was the latter which proved most dangerous for our comrade. He and his companion were taken prisoner by the FFI (Forces Francaises de l’Interieur), which were stuffed with Stalinists; they escaped from death at the latter’s hands at the last minute. But the end of the war sounded the Fraction’s death-knell. After the “liberation” of Brussels in 1944, Vercesi, in continuity with his aberrant positions, and still turning his back on the principles he had defended in the past, took charge of an “Anti-fascist Coalition”; this latter published L’Italia di Domani, which used its assistance to Italian refugees and prisoners as a cover for a clear support for the Allied war effort. At first, the Fraction did not believe the reports of Vercesi’s activity. When these proved to be true, its EC followed Marc’s lead in expelling Vercesi on 25th January 1945. This decision was not a result of the disagreements on various ana­lytical points that existed between Vercesi and the ma­jority of the Fraction. The policy of the EC, and espe­cially of Marc who adopted Vercesi’s attitude towards the minority of 1936-37, was to conduct the debates with the greatest possible clarity. In 1944-45, how­ever, Vercesi was accused not simply of political dis­agreement but of playing an active, and even a leading, part in a bourgeois organism directly involved in the imperialist war. But this last display of intransigence was no more than the Fraction’s swan-song. At its May 1945 Conference, the Fraction had learned of the PCInt’s existence in Italy, and the majority of its mem­bers decided to dissolve the Fraction and join the new “Party” on an individual basis. Marc fought vigor­ously against what he considered to be a complete negation of the whole approach on which the Fraction had been based. He demanded that the Fraction should be maintained, at least until it had been able to verify the new organisation’s positions, which were still un­clear outside Italy. His caution proved wholly justi­fied, if we consider that the Party in question, joined by elements close to Bordiga who remained in the south of Italy (certain of whom had engaged in entry­ism in the Italian CP), moved towards wholly oppor­tunist positions to the point where it even compromised itself with the anti-fascist partisan movement (see our International Review nos. 32, 34). In protest against this desertion of principles, Marc announced his resig­nation from the EC and left the Conference; the latter also refused to recognise the French Fraction of the Communist Left (FFCL), which had been set up by the French Nucleus at the end of 1944, adopting the basic positions of the International Communist Left. Vercesi, on the other hand, joined the new “Party”, which asked for no account of his role in the Brussels anti-fascist coalition. It was the end of the effort that he had conducted himself for years, to make the Frac­tion a “bridge” between the old party, which had de­serted to the enemy, and the new, which would be re­constituted with the resurgence of the proletarian class struggle. Far from continuing the combat for these po­sitions, he remained ferociously hostile, along with the rest of the PCInt, to the only organisation which had remained faithful to the classic positions of the Italian Fraction and the International Communist Left: the FFCL. He even encouraged a split in the latter, which was to form another FFCL[10]. This group published a paper under the same name as the FFCL’s: L’Etincelle. It welcomed into its ranks the members of Bilan’s old minority, against whom Vercesi had fought at the time, as well as one-time members of Union Communiste. It was this second ‘FFCL’ that the PCInt and the Belgian Fraction (reconstituted after the war around Vercesi in Brussels) were to recognise as the “only representative of the Communist Left”.

Henceforth, Marc remained the only member of the Italian Left to continue with the combat and the posi­tions that had given this organisation its strength and its political clarity. He began this new stage in his po­litical life within the Gauche Communiste de France (French Communist Left), as the FFCL now called it­self

ICC, 199

When it comes to recounting a comrade’s life, and to paying our respects to his commitment, we would have preferred to treat it as a whole and publish this article in full in the International Review. However, because his life was so much a part of this century’s history, and of the revolutionary minorities of the workers’ movement, we have felt it necessary, not just to describe our comrade’s life, but to develop at greater length the most important political questions which he had to confront, and the life of the organisations where he was a member. Given the imperatives of the international situation today, and our limited space, the article has thus been divided into two; the second part will be published in the next issue of this Review.

What's behind the 'new world order' announced by the western powers? What is the historic significance of the Gulf war? What stage has the world economic crisis reached? What are the perspectives for the class struggle? What should be the main themes in the intervention of revolutionaries?

These are the questions examined in this resolution adopted by the ICC in January 1991.

The phenomenon of the acceleration of history, which was pointed out by the ICC at the beginning of the 80s, has accentuated considerably in the last year and a half. In a few months, the whole configuration of the world established at the end of the Second World War was turned upside down. The collapse of the eastern imperialist bloc at the end of the 80s announced and opened the door to an end-of-the-millennium dominated by a greater instability and chaos than humanity has ever known.

1) The most immediately significant and dangerous expression of what is not a 'new order' but a new world chaos is at the level of imperialist antagonisms. The war in the Gulf has highlighted the reality of a phenomenon which flowed inevitably from the disappearance of the eastern bloc: the disintegration of its imperialist rival,' the western bloc. This phenomenon was already at the origins of Iraq's 'hold up' in Kuwait: it was because the world had ceased to be divided up into two imperialist constellations that a country like Iraq believed it possible to lay its hands on a former ally of the same bloc. This phenomenon was also revealed in an obvious manner during October in the various attempts of the European countries (notably France and Germany) and Japan to undermine US policy in the Gulf through separate negotiations in the name of freeing the hostages. The USA's aim is to make the punishment of Iraq an 'example' which will discourage any future temptations to imitate the behavior of this country (and indeed to obtain this 'example' the USA did all it could prior to 2 August to provoke and facilitate the Iraqi adventure[1]). It is targeted at the countries of the periphery, where the convulsions are so far advanced that they are permanently pushed towards adventures of this kind. But it is not limited to this aim. In fact its fundamental goal is much more general: faced with a world that is more and more falling into chaos and 'every man for himself', what's required is to impose a minimum of order and discipline, above all on the most important countries of the former western bloc. It is for this very reason that these countries (with the exception of Britain which long ago chose to .make an unbreakable alliance with the USA) have more than dragged their feet in aligning themselves with the US position and associating themselves with its war effort. While they need American power to police the world, they are concerned that too great a display of this power, which is inevitable in a direct armed intervention, will overshadow their own positions.

2) In fact the Gulf war reveals in a particularly significant way what's at stake in the new period at the level of imperialist rivalries. No longer is the world dominated by two superpowers, and imperialist antagonisms are no longer subjected to the fundamental antagonism between them. But at the same time, and as the ICC said over a year ago, such a situation, far from putting an end to imperialist confrontations, has meant that these confrontations are being unleashed more sharply than ever, in the absence of the discipline of the blocs. In this sense, imperialism and the barbarism of war, which are essential characteristics of the period of the decadence of capitalism, can only be further aggravated in the phase that we are now going through, that of the general decomposition of capitalist society. In a world dominated by chaotic wars, by the 'law of the jungle', it's up to the only superpower left - because it has the most to lose in this world disorder, and because it is the only one that has the means - to play he role of the gendarme of capitalism. And it will only be able to play this role by increasingly imprisoning the world in the iron corset of militarism. In such a situation, for a long time to come, and perhaps until the end of capitalism, the conditions don't exist for a new division of the planet into two imperialist blocs. There may be temporary and circumstantial alliances around or against the USA, but in the absence of another military superpower capable of rivaling the US (and the latter will do all it can to prevent such a power arising), the world will be ravaged by all kinds of military confrontations, which even if they are not able to lead up to a third world war, threaten to bring about the most terrible devastation, up to and including, in combination with other calamities typical of the period of decomposition (pollution, famines, epidemics), the destruction of humanity.

3) Another immediate consequence of the collapse of the eastern bloc is the considerable aggravation of the situation that caused it in the first place: economic and political chaos in the countries of Eastern Europe, and above all in the country which was their leader two years ago, the USSR. In fact this country has right now ceased to exist as a state entity: the considerable reduction in Russia's participation in the budget of the 'Union', decided by parliament on 27/12, simply confirmed the irreversible break-up and dislocation of the USSR. A dislocation that the probable reaction of the 'conservative' forces, and particularly the organs of security (as illustrated by Shevarnadze's resignation) can only delay for short time, while at the same time provoking even more chaos and bloodbaths.

Concerning the former 'peoples' democracies', their situation, while not reaching the same level of gravity as that of the USSR, can also only sink into growing chaos as can be seen right now from the catastrophic production figures (which have fallen by 40% in certain countries) and the political instability which has developed in the last few months in countries like Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland (presidential elections) and Yugoslavia (Slovenia's declaration of independence).

4) The crisis of capitalism, which in the last instance is behind all the convulsions the world is now going through, is itself being aggravated by these convulsions:

- the war in the Middle East and the resulting growth in military expenditure can only have a negative effect on the world economic situation (in contrast to the Vietnam war, for example, which made it possible to delay the American and world economy from entering into recession at the beginning of the 60s), owing to the fact that for a long time now the war economy has been one of the main factors aggravating the crisis;

- the dislocation of the western bloc can only deliver a mortal blow to the coordination of economic policy at the level of the bloc, which in the past made it possible to slow down the rhythm of the collapse of the capitalist economy. The perspective is one of a ruthless trade war (as illustrated by the recent failure of the GATT talks) in which all countries will be mauled;

- the convulsions in the zone of the former eastern bloc will also help to aggravate the world crisis by widening the scope of global chaos and, in particular, by forcing the western countries to devote considerable funds to the attempt to limit this chaos (for example by sending 'humanitarian aid' aimed at slowing down the massive emigrations into the west).

5) This said, it is important that revolutionaries show the ultimate factors behind the aggravation of the crisis:

- the generalized overproduction of a system that can't create outlets for the totality 'of commodities produced, as clearly illustrated by the new open recession which is already hitting the premier world power;

- the frenzied flight into external and internal, public and private debt by this same power all through the 80s; this may have made it possible for production to pick up momentarily in a certain number of countries, but it made the USA into easily the world's number one debtor;

- the impossibility of continuing this policy indefinitely, of buying without paying, of selling against promises which more and more obviously will never be repaid; a policy which has simply made the contradictions all the more explosive.

The demonstration of this reality is all the more important to the extent that it is a primary factor in the development of consciousness in the proletariat in the face of the current ideological campaigns. As in 1974 (when it was the 'greedy oil sheikhs') and 1980-82 (when it was the 'mad Khomeini '), the bourgeoisie will try once again (and has already done so) to blame the present open recession on a 'baddy'. Today Saddam Hussein, the 'bloody and megalomaniac dictator', the 'new Hitler' of our time, is ideal for this role. It is thus vital that revolutionaries make it very clear that the present recession, no more than the ones in 74-75 and 80-82, is not the result of a mere oil price rise, but that it began well before the Gulf crisis and that it reveals the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist mode of production.

6) More generally, it is important that revolutionaries draw out of the present situation the elements most likely to facilitate the development of class consciousness.

Today, the development of consciousness is still being held back by the effects of the collapse of Stalinism and the eastern bloc. The way that the very ideas of socialism and revolution were cast into discredit last year, especially under the impact of a gigantic campaign of lies, is something that has still not been overcome. In addition, the impending massive arrival of emigrants from an eastern Europe that has fallen into chaos cannot fail to create further disarray in the working class on both sides of the old iron curtain: among the workers who imagine that they can escape from unbearable misery by exiling themselves to the western Eldorado, and among those who will have the feeling that this immigration will rob them of the meager 'gains' that they still have. This will make the latter more vulnerable to nationalist mystifications. Such a danger is particularly acute in countries like Germany which will be in the front line of any such flood of immigrants.

However, the increasingly obvious bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, including and above all in its 'liberal' form, the growing revelation of the warmongering nature of the system, will play a powerful role in wearing out the illusions that were engendered by the events of late 1989. In particular, the promise of a 'new world order' following the disappearance of the Russian bloc has suffered a decisive blow in less than a year.

In fact, the warmongering barbarity that will more and more be a feature of capitalism in decomposition will increasingly stamp itself on the whole process through which the proletariat becomes conscious of what's at stake in its struggle. War does not constitute in itself and automatically a factor in the clarification of the proletariat's consciousness. Thus, the second world war led to a strengthening of the ideological grip of the counter-revolution. Similarly, although the sound of marching boots which has been heard since last summer has had the merit of refuting all the speeches about the new era of peace, it has also given rise, initially, to a feeling of powerlessness, an undeniable paralysis in the' great mass of the working class in the advanced countries. But the present conditions for the development of the class struggle will not allow this disarray to last for long:

- because the proletariat today, unlike in the 30s and 40s, has come out of the counter-revolution; its decisive sectors are not dragooned behind bourgeois flags such as nationalism, defense of the 'socialist fatherland', or of democracy against fascism;

- because the working class of the central countries is not directly mobilized for the war, it's not gagged by being enrolled under a military authority; this gives it much more latitude to engage in a thorough-going reflection about the barbarism of war, whose effects it will be the first to suffer through increasing austerity and poverty;

- because the profound and increasingly overt aggravation of the crisis of capitalism, of which the workers will evidently be the main victims and against which they will be forced to develop their class militancy, will more and more lead them to make the link between the capitalist crisis and war, between the struggle against the latter and the resistance against economic attacks, which will enable them to protect themselves against the traps of pacifism and inter-classist ideologies.

In reality, while the disarray provoked by the events in the Gulf may on the surface resemble the one provoked by the collapse of the eastern bloc, it obeys a different dynamic: whereas what came from the east (elimination of the vestiges of Stalinism, nationalist conflicts, immigration, etc) can only, for some time to come, have an essentially negative effect on the consciousness of the proletariat, the more and more permanent presence of war in the life of society will tend to reawaken class consciousness.

7) While despite its temporary disarray, the world proletariat still holds the key to the future in its hands, it is necessary to point out that not all sectors of the class are in the same position to offer humanity a perspective. In particular, the economic and political situation developing in the former eastern bloc countries bears witness to the extreme political weakness of the working class in this part of the world. Having been crushed by the most brutal and pernicious form of the counter-revolution - Stalinism - ; carried away by democratic and trade unionist illusions; torn apart by nationalist conflicts and confrontations between bourgeois cliques, the proletariat of Russia, the Ukraine, the Baltic countries, Poland, Hungary etc faces the most extreme difficulties in the development of its class consciousness. The struggles which the workers of these countries will be forced to wage in the face of unprecedented economic attacks will, when they are not directly diverted onto a bourgeois terrain like nationalism, come up against the whole weight of social and political decomposition, which will stifle their ability to serve as a soil for the germination of consciousness. And this will continue to be the case as long as the proletariat of the great capitalist metropoles, and particularly those of Western Europe, is unable to put forward, even at an embryonic level, a general perspective for the struggle.

8) The new stage in the process of the maturation of consciousness in the proletariat, the premises of which are being laid by the present situation of capitalism, is for the moment only at the beginning. On the one hand, the class has to go a long way to shake off the effects of the implosion of Stalinism and the way the  bourgeoisie made use of it. On the other hand, even if it won't last as long as the impact of the former, the disarray produced by the campaigns around the Gulf war has yet to be overcome. In making this step, the proletariat will be confronted by the difficulties sown by the general decomposition of society and by the traps set by the forces of the bourgeoisie, especially the trade unions, which will try to channel its militancy into dead-ends, which includes pushing it into premature battles. In this process, revolutionaries will have a growing responsibility:

- in warning against all the dangers represented by decomposition, particularly, it goes without saying, the barbarity of war;

- in denouncing all the bourgeois maneuvers, an essential aspect of which will be the attempt to hide or deform the fundamental link between the struggle against economic attacks and the more general struggle against imperialist war, which will be an increasingly ubiquitous element in the life of society;

- by putting forward, against all the pacifist mystifications, and more generally, against all the bourgeois ideologies which tend to undermine the proletariat's confidence in itself and its future, the only perspective which can counter the aggravation of war: the development and generalization of the class struggle against capitalism as a whole, with the ultimate aim of overthrowing it once and for all.

4th January, 1991

Note (1): Even if they are not completely in control of this aspect (Iraq also has something to say about it), the date chosen by the USA for beginning the conflict is not the result of chance. For the USA, it's important to act quickly before the dislocation of its former bloc has gone even further; but also before the tendency towards the revival of workers' struggles (following the reflux provoked by the collapse of the eastern bloc, and given an impetus by the world recession) could manifest itself too openly, as it had begun to do before the summer of 90.

[1] Even if they are not completely in control of this aspect (Iraq has something to say about it), the date chosen by the USA for beginning the conflict is not the result of chance. For the USA, it's important to act quickly before the dislocation of its former bloc has gone even further; but also before the tendency towards the revival of workers' struggles (following the reflux provoked by the collapse of the eastern bloc, and given an impetus by the world recession) could manifest itself too openly, as it had begun to do before the summer of 90.

The present acceleration of history, capitalism's entry into its phase of decomposition, sharply poses the necessity for the proletarian revolution, as the only way out of the barbarism of capitalism in crisis. History teaches us that this revolution can only triumph if the class manages to organize itself autonomously from other classes (the workers' councils) and to secrete the vanguard that will guide it towards victory: the class party. However, today, this party doesn't exist, and many are those who simply fold their arms because, faced with the gigantic tasks that await us, the activity of the small revolutionary groups who do exist may appear to be senseless. Within the revolutionary camp itself, the majority of groups respond to the absence of the party by endlessly repeating its very Holy Name, invoking it like some kind of deus ex machina that can solve all the problems of the class. Individual disengagement and overblown declarations about commitment are two classic ways of running away from the struggle for the party, a struggle which is going on here and now, in continuity with the activity of the left fractions who broke with the degenerating Communist International in the 20s. In the first two parts of this work, we analyzed the activity of the Italian Communist Left, which was organized as a fraction in the 30s and 40s, and the premature, completely artificial foundation of the Internationalist Communist Party by the comrades of Battaglia Comunista in 1942[1]. In this third part, we first showed[2] that the method of working as a fraction in unfavorable periods when there is no possibility of a class party existing, was the very method employed by Marx himself. In this issue we will also show that this marxist method of working towards the party found its essential definition through the tenacious struggle of the Bolshevik fraction in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Against all those who gargle eulogies to the iron party of Lenin, and who refer ironically to the 'little grouplets that were the left fractions', we reaffirm that "the history of the fractions is the history of Lenin"[3] and that only on the basis of the work that they accomplished will it be possible to reconstruct tomorrow's world communist party.

"Without the Fractions, Lenin himself would have been no more than a bookworm"

In the passages cited in the previous issue, we saw how Battaglia doesn't lose any opportunity to make ironical comments about What Is To Be Done of 1902 being the perfect text book for the fractionists, and to paint a distorted picture of things for the umpteenth time[4]. If the comrades would stop getting so excited about the word party and would begin a sober study of the history of the party, they would discover that What Is To Be Done in 1902 could hardly talk about the Bolshevik fraction, due to the fact that it was formed in Geneva in June ... 1904 (the meeting of the '22')[5]. It's from here that the Bolsheviks began to develop the notion of the fraction and its relations with the whole party, a notion which took a definitive form with the 1905 revolu­tion, and above all the period of reaction which allowed its defeat[6].

"A faction is an organization within a party, united, by its place of work, language or other objective conditions, but by a particular platform of views on questions"[7].

"A party can contain a whole gamut of opinions and shades of opinion, the extremes of which may be sharply contradictory ... That is not the case within a section. A section in a party is a group of like-minded persons formed for the purpose of securing acceptance for their principles in the party in the purest possible form. For this, real unanimity of opinion is necessary. The different standards we set for party unity and sectional unity must be grasped by everyone who wants to know how the question of the internal discord in the Bolshevik section really stands"[8].

"But as a wing, ie a union of like-minded people in the party, we cannot work without unanimity on fun­damental issues. To break away from a wing is not the same as breaking away from the Party. The people who have broken away from our wing in no way lose the possibility of working in the Party"[9].

The fraction was thus seen as an organization within the party, clearly identified and with a precise plat­form, and which fights to influence the party, with the final aim of seeing its principles triumph in the party "in their purest form", ie. without any mediation or homogenization. The fraction works within the party, with other fractions defending other platforms, so that practical experience and public political debate allow the whole party to recognize which platform is most correct. This coexistence is possible on condition that there is no room in the party for those who have al­ready taken choices which will lead them out of the party, so that keeping them within the organization can only lead to the liquidation of the organization itself. In Russia this applied to the 'liquidators' who fought for the dissolution of the illegal party and its submission to Tsarist 'legality'. There was a fundamental difference between the Bolsheviks and the other fractions pre­cisely on this point: while the latter in general con­demned the liquidators, they still considered them to be members of the party. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, considered that there could be a place in the socialist party for all opinions - except those which are anti-so­cialist:

"The very foundation of conciliation ism is false - the wish to base the unity of the party of the proletariat on an alliance of all factions, including the anti-Social ­Democratic, non-proletarian factions; false are its unprincipled 'unity' schemes which lead to nothing; false are its phrases against 'factions' (when in fact a new faction is formed) ... "[10].

It is interesting to note that these lines by Lenin were directed against Trotsky, who, within the RSDLP, was the main opponent of the organized existence of frac­tions, something he saw as useless and damaging for the party. Trotsky's total incomprehension of the ne­cessity for fraction work would have catastrophic con­sequences during and after the degeneration of the Rus­sian revolution.

"It should be noted that Trotsky - on all the questions relating to the 1905 revolution, and during the whole period that followed - was generally with the Bolshe­viks on all questions of principle and with the Menshe­viks on all questions of organization. His incomprehen­sion of the correct notion of the party, during the course of this period, resulted in him standing 'outside the fractions' in favor of unity at any price.

His pitiful position of today - which is pushing him into the arms of social democracy - proves to us that on this question, Trotsky has learned nothing from events"[11].

Naturally, Lenin was violently attacked, both in the Russian movement and the international movement, for his sectarianism, his mania for splits, and everyone sang fine songs about the 'end of factionalism'. In fact, Lenin was the first to be for the end of factionalism, because he knew quite well that the existence of frac­tions was the symptom of a crisis in the party. But he also knew that the open, practical struggle of the frac­tion was the only remedy for the party's malady, since it was only through a public confrontation of platforms that a clear way forward could emerge.

"Every faction is convinced that its platform and its policy are the best means of abolishing factions, for no one regards the existence of factions as ideal. The only difference is that factions with clear, consistent, inte­gral platforms openly defend their platforms, while unprincipled factions hide behind cheap shots about their virtue, about their non-factionalism"[12].

One of the big lies inherited from Stalinism is that Bolshevism was a monolithic tradition where there was no place for empty chatter and pseudo-intellectual de­bate; this lie is in continuity with the Mensheviks' con­stant accusation that the Bolsheviks were 'closed to de­bate'. Of course, it's quite true that among the Men­sheviks and the conciliators, discussion was 'free', whereas among the Bolsheviks it was obligatory. But it's true in the sense that the first felt free to discuss when it suited them and to keep quiet when they had divergences to hide. For the Bolsheviks on the other hand, discussion wasn't free, it was obligatory, and be­came all the more obligatory when divergences arose within the fraction, divergences which had to be dis­cussed publicly so that they could either be reabsorbed or pushed to their conclusion, with an organizational separation based on clear motives.

"That is why we have initiated a discussion on these questions in Proletary. We have published everything that was sent to us, and reprinted all that the Bolshe­viks in Russia have written on the subject. So far, we have not rejected a single contribution to the discus­sion, and we shall continue to pursue the same course. Unfortunately, the otzavist comrades and those who sympathize with them have, so far, sent us little mate­rial, and, in general, have avoided making a frank and complete statement of their theoretical credo in the press. They prefer to talk 'among themselves'. We in­vite all comrades, otzavists and orthodox Bolsheviks alike, to state their views in the columns of Proletary. If necessary we shall publish these contributions in pamphlet form .... Our supporters should not be afraid of an internal ideological struggle, once it is neces­sary. They will be all the stronger for it"[13].

This demonstrates that Lenin made an enormous contribution to the historic definition of the nature and function of the fraction, in spite of all Battaglia's quips about the "ten commandments of the fractionist faith". Let's note in passing that Battaglia also talks in one phrase about the party alternative from 1902 on, and in another, says that the party was acting as such "at least from 1912". So what was Lenin doing between 1902 and 1912 if he wasn't doing fraction work? Macrobi­otic cooking? Actually what BC is really concerned about is affirming that the Bolsheviks didn't restrict themselves to theoretical work and the formation of cadres, but that they worked towards the masses and thus couldn't have been a fraction. For Battaglia, if you choose to work as a fraction, you're running away from the class struggle, refusing to dirty your hands with the problems of the masses, which means "limiting yourself to a policy of measured proselytism and propaganda, focusing on the study of so-called ba­sic problems, reducing the tasks of the party to the tasks of a fraction if not of a sect"[14].

The lines are drawn: on one side you have Lenin, who thinks of the masses, and who thus can only be in the party; on the other, the Italian Left in exile in the 30s, which works as a fraction and can therefore be no more than a club of students and little professors. We've seen what Lenin's real activity was; let's now look at the real activity of the Italian Left:

"It might seem that the tasks of the fraction are exclu­sively didactic. But such a criticism can be refuted by marxists with the same argument used against those charlatans who consider that the proletariat's struggle for the revolution and for the transformation of the world can be put at the same level as electoral activity.

It is perfectly true that the specific role of the frac­tions is above all a role of educating cadres through the experience of events, and thanks to the rigorous confirmation of the significance of these events. How­ever, it is also true that this work, above all an ideo­logical one, is done in consideration of the mass movements and constantly supplies the political solu­tion for their success. Without the work of the frac­tions, Lenin himself would have been a mere book­worm, not a revolutionary leader.

The fractions are thus the only historic place where the proletariat can continue its work for its class organization. From 1928 until now, comrade Trotsky has completely neglected this work of building frac­tions, and, because of this, he has not contributed to realizing the effective conditions for mass movements"[15].

As can be seen, Battaglia' s sarcasms about the frac­tion as a sect running away from the masses fall very flat. Bilan's concern was the same as the Bolsheviks' "to contribute to the realization of the effective condi­tions for mass movements". The fact that the Bolshe­viks had much greater links with the masses in the 1910s than the Italian Left in the 30s did not derive from the personal features of so-and-so, but from the objective conditions of the class struggle, which dif­fered hugely. The Bolshevik fraction was not made up of a group of comrades who had survived the degener­ation of the party in a period of counter-revolution and deep defeat for the proletariat. It was a part (often the majority) of a mass proletarian party (like all the par­ties of the 2nd International), which was constituted in an immediately pre-revolutionary phase which for two years (1905-6) was to shake the entire Russian empire, from the Urals to Poland. If you want to make a quan­titative comparison between the activity of the fraction of the Italian Left and that of the Bolsheviks, you must refer to a period which has certain historically com­parable aspects, ie. the revolutionary years between 1917 and 1921. In those years, the Abstentionist Communist Fraction (the left fraction of the PSI) de­veloped to the point that when it constituted itself as the Communist Party of Italy, it absorbed into its ranks one third of the membership of the old mass socialist party and all the youth federations. The comrades who had been able to guide this process were the ones who ten years later were militating in the Left Fraction in exile, but by then they had been reduced to a small handful. What had changed? Was it that those com­rades no longer had the will to lead mass movements? Obviously not:

"Since we have been in existence, it has not been possible for us to lead any class movements. It has to be understood that this isn't anything to do with our will, our incapacity, or the fact that we are a fraction. It is the result of a situation of which we have been a victim, just as the world-wide revolutionary proletariat has also been a victim of it" (Bilan 28, 1935).

What had changed was the objective situation of the class struggle, which had gone from a pre-revolution­ary phase which put on the agenda the transformation of the fraction into a party, to a counter-revolutionary phase which compelled the fraction to resist against the tide, to carry on a work which would contribute to the eventual emergence of a new situation, again putting on the agenda the transformation of the fraction into a party.

From the Bolshevik fraction of the RSDLP to the Russian Communist Party

As always, when one criticizes the positions of Battaglia, one has to return to the crucial issue, ie. the conditions for the rebirth of the party. We've seen how BC would like to whitewash Lenin of the infamous charge of adhering to the ''fractionist faith", from as early as 1902. In their willingness to make conces­sions, they grit their teeth and are ready to admit that the Bolshevik party only existed after 1912, on condi­tion that it's clear that the party did exist as such be­fore the revolutionary period which began in February 1917. What they try to avoid admitting at any cost is that the struggle of the Bolshevik fraction of the RS­DLP was concluded by its transformation into the Rus­sian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in 1917, because that would mean admitting that

"the transformation of the fraction into a party is conditioned... by the upsurge of revolutionary move­ments enabling the fraction to assume the leadership of struggles for the insurrection" (Bilan KNOB. 1933). We thus have to clear up whether or not this transfor­mation took place in 1912 - five years before the revo­lution.

What did happen in 1912? In Prague there was a conference of the territorial organizations of the RS­DLP, the groups working in Russia. This conference reorganized the party after it had been demolished by the reaction which followed the defeat of the 1905 rev­olution, and elected a new Central Committee to re­place the one which was thenceforward dissolved. The conference and the CC were dominated by the Bolshe­viks, whereas the other tendencies in the RSDLP didn't participate in Lenin's 'splitting' initiative. At first sight, it looks as though Battaglia is right: a conference of Bolsheviks has taken the initiative of reconstructing the party, independently of the other fractions; thus, from now on, the Bolsheviks are acting as a party, without waiting for the opening of a pre-revolutionary phase. But if we look a bit closer, we can see that things are rather different. The birth of a revolutionary fraction within the old party takes place in reaction to the party's illness, to its inability to come up with an adequate response to the necessities of history, to lacu­nae in its programme. The transformation of the frac­tion into the party doesn't mean that we just return to the old status quo, to the old party purged of oppor­tunists; it means the formation of a new party, founded on a new program which eliminates previous ambiguities and takes up the principles of the revolutionary fraction "in their purest form". Otherwise you would simply be going back to where you started, and that would lay the groundwork for the reappearance of all the opportunist deviations that had just been chased away. And is this what Lenin did in 1912, transform the fraction into a party based on a new program? Not at all. In the first place, the resolution approved by the conference declared that it had been called with the aim of "rallying all the Party organizations in Russia irrespective of factional affiliation, and (of) re-estab­lishing our Party as an all-Russian organization"[16]. It was thus not a purely Bolshevik conference, all the more because its organization was to a large extent car­ried out by the Kiev territorial committee which was dominated by pro-party Mensheviks, and it was a Men­shevik who presided over the commission for the veri­fication of mandates[17]. There was no talk of modi­fying the old program and the decisions taken con­sisted simply in putting into practice the resolutions condemning the liquidators, approved in 1908 and 1910 by "the representatives of all the factions". Thus the conference was not only composed of party mem­bers, "irrespective of factional affiliation", but was based on a resolution approved by "all the factions". It's obvious that this wasn't the constitution of the new Bolshevik party, but simply the reorganization of the old social democratic party. It's worth underlining that such a reorganization was only considered possible "in association with the revival of the workers' movement"[18] after the years of reaction between 1907 and 1910. As we can see, Lenin not only didn't think of founding a new party before the revolutionary battles, but didn't even have the illusion of reorganizing the old party in the absence of a new period of struggle. The comrades of Battaglia - and not only them - are so hypnotized by the word party that they have become incapable of analyzing facts lucidly, reading something as a decisive turning point when it was only an important step in the process of demarcation with opportunism. The election of a Central Committee in 1912 by a conference dominated by Bolsheviks cannot be considered to be the end of the fraction phase and the beginning of the party phase, for the simple reason that in London in 1905 there had been an exclusively Bolshevik conference which proclaimed itself to be the III Congress of the party, and which had elected an entirely Bolshevik CC, considering the Mensheviks to be outside the party. But by the following year, Lenin had recognized that this had been a mistake, and at the 1906 congress the party was reunified, maintaining the two fractions as frac­tions of the same party. In a similar way, between 1912 and 1914, Lenin considered that the period of the struggle of the fraction was coming to an end and that the time had come for a definitive selection. This may have been true from a strictly Russian point of view, but it would certainly have been premature from an in­ternational point of view:

"Lenin's fractional work took place uniquely within the Russian party and there was no attempt to expand it onto the international level. To be convinced of this you only have to read his interventions at different congresses and you'll see that this work remained com­pletely unknown outside the Russian sphere."[19].

In fact, the definitive selection took place in the years 1914 to 1917, in the face of the dual test of war and revolution, dividing the socialists into social patriots and internationalists. Lenin was well aware of this and - as in 1906 when he fought for the unification of the party - in February 1915, replying to Trotsky's Nashe Slovo group, he wrote:

"We agree absolutely with you that the union of all the real internationalist social-democrats is one of the most vital tasks of the present moment"[20]. The problem was that for Lenin the unification of the inter­nationalists in a really communist party was only pos­sible if one made a clear break with those who weren't really internationalists, whereas Trotsky, as usual, wanted to reconcile the irreconcilable, wanted to base the unity of the internationalist party "on the union of all the fractions", including those who weren't pre­pared to break with the enemies of internationalism. For three years, Lenin fought incessantly against these illusions, transferring his fractional struggle for clarity from the purely Russian soil to the international one of the Zimmerwald Left[21]. This grandiose international struggle was the apogee and conclusion of the Bol­shevik's fraction work, which would bear its fruit with the outbreak of the revolution in Russia. Thanks to this tradition of struggle and to the development of a revo­lutionary situation, Lenin was able, as soon as he re­turned to Russia, to propose the unification of the Bol­sheviks with the other consistent internationalists, on the basis of a new program and under the name of the Communist Party, replacing the old term 'social democrat'. This led to the final selection, with the Bol­shevik right (Voitinsky, Goldenberg) going over to Menshevism, while the 'Old Bolshevik' center (Zinoviev, Kamenev) opposed Lenin in the name... of the old program upon which the 1912 conference had based itself. Lenin was accused of being the "gravedigger of the party's tradition"; he replied by showing that the entire struggle of the Bolsheviks had simply been the preparation for a real communist party:

"Let us create a proletarian Communist Party; its ele­ments have already been created by the best adherents of Bolshevism"[22]. Here is the conclusion of the grand struggle of the Bolshevik fraction; here is the real transformation into the party. We say real because, from a formal point of view, the name Communist Party wasn't adopted until March 1918, and the defini­tive version of the new program would only be rati­fied in March 1919. But the substantial transformation took place in April 1917 (VIII Pan-Russian Bolshevik Conference). We shouldn't forget that what distin­guishes a party from a fraction is its capacity to have a direct influence on events. The party is "a program, but also a will to action" (Bordiga), providing obvi­ously that this will is expressed in conditions objec­tively favorable to the development of a class party. In February 1917, there were only a few thousand Bol­sheviks and they had not played any leadership role in the spontaneous uprising which opened the revolution­ary period. At the end of April, there were more than 60,000 of them and they were already standing out as the only real opposition to the bourgeois Provisional Government. With the acceptance of the April Theses and the necessity to adopt a new program, the frac­tion became a party and posed the bases of Red Octo­ber.

In the next part of this work, we will see how the particular, historically original conditions of the degen­eration of the Russian revolution prevented the emer­gence of a left fraction that could resume, inside the degenerating Bolshevik party, Lenin's battle inside the social democratic party. The incapacity of the Russian opposition to form itself into a fraction would later be at the root of the historic failure of the Trotskyist in­ternational opposition, whereas the Italian Left, by car­rying on the methods of Marx and Lenin, was able to form itself into the International Communist Left in 1937[23]. We will also see how the abandonment of these methods by the comrades who founded the Inter­nationalist Communist Party in 1943 has been the source of the incapacity to act as a pole of revo­lutionary regroupment displayed by the two organizations (Battaglia, Programma Comunista) who derive from that party .

Beyle.

[1] The first two parts were published in IR 59 and 61. For a deeper analysis of the activity of this current, we recommend reading our two pamphlets La Gauche Communiste D'Italie 1927-52 and Rapports entre la fraction de gauche du PC d'Italie et l'Opposition de Gauche Internationale 1929-33

[2] See ‘Third Part: from Marx to Lenin, 1848-1917. 1. From Marx to the Second International' in IR 64

[3] Bordiga's intervention at the 6th Enlarged Executive Committee of the Communist International, in 1926

[4] "In 1902, Lenin had laid the tactical and organizational bases upon which were to be built the alternative to the opportunism of Russian social democracy, a party alternative, unless you want to pass off What Is To Be Done as the ten commandments of the fractionist faith"  (‘Fraction and Party in the Experience of the Italian Left', Prometeo 2, March 1979).

[5] The Bolshevik (‘Majority') at the 1903 congress of the RSDLP were the fruit of a temporary alliance between Lenin and Plekhanov. The 1904 fraction called itself Bolshevik in order to lay claim to the positions defended by the Congress majority of 1903

[6] It is significant that the complete theorization of the concept of the fraction by Lenin was not achieved until the years of reaction following the 1905 revolution. It is only the activity of the fraction that makes it possible to hold out in unfavorable periods.

[7] ‘The new faction of conciliators, or the virtuous', Social Democrat no. 24, October 18 (31), Lenin, Collected Works, 17

[8] ‘Conference of the extended editorial board of Proletary, 8-17 (21-30) June 1901, supplement to no 46 of Proletary, Collected Works, 15.

[9] ‘The liquidation of liquidationism', Proletary no. 46, 11 (24) July 1909, Collected Works, 15

[10] Idem note 4

[11] ‘The problem of the fraction in the Second International', Bilan 24, 1935

[12] Idem note 4

[13] ‘On the article Questions of the Day', Poletary no 42, 12 (25) February 1909, Collected Works, 15. Otzovism was a dissident current inside the Bolshevik fraction in the darkest years of the reflux, it tended towards reducing fraction work to that of a mere network.

[14] Political Platform of the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Communista), 1952. In a recent publication of this text (1982), this passage was reproduced unchanged.

[15] ‘Towards the Two and Three-Quarter International', in Bilan 1, 1933; extracts published in the Bulletin D'etude et de Discussion, Revolution Internationale, no 6, April 1974.

[16] 6th General Conference of the RSDLP, Prague conference 6-17 (18-30) January 1912, Resolution on the Russian organizing commission for the convening of a conference, Collected Works, 17

[17] ‘The situation in RSDLP and the immediate tasks of the Party', 16 July 1912, Gazeta Robotnicza no. 15-16, Collected Works, 18: "It was a delegate from that organization (Kiev) that was chairman of the Credentials Committee at the Conference!"

[18] Taken from the resolutions of the conference. Lenin came back to this subject in 1915: "The years 1912-14 marked the beginning of a great new revolutionary upswing in Russia. We again witnessed a great strike movement, the like of which the world has never known. The number involved in the mass revolutionary strike in 1913 was, at the very lowest estimate, one and a half million, and in 1914 it rose to over two million, approaching the 1905 level" (Socialism and War, July-August 1915, Chapter II, ‘The working class and the war', Collected Works, 21.

[19] ‘The problem of the Fraction in the II International', Bilan 24, 1935.

[20] Letter from the CC of RSDLP to the editorial board of Nashe Slovo, 10 (23) March 1915, Collected Works, 15

[21] For a better understanding of the role of the Bolsheviks in the Zimmerwald Left, see our article in IR 57.

[22] ‘The dual power', Pravda no. 28, 9 April 1917, Collected Works, 24

[23] For an analysis of the work of the Italian Fraction in the 30s, see the first part of this work, in IR 59.

IR 65 2nd Qtr 1991

The fantastic violence of the Gulf War has served as a reminder that capitalism means war. The historic responsibility of the working class, as the only force capable of opposing capital, has been highlighted all the more. But to take up this responsibility, the revolutionary class must reappropriate the theoretical and practical experience of its own struggle against war. It must draw from this experience confidence in its revolutionary capacities and the means to fight successfully.

THE PROLETARIAT AND THE WAR IN THE GULF: WHAT IS AT STAKE IN THE HISTORICAL SITUATION

The world working class has suffered from the Gulf war, not only as a massacre of a part of itself, but also as a stupefying blow from the ruling class.

But the balance of forces between the proletariat and the local ruling class is not the same on each side of the battle front.

In Iraq, the government was able to send conscripts to the slaughter: workers, peasants and their children (sometimes only 15 years old). The working class is in a minority, drowned in a rural or semi-marginalised slum population. Its historical experience of struggle against capital is virtually nil. And above all, the absence of any significant struggles on the part of the workers in the most industrialised countries makes it unable to imagine the possibility of a truly internationalist combat. It has therefore been unable to resist the ideological and military control that forced it to serve as canon-fodder for the imperialist ambitions of its bourgeoisie. The ability of workers in these regions to overcome religious or nationalist mystifications depends first and foremost on the internationalist, anti-capitalist stance of the proletarians in the central countries.

The situation is different in the imperialist metropoles of Britain, France or the United States. The bourgeoisie had to send professional armies into the massacre. Why? Because the balance of forces between the classes was not the same. The ruling class knows that the workers are not ready, yet again, to pay the blood tax. Since the end of the sixties and the renewal of struggles marked by the massive 1968 strikes in France, the oldest working class in the world – and which has already suffered two world wars – has acquired an immense distrust of all the bourgeoisie’s politicians and their promises, and of the so-called “working class” organisations (left parties, trade unions), designed to keep them under control. It is this combativity, this disengagement from the ruling ideology, which has up to now prevented the outbreak of World War III, and the enlistment, once again, of the workers in an imperialist conflict.

However, recent events have shown that this is not enough to prevent capitalism from making war. If the working class went no further than this “implicit” resistance, then capital would eventually put the whole planet, including its industrial centres, to fire and sword.

The 1917-23 revolutionary wave, which put an end to World War I, showed that the proletariat is the only force able to stand against the barbarity of decadent capitalism’s imperialist war. The bourgeoisie is doing everything it can to make workers forget this, and to submerge them in a feeling of impotence, especially through the current gigantic campaign on the collapse of the USSR, with its ignoble lie: “the workers’ revolutionary struggle can only lead to the gulag and the most totalitarian militarism”.

For the working class today, to “forget” its revolutionary nature would mean a suicide that would drag the whole of humanity down with it. If it is left in the hands of the capitalist class, then human society is heading for a definitive disaster. The technological barbarity of the Gulf war is there to remind us. If the proletariat, the producer of the greater part of social wealth, lets itself be lulled by the sirens of pacifism and their hypocritical hymns to a capitalism without war, if it lets itself be dissolved in the rotten atmosphere of “every man for himself”, if it is unable to rediscover the path of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism as a system, then the human race will be definitively condemned to barbarity and destruction. “War or revolution. Socialism or barbarism”; more than ever, the question is posed thus.

More than ever, it is urgent that the proletariat reappropriate its historical lucidity and experience, the result of more than two centuries’ struggle against capital and its wars.

THE PROLETARIAT’S STRUGGLE AGAINST WAR

The proletariat, because it is the bearer of communism, is the first class in history to be able to envisage war as something other than an eternal and inevitable scourge. From the start, the workers’ movement declared its general opposition to capitalism’s wars. The Communist Manifesto, whose publication in 1848 corresponded to the first struggles where the proletariat stood forward on history’s stage as an independent force, is unequivocal: “The workers have no country... Workers of all countries, unite!”

The proletariat and war during the 19th century

The attitude of proletarian political organisations towards war has, logically, differed according to historical periods. In the 19th century, some capitalist wars still had a progressive anti-feudal character, in that they encouraged the development of the necessary conditions for the future communist revolution, through the formation of new nations and the growth of the productive forces. On several occasions, the marxist current was thus led to take a position in favour of one camp or the other in a national war, or to support the liberation struggle in certain nations (e.g., Poland against the Russian empire, the bastion of feudalism in Europe).

But in every case, the workers’ movement has always considered war as a capitalist scourge whose first victims are the exploited classes. Important confusions existed, at first because of the immaturity of historical conditions, then because of the weight of reformism. At the time of the First International’s foundation (1864), it was thought that a means to put an end to war had been found in the demand for the replacement of standing armies by people’s militias. This position was criticised from within the International itself, which declared in 1867 “ that it is not enough to abolish standing armies to do away with war; to this end, a transformation of the entire social order is also necessary”. The Second International, founded in 1889, also took position against wars in general. But this was the golden age of capitalism, and of the development of reformism. The International’s First Congress went back to the old slogan of “replacing the standing armies with people’s militias”. At the London Congress in 1896, a resolution on war declared: “the working class in all countries must oppose the violence provoked by war”. In 1900, the International’s parties had grown, and even had representatives in the Parliaments of the most important countries. One principal was solemnly stated: “the socialist members of parliament in every country are required to vote against military and naval credits, and against colonial expeditions”.

But in reality, the question of war had not yet been sharply posed. Apart from the colonial expeditions, the watershed between the two centuries was still marked by peace between the main capitalist powers. It was still the “belle époque”. While the conditions that would lead to the outbreak of World War I ripened, the workers’ movement seemed to be advancing from social conquest to parliamentary triumph, and for many the question of war seemed to be a purely theoretical one.

“All this explains – and we are speaking here from experience – the fact that we, the generation that struggled before the 1914 imperialist war, perhaps considered the problem of war more as an ideological struggle than as a real and imminent danger; the conclusion of several serious conflicts, such as Fashoda or Agadir, without recourse to arms, led us to believe, wrongly, that economic “interdependence”, the ever more numerous and tighter links between countries, formed a sure defence against the outbreak of war between the European powers, and that the different imperialisms’ growing military preparations, rather than leading inevitably to war, confirmed the Roman principle “si vis pacem para bellum”: if you want peace, prepare for war” (Gatto Mamonne, in Bilan no. 21, 1935 [1] [26]).

The conditions of this period of capitalism’s apogee, the development of the mass workers’ parties with their parliamentary representatives and their enormous union bureaucracies, the real reforms torn from the capitalist class, all encouraged the development of reformist ideology within the workers’ movement, and of its corollary: pacifism. The workers’ organisations were infected by the illusion of a capitalism without wars.

Against reformism, there emerged a left wing that stuck to revolutionary principals and understood that capitalism was entering into its phase of imperialist decadence. Rosa Luxemburg, and the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social-Democratic party maintained and developed revolutionary positions on the question of war. At the Stuttgart Congress of the International in 1907, they managed to have adopted an amendment that shut the door on pacifist conceptions. This stated that it was not enough to fight against an eventual outbreak of war, or to bring it to an end as quickly as possible, but that during the war it was necessary “to profit in any way possible from the economic and political crisis to rouse the people and in this way hasten the collapse of capitalist domination”. In 1912, under the pressure of the same minority, the Basle Congress denounced the coming European war as “criminal” and “reactionary”, “accelerating the capitalism’s downfall by inevitably provoking the proletarian revolution”.

Despite the adoption of these positions, when war broke out two years later the International collapsed. The leaderships of the national parties, rotten with reformism and pacifism, lined up alongside their national bourgeoisies in the name of “defence against aggression”. The Social-Democrat members of parliament voted the war credits.

Only the revolutionary minorities within the main parties, grouped around the German Spartakists and the Russian Bolsheviks, continued the fight against the war.

The revolutionary struggle puts an end to World War I

The revolutionary forces were now reduced to their simplest expression. When they met for the first time at the international conference of 1915 at Zimmerwald, Trotsky could joke that the proletariat’s revolutionary representatives could fit into a few taxis. But their intransigent internationalist position, their perspective of revolution rising from the war, and that only this revolution rising from the war, and that only this revolution could put an end to the barbarity that had been unleashed, were to be born out by events. By 1915, the first strikes broke out against the privations caused by the war, notably in Britain. In 1916, the workers in Germany and Russia took up the struggle, despite ferocious repression. In February 1917, a demonstration of Russian working class women against shortages set in motion the process that was to lead to the proletariat’s first international revolutionary attempt.

We have not the space here to recount, even briefly, the history of the struggles that put an end to the imperialist slaughter through the Russian workers’ soviets’ seizure of power in October 1917, and the 1918-19 insurrection by the German proletariat. We want here to highlight, nonetheless, two fundamental lessons of this experience.

The first is that, contrary to the claims of the bourgeoisie’s disgusting propaganda, the exploited classes are not impotent and weaponless against capital and its wars. If the proletariat is capable of uniting consciously, if it succeeds in discovering its own enormous strength, then it can not only prevent capitalist war, it can disarm the power of capital and overthrow its armed power by disintegrating it. The revolutionary wave which put an end to World War I has provided practical proof that the combat of the working class constitutes the only force able to halt the military barbarity of capitalist decadence, and this society’s only revolutionary force.

The second lesson concerns the relation between the proletariat’s struggle in the workplace and the struggle of soldiers in the barracks and at the front. However important the soldiers’ struggle, and the fraternisation of German and Russian soldiers in the trenches during World War I, they were not at the heart of the revolution which put an end to the war, but a moment within it. These actions were preceded by a whole fermentation in the factories, whether in the form of strikes, or of demonstrations against the effects of the war. Soldiers’ desertions, and actions against officers only became truly massive and determining once they became part of the proletarian movement, which shook the bourgeoisie’s power in its economic and political centres. Without the massive political and revolutionary struggle of the working class, there is no real struggle against capitalist war.

The proletariat unable to prevent World War II

The proletariat did not succeed in renewing its revolutionary struggle during World War II, despite the hopes of the revolutionary minorities, and despite the workers’ struggles that marked its end, especially Germany, Italy and Greece. The fundamental reason was that the working class had not yet got over the physical and ideological defeat it suffered during the Social-Democrat and Stalinist counter-revolution of the 20s and 30s.

The defeat of the 1919-23 German revolution, the isolation and degeneration of the Russian revolution have had tragic consequences for the whole workers’ movement. The very form that the counter-revolution took in Russia during the 20’s and 30’s – Stalinism – has been a source of inextricable confusion. The counter-revolution came dressed in the clothes of the revolution.

Despite their exemplary combativity, the Spanish workers’ struggles in 1936 were derailed onto the terrain of anti-fascism and the defence of the bourgeois republic. On the international scale, fascism and anti-fascism (notably the left parties and the Popular Fronts) shared the task of enrolling the workers by terror, or by lies presenting bourgeois democracy as a workers’ conquest, to be defended to the detriment of their own class interests. By the time war broke out, the proletariat was ideologically under control. The bourgeoisie turned the workers into cannon-fodder once again, without them being able to rediscover their class consciousness and their ability to resist and organise. The horrors of war were not enough to open their eyes, and set them anew one the road to revolutionary struggle.

The ruling class had also learnt from experience since the First World War. In 1917-18, the bourgeoisie had been “surprised” by the proletarian revolutionary struggle. This time, it kept constantly in mind, at the beginning, but especially at the end of the war, the immense fear it had felt 25 years before. With absolutely conscious cynicism, Churchill left the Fascist government, supported by the Germans, to suppress the workers’ revolts in Italy during 1943; Stalin stopped the Russian army within sight of Warsaw, allowing the Nazis to massacre the popular uprising in the city; and the Allied forces, after the German bourgeoisie’s capitulation and in cooperation with it, prevented the return of POW’s to Germany in order to avoid any explosion that their mingling with the civilian population might have provoked. The reasons for the systematic extermination of the civilian population by the allied bombardments of the working class districts in Germany (Hamburg, Dresden: twice as many dead as at Hiroshima) were not purely military.

During the war, the bourgeoisie was dealing with proletarian generations whose revolutionary strength had been shattered by the deepest counter-revolution in history. All the same, the ruling class took no risks.

On the whole, the effect of the war on the world proletariat was of another annihilation, which it would take decades to recover from.

The renewal of the class struggle since 1968

Since World War II, the planet has not had a moment’s peace. The main imperialist powers have continued to confront each other militarily, mostly through local conflicts (Korea, the Arab-Israeli wars) but also through the so-called “national liberation struggles” (Indochina, Algeria, Vietnam, etc). The working class has only been able to suffer under these wars, as under the effects of capitalism as a whole.

But with the massive strike of 1968 in France, followed by the struggles in Italy 1969, Poland 1970, and elsewhere, the proletariat returned to the historical stage. It rediscovered massive combat on its own class terrain, and escaped the crushing weight of the counter-revolution. At the very moment that the capitalist crisis provoked by the end of the reconstruction period pushed world capital towards a Third World War, the working class was detaching itself from the dominant ideology, slowly, but enough to make its immediate enrolment in another imperialist massacre impossible.

Today, after 20 years of stalemate where the ruling class has been unable to unleash its “solution” of worldwide apocalypse, but where the proletariat has not had the strength to impose its own revolutionary solution, capitalism has entered a state of decomposition which engenders a new kind of conflict: the Gulf war is its first major concretisation.

For the world working class, and especially for workers in the main industrialised countries, the warning is clear: either the class will be able to develop its fight to a revolutionary conclusion, or the dynamic of decomposing capitalism, from one “local” war to the next, will eventually call humanity’s very survival into question.

HOW TO FIGHT AGAINST WAR TODAY?

First of all, what the working class must reject.

Pacifism means impotence

Before the Gulf war began, as before the First and Second World Wars, capitalism was readying its physical weapons, its warmongering brainwash, and its ideological weapon of capitalism.

“Pacifism” is not defined by the demand for “peace”. Everybody wants peace. The warmongers themselves never stop proclaiming that they only want war in order to prepare for peace. The distinguishing feature of pacifism is its claim that it is possible to fight for peace, as such, without touching the foundations of capitalist power. The proletarians whose revolutionary struggle, in Russia and Germany, put an end to World War I, also wanted peace. But their combat’s success was because they fought not with the “pacifists” but in spite of and against them. As soon as it became clear that only the revolutionary struggle would stop the imperialist slaughter, the workers of Russia and Germany found themselves facing not just the bourgeoisie’s “hawks”, but also and especially the original pacifists: the Mensheviks, the “Socialist Revolutionaries”, the Social Democrats, who defended both ideologically and militarily what was dearest to them: capitalist order.

War does not exist “as such”, outside social relations, in other words relations between classes. In decadent capitalism, war is only a moment in the life of the system, and there can be no struggle against war without a struggle against capitalism. To struggle against war without struggling against capitalism is to be condemned to impotence. The aim of pacifism has always been to make the revolt of the exploited against war harmless for capital.

History gives us edifying examples of this kind of manoeuvre. The efforts that we can see at work today were already being vigorously denounced by revolutionaries 50 years ago: “The necessity for the bourgeoisie is precisely that, with hypocritical talk of peace, the workers be turned away from the revolutionary struggle” wrote Lenin in 1916. The use of pacifism has not changed: “The unity of principle between the social-chauvinists (Plekhanov, Scheidemann) and the social-pacifists (Turati, Kautsky), lies in that both, objectively speaking, are the servants of imperialism: the former serve it by presenting the imperialist war as a ‘defence of the fatherland’, while the others serve the same imperialism by disguising the imperialist peace that is being prepared today with talk about a democratic peace. The imperialist bourgeoisie needs both kinds of lackey, with each kind of nuance: it needs the Plekhanovs to encourage the peoples to massacre each other shouting ‘down with the conquerors’; it needs the Kautskys to console and calm the exasperated masses with hymns and declamations in honour of peace,” (Lenin, January 1917).

What was true during World War I has invariably been confirmed since. Today, yet again, with the Gulf war, the bourgeoisie in all the belligerent powers has organised the pacifist machine. “Responsible” (having taken part in government, in the sabotage of strikes and other forms of the struggle of the exploited classes, or having played the recruiting sergeant in previous conflicts) parties, or fractions of political parties are given the job of taking the lead in the pacifist movements. We must “demand!”, they say; we must “impose!”... a peaceful capitalism. From Ramsey Clark (one-time adviser to Lyndon Johnson) in the US, to the Social-democracy in Germany (the same ones who sent the German proletariat into World War I, and was directly responsible for the murder in 1919 of the revolutionary movement’s most important figures, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg); from the pacifist fractions of the British Labour Party to those of Chevenement and Cheysson in the French PS, via the Stalinist CP’s of France, Italy and Spain (with their inevitable Trotskyist acolytes) whose have long since become master recruiters of canon-fodder: all these fine people have appeared at the head of the great pacifist demonstrations of January 1991 in Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, or Rome. All these patriots (whether they defend big countries or little ones – Iraq for example – changes nothing) obviously believe in peace as little to day as they did yesterday. They are simply playing the part of pacifism: channelling the discontent and the revolt provoked by the war into an impotent dead-end.

After all the “petitions”, the “demonstrations” in the company of all the ruling class’ “concerned people”, the “progressive” priests, the show-biz starts and such like “lovers of (...capitalist) peace”, what can there be left in the minds of those who thought that this would be a means of opposing the war, if not a feeling of sterility and impotence? Pacifism has never prevented capitalism wars. It has always prepared and accompanied them.

Pacifism always has a “radical” fellow-traveller: anti-militarism. In general, this is characterised by a more or less complete rejection of “peaceful” pacifism. It calls for more radical methods to combat war, directly attacking military force: individual desertion and the “execution of officers” are its most typical slogans. On the eve of World War I, its best known exponent was Gustave Herve, and he encountered a certain echo in the face of reformist social-democracy’s flabby pacifism. In Toulon, France, one poor soldier was so far taken in by this “radical” language that he even tried to shoot his colonel. Needless to say, this got nobody anywhere... with the exception of Herve who ended the war as an abject patriot and supporter of Clemenceau.

It is obvious that the revolution will also be expressed in desertions from the army, and the struggle against the officers. But in this case, as in the German and Russian Revolutions, these will be mass actions by soldiers, and a part of the mass proletarian struggle. It is absurd to think that there can be an individualist solution to so eminently social a problem as capitalist war. At best, this is an expression of the suicidal despair of the petty bourgeois incapable of understanding the revolutionary role of the working class, and at worst it is a dead-end consciously used by the police to reinforce a feeling of impotence in the face of militarism and war. The dissolution cannot be achieved by individual actions of nihilist revolt; it can only be the result of the conscious, massive, and collective revolutionary action of the proletariat.

The struggle against war can only be the struggle against capital. But the conditions of this struggle today are radically different from what they were during the revolutionary movements of the past. In the past, proletarian revolutions have all been more or less directly linked to wars: the Paris Commune sprang from the conditions created by the 1870 Franco-Prussian war; the 1905 revolution in Russia was a response to the Russo-Japanese war; the wave of 1917-23, to World War I. Some revolutionaries have deduced that capitalist war is a precondition, or at least a highly favourable condition, for the communist revolution. This was only partly true in the past. War creates conditions that do indeed push the proletariat to act in a revolutionary manner. However, firstly, this only happens in the defeated countries. The proletariat in the victorious countries generally remains much more strongly subjected, ideologically, to the ruling class; this counters the worldwide extension of revolutionary power, which is vital to its survival. Secondly, when the struggle succeeds in forcing the bourgeoisie to make peace, it thereby deprives itself of the extraordinary conditions that gave birth to it [2] [27]. In Germany, for example, the revolutionary movement after the armistice suffered badly from the tendency of many soldiers returning from the front to forget everything but the desire to enjoy the peace they had so dearly won. Moreover, as we have seen above, by the time of the Second World War the bourgeoisie had drawn the lessons of the first and acted to prevent any revolutionary social explosions.

Above all, however, and quite apart from all these considerations, if the present historical course is ever overturned and a war breaks out involving the masses of the proletariat in the imperialist metropoles, then it will set in motion such terrible means of destruction that there will be no, or virtually no, possibility of fraternisation or revolutionary action.

If there is one lesson that workers must retain from their past experience, then it is this: to struggle against war today, they must act before a world war; during it will be too late.

An analysis of today’s historic conditions allows us to state that the conditions for a new international revolutionary situation could arise without capitalism having been able to enrol the proletariat of the central countries in a generalised butchery.

The processes leading to a revolutionary proletarian response are neither rapid nor easy. Those who today lament the lack of an immediate response to the Gulf war by the proletariat in the industrialised countries, forget that the revolutionary response to war in 1917 only came after three years of dreadful suffering. Nobody can say when and how the world working class will raise its combat to the level of its historic tasks. What we do know is that it will come up against enormous difficulties, not the least being the debilitating effects of the general atmosphere of decomposition engendered by capitalism’s advanced state of decadence accompanied by the widespread spirit of “every man for himself”, and the nauseating stink of putrefying Stalinism. But we also know that, contrary to the period of the economic crisis in the 1930’s and of World War II, the proletariat in the central countries is neither physically crushed nor has its consciousness been destroyed.

The very fact that the proletariat in the great powers could not be enrolled in the Gulf war (forcing the governments to use professionals); the multitude of precautions taken by governments to justify the war, are so many signs of this balance of forces.

As for the effects of this war on consciousness in the class, in the short term they have provoked a relative paralysis, accompanied however by an anxious and deep-seated reflection on what is historically at stake.

At this level, the Gulf war is distinct from the World Wars of the past in one particularly important aspect: the World Wars were special in that they hid from the proletariat the economic crises that they sprang from. During the war, the unemployed disappeared into the army, the factories which had shut down restarted to produce the weapons goods necessary for total war: the economic crisis seemed to have disappeared. The situation is quite different today. Just as the bourgeoisie unleashed its hellfire over the Middle East, its economy, at the heart of its industrialised zones, plunged into an unprecedented recession... with no hope of a new Marshall Plan. At the same time, we have witnessed a war that clearly announced the apocalyptic perspective of capitalism, and the deepening of the economic crisis. The first has given the proletariat the measure of what is at stake historically, the second is creating the conditions that will force it, in responding to the attacks on its living conditions, to affirm itself as a class and recognise itself as such.

For today’s generations of workers, the present situation is a new historical challenge. They will be able to rise to it, if they are able to profit from the last twenty years of economic struggles which have taught them the worth of capitalism’s promises, and what this system’s future holds in store; if they are able to take to its conclusion the mistrust and hatred that they have developed for the so-called workers’ organisations (unions and left parties), which have systematically sabotaged all their important struggles; and if they are capable of fully understanding that their own struggle is only the continuation of two centuries of combat by our epoch’s revolutionary class.

To do so, the proletariat has no choice but to develop its struggle against capital, on its own class terrain, a thousand miles from the inter-classiest terrain of pacifism and other nationalist snares.

This terrain can be defined in the most clear-cut way as a viewpoint on each moment of the struggle: the intransigent defence of workers’ interests against those of capital. It is not the trade union terrain, which divides workers by national, region, or industrial branch. It is not the terrain of the unions and left-wing parties, which pretend that “the defence of workers’ interests is the best defence of the nation”, to conclude that workers’ struggles should take account of the nation’s interests, and so of the national capital. The class terrain is defined by the irreconcilable opposition between the interests of the exploited class and those of the moribund capitalist system.

The class terrain has class, not national frontiers. By itself, it negates the foundations of capitalist war. It is the fertile ground where the dynamic develops which will lead the proletariat to assume, from the defence of its “immediate” interests, the defence of its historic interests: the world communist revolution.

Capitalist war is no more inevitable than the aberrations of decomposing capitalism. The capitalist mode of production is no more eternal than were the ancient slave-holding societies, or feudalism. Only the struggle to overthrow this society, and to build a truly communist society without exploitation or nations, can rid humanity of the threat of destruction in the holocaust of capitalist war.

The only struggle against war is the struggle against capitalism. The class war is the only “war” worth waging.

RV

Only the international working class can create a real new world order

As we go to press, the Gulf war has been officially ended. It finished very quickly, much quicker than the military commands had led people to believe, perhaps quicker than they themselves had thought. The editorial article that follows was written at the beginning of the ground offensive by the US-led coalition against Iraq. It is thus dated. However, its denunciation of the butchery of this war is still very relevant. The introduction demonstrates how much the political positions and analyses it puts forward have been confirmed from the very first days of the 'post war' phase.

Introduction

The Gulf War ends: the USA, World Policeman

The end of the war has clearly confirmed the real ob­jectives of the American bourgeoisie: demonstrating its enormous military superiority, not only vis-a-vis peripheral countries like Iraq who are being pushed into military adventures by the severity of the eco­nomic crisis, but also and above all the other world powers, and particularly those who used to make up the western bloc: Japan and the great European pow­ers.

The disappearance of the eastern bloc, by eliminating these powers' need for the American military 'umbrella', has resulted in the disappearance of the western bloc itself and given rise to the tendency to­wards the formation of a new imperialist bloc. The complete effacement, during the course of the war, of the only two serious candidates for the 'leadership' of a new bloc, Germany and Japan, the demonstration of their complete military impotence, is America's warn­ing for the future: whatever the economic dynamism of these countries (in reality, their capacity to stand up to the crisis more effectively than their rivals), the USA is not prepared to let anyone muscle in on its patch. Sim­ilarly, all of France's little attempts to 'affirm its differences' (see the editorial of International Review 64) up until 17 January went up in smoke the minute the USA succeeded in imposing its 'solution' to the crisis: the military crushing of Iraq. Today France is reduced to wagging its tail like a poodle when Schwarzkopf congratulates the French troops for doing an "absolutely superb job", and when Bush receives Mitterrand with all the right civilities. As for the Eu­ropean Community, which some people have seen as future great rival of the USA, it has been com­pletely non-existent throughout the war. In short, if it necessary to identify the real objectives of the making this war inevitable and in waging it to e results are there to make everything crystal clear.

A Pyrrhic Victory

Similarly, with the end of the fighting, we have seen the rapid confirmation of the perspective we put for­ward from the beginning (see IR 63): war would not be followed by peace, but by chaos and more war. Chaos and war in Iraq, as illustrated tragically by the con­frontations and massacres in the cities of the south and in Kurdistan. Chaos, war and disorder throughout the region: Lebanon, Israel, and the occupied territories. In short, the glorious victory of the 'allies', the 'new world order' that they claim to be setting up, are giv­ing their first fruits: disorder, misery and massacres for the populations; wars here, there and everywhere. The new world order? Already the Middle East is more un­stable now than it ever was before!

And this instability won't be limited to the Middle East. The end of the war against Iraq is not opening up the prospect of a diminution of tensions between the big imperialist powers. On the contrary. Thus, the dif­ferent European bourgeoisies are already preoccupied with the need to adapt, modernize and strengthen their weaponry - and that's not with a 'new era of peace' in mind. We are also seeing countries like Japan, Ger­many and even Italy demanding a reevaluation of their international status by calling for a permanent place on the UN Security Council. Thus, while the USA has succeeded through this war in proving its vast military superiority, while it has for the moment slowed down the tendency towards every man for himself, this is re­ally a Pyrrhic victory. The exacerbation of imperialist tensions and the spread of chaos all over the planet are inevitable, as is the aggravation of the economic crisis which is at the origin of all this. And there will have to be more 'punitive actions' like the one inflicted on Iraq, other monstrous massacres to serve as an 'example' and to bolster 'law and order'.

The 'New World Order': Poverty, famine, barbarism, war

Just over a year ago, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the bourgeoisie, its governments and its media, triumphantly claimed that 'liberal' capitalism had won, that an era of peace and prosperity was opening up with the disappearance of the eastern bloc and the opening up of these countries' markets. These lies have been shattered: instead of markets in the east, we have had economies ravaged by chaos. Instead of peace, we have had the most gigantic military intervention since the Second World War. Today, just as triumphantly, the leading sectors of the world bourgeoisie tell us that with the defeat of Iraq, the dawn of the new world or­der has definitely arrived: peace will be achieved, international stability ensured. These lies are also going to be shattered.

The rapid end of the war, the low number of deaths on the 'allied' side, have allowed the bourgeoisie to disorient the working class of the capitalist metropoles, the fraction of the proletariat which is key to the final outcome of the worldwide, historic battle between the classes. Even though many workers feel deeply wounded by the extermination of tens or hundreds of thousands of the exploited and the oppressed of Iraq, they also feel powerless in the face of the campaign of triumphant chauvinism which, thanks to the lies of the media, has temporarily deafened people's minds. But the future of poverty, famine, chaos, and ever more monstrous imperialist massacres, which is all the ruling class can offer, will open the eyes of the working masses and allow their struggles to be more and more impregnated with an awareness of the need to do away with this system. Revolutionaries must play an active part in this development of consciousness.

RF 11.3.91

The Kurdish tragedy is the latest demonstration of the bloody barbarity brought about by so-called 'national liberation' struggles.

The United States, Great Britain, Turkey, Iran, all the different imperialist protagonists who brought about the outrage of the Gulf War, encouraged the Kurds in one way or the other to rise up in armed insurrection for their 'national liberation'. Now we can see how they left Saddam Hussein to crush them and cast them into exile.

They are all accomplices to this genocidal slaughter and they have all used 'national liberation' as a fig leaf for their imperialist ambitions. In this pack of dogs we have to include the Kurdish leaders who have made an agreement with the Butcher of Baghdad to reduce 'national independence' to the 'first step' of 'autonomy', a 'first step' that also took place in 1970, 1975, and 1981...!

Capitalism has entered its final phase: decomposition. A phase in which wars like that in the Gulf and ethnic-nationalist massacres like those in Yugoslavia and the USSR, or the killings between the Arabs and Kurds in Iraq, will increasingly proliferate. Both take place under the same banner of 'national liberation' which, in many cases, is the cynical disguise for the imperialist ambitions of different states, especially the great powers; in the other cases it is just an irrational drunkenness which carries away the brutalised and desperate masses. In both it is an expression of the mortal bankruptcy of the capitalist order, of the threat it represents to the survival of humanity.

Against all of this, only the proletariat can offer a perspective of reorganising society around social relations based on the real unification of humanity, on production dedicated to the full satisfaction of human needs; in sum, a world community of free and equal human beings who work with and for each other.

In order to orient its struggles around this perspective the proletariat must clearly reject the whole ideology of 'national liberation', which serves only to tie it to the old society [1] [34]. In the first part of this article we are going to analyse how, in the revolutionary experience of 1917-23, this mystification represented a crucial factor in the failure of the revolution and provided the capitalist states with a means of salvation that resulted in a tragic procession of war and barbarity, the price mankind has paid for the survival of the capitalist regime over the last 70 years.

The Second Congress of the Communist International (March 1920) adopted the 'Theses on the national and colonial question' whose basic idea was: "All events in world politics are necessarily concentrated on one central point, the struggle of the world bourgeoisie against the Russian Soviet Republic, which is rallying around itself both the soviet movements among the advanced workers in all countries, and all the national liberation movements in the colonies and amongst the oppressed peoples, convinced by bitter experience that there is no salvation for them except in union with the revolutionary proletariat and in the victory of Soviet power over world imperialism" (Documents of the Communist International, ed J Degras, page 138).

This hope was quickly refuted by events from the beginning of the Russian Revolution. The policy of support for 'national liberation' struggles practiced by the CI and the proletarian bastion in Russia created a barrier against the international extension of the proletarian revolution and fundamentally weakened the consciousness and unity of the international proletariat, contributing to the failure of its revolutionary efforts.

A noose around the neck of the Russian Revolution

The October revolution was the first step in the revolutionary movement of the proletariat on a world scale: "That the Bolsheviks have based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian revolution is the clearest proof of their political farsightedness and firmness of principle and of the bold scope of their politics" (Rosa Luxemburg, 'The Russian Revolution' in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press, page 368)

In accordance with this thinking, where the essential issue was the international extension of the revolution, support for national liberation movements in the countries oppressed by the great metropolitan imperialists was seen as a tactic for winning additional support for the world revolution.

From October 1917, the Bolsheviks pushed for the independence of the countries which the Czarist empire had kept subjugated: the Baltic countries, Finland, Poland, the Ukraine, Armenia etc... They believed that such an attitude would guarantee the revolutionary proletariat indispensable support for its efforts to retain power while waiting for the maturation and explosion of the proletarian revolution in the great European countries, especially Germany. These hope were never to be fulfilled:

·         Finland: the Soviet government recognised its independence on the 18th of December 1917. The working class movement in this country was very strong: it was on the revolutionary ascent, it had strong links with the Russian workers and had actively participated in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. It was not a question of a country dominated by feudalism, but a very developed capitalist territory. And the Finnish bourgeoisie used the Soviet power's gift in order to crush the workers' insurrection that broke out in January 1918. This struggle lasted nearly 3 months but, despite the resolute support the Soviets gave to the Finnish workers, the new state was able to destroy the revolutionary movement, thanks to German troops whom they called on to help them;

·         The Ukraine: the local nationalist movement did not represent a real bourgeois movement, but rather obliquely expressed the vague resentments of the peasants against the Russian landlords and above all the Poles. The proletariat in this region came from all over Russia and was very developed. In these conditions the band of nationalist adventurers that set up the 'Ukraine Rada' (Vinnickenko, Petlyura etc.) rapidly sought the patronage of German and Austrian imperialism. At the same time it dedicated all its forces to attacking the workers' soviets, which had been formed in Kharkov and other cities. The French general Tabouis who, because of the collapse of the central powers, replaced the German influence, employed Ukrainian reactionary bands in the war of the White Guards against the Soviets.

"Ukrainian nationalism... was a mere whim, a folly of a few dozen petty bourgeois intellectuals without the slightest roots in the economic, political or psychological relationships of the country; it was without any historical tradition, since the Ukraine never formed a nation or government, was without any national culture... To what was at first a mere farce they lent  such importance that the farce became a matter of the most deadly seriousness - not as a serious national movement for which, afterwards as before, there are no roots at all, but as a shingle and rallying flag of counter-revolution. At Brest, out of this addled egg crept the German bayonets" (Rosa Luxemburg, idem, pages 382-2);

·         The Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania): the workers' soviets took power in this zone at the same moment as the October revolution. 'National liberation' was carried out by British marines: "With the termination of hostilities against Germany, British naval units appeared in the Baltic. The Estonian Soviet Republic collapsed in January 1919. The Latvian Soviet Republic held out in Riga for five months and then succumbed to the threat of British naval guns" (E.H.Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 1, page 317)

·         In Asiatic Russia, Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan: "A Bashkir government under one Validov, which had proclaimed an autonomous Bashkir state after the October revolution, went over to the Orenburg Cossacks who were in open warfare against the Soviet Government; and this was typical of the prevailing attitude of the nationalists" (idem, page 324). For its part the 'national-revolutionary' government of Kokanda (in central Asia), with a programme that included the imposition of Islamic law, the defence of private property, and the forced seclusion of women, unleashed a fierce war against the workers' Soviet of Tashkent (the principal industrial city of Russian Turkestan).

·         In Caucasia a Transcaucasian republic was formed, and its tutelage was fought over between Turkey, Germany and Great Britain. This caused it to break up into 3 'independent' republics (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan), which fiercely confronted each other, urged on in turn by each of the contesting powers. The three republics supported with all their forces the British troops in their battle against the Baku workers' Soviet, which from 1917-20 suffered bombardment and massacres by the British;

·         Turkey: from the beginning the Soviet government supported the 'revolutionary nationalist' Kemal Attaturk. Radek, a member of the CI, exhorted the recently formed Turkish Communist Party thus: "Your first task, as soon as you have formed as an independent party, will be to support the movement for the national freedom of Turkey" (Acts of the first four Congresses of the CI). The result was a catastrophe: Kemal crushed without leniency the strikes and demonstrations of the young Turkish proletariat and, if for a time he allied with the Soviet government, it was only done to put pressure on the British troops who were occupying Constantinople, and on the Greeks who had occupied large parts of Western Turkey. However, once the Greeks had been defeated and having offered British imperialism his fidelity if they left Constantinople, Kemal broke off the alliance with the Soviets and offered the British the head of the Turkish Communist Party, which was viciously persecuted.

·         The case of Poland should also be mentioned. The national emancipation of Poland was almost a dogma in the Second International. When Rosa Luxemburg, at the end of the 19th century, demonstrated that this slogan was now erroneous and dangerous since capitalist development had tightly bound the Polish bourgeoisie to the Russian Czarist imperial caste, she provoked a stormy polemic inside the International. But the truth was that the workers of Warsaw, Lodz and elsewhere were at the vanguard of the 1905 revolution and had produced revolutionaries as outstanding as Rosa. Lenin had recognised that "The experience of the 1905 revolution demonstrated that even in these two nations (he is referring to Poland and Finland) the leading classes, the landlords and the bourgeoisie, renounced the revolutionary struggle for liberty and had looked for a rapprochement with the leading classes in Russia and with the Czarist monarchy out of fear of the revolutionary proletariat of Finland and Poland" (minutes of the Prague party conference, 1912).

Unfortunately the Bolsheviks held onto the dogma of 'the right of nations to self-determination', and from October 1917 on they promoted the independence of Poland. On 29 August 1918 the Council of Peoples Commissars declared "All treaties and acts concluded by the government of the former Russian Empire with the government of Prussia or of the Austro-Hungarian Empire concerning Poland, in view of their incompatibility with the principle of the self-determination of nations and with the revolutionary sense of right of the Russian people, which recognises the indefeasible right of the Polish people to independence and unity, are hereby irrevocably rescinded" (quoted in E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol 1, p 293).

While it was correct that the proletarian bastion should denounce and annul the secret treaties of the bourgeois government, it was a serious error to do so in the name of 'principles' which were not on a proletarian terrain, but a bourgeois one, viz the 'right of nations'. This was rapidly demonstrated in practice. Poland fell under the iron dictatorship of Pilsudski, the veteran social patriot, who smashed the workers' strikes, allied Poland with France and Britain, and actively supported the counter-revolution of the White Armies by invading the Ukraine in 1920.

When in response to this aggression the troops of the Red Army entered Polish territory and advanced on Warsaw in the hope that the workers would rise up against the bourgeoisie, a new catastrophe befell the cause of the world revolution: the workers of Warsaw, the same workers who had made the 1905 revolution, fell in behind the 'Polish Nation' and participated in the defence of the city against the soviet troops. This was the tragic consequence of years of propaganda about the 'national liberation' of Poland by the Second International and then by the proletarian bastion in Russia. [2] [35]

The outcome of this policy was catastrophic: the local proletariats were defeated, the new nations were not 'grateful' for the Bolsheviks' present and quickly passed into the orbit of British imperialism, collaborating in their blockade of the Soviet power and sustaining with all the means at their disposal the White counter-revolution which provoked a bloody civil war.

"The Bolsheviks were to be taught to their own great hurt and that of the revolution, that under the rule of capitalism there is no self-determination of peoples, that in a class society each class of the nation strives to 'determine itself' in a different fashion, and that, for the bourgeois classes, the stand-point of national freedom is fully subordinated to that of class rule. The Finnish bourgeoisie, like the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, were unanimous in preferring the violent rule of Germany to national freedom, if the latter should be bound up with Bolshevism." (Rosa Luxemburg, 'The Russian Revolution', Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, page 380)

National liberation will not cure national oppression

The Bolsheviks thought that "in order to affirm the workers' international unity it was first necessary to uproot all vestiges of the past inequality and discrimination between nations". Hadn't these vestiges subjected the workers of these countries to the reactionary nationalism of the Czarist empire? Didn't this create an obstacle to their unity with the Russian workers, who could be seen as accomplices to Great Russian chauvinism? Wouldn't the young proletariat of the colonial and semi-colonial countries have a hostile attitude towards the proletariat of the great metropoles as long as their countries had not become independent nations?

It is certain that capitalism did not create and organise the world market in a conscious way. It developed in a violent, anarchic manner, through antagonisms between nations. Everywhere it sowed all kinds of discrimination and oppression, particularly national, ethnic, and linguistic ones. These weighed heavily on the workers of different countries, complicating the process towards the unification and self-awareness of the class.

However, it was erroneous and dangerous to seek to solve this by encouraging the formation of new nations which - given the saturation of the world market - could have no economic viability, and would only reproduce these wounds on a much vaster scale. The experience of the peripheral peoples of the Czarist empire was conclusive. The Polish nationalists used their 'independence' to persecute the Jewish, Lithuanian and German minorities; in Caucasia, the Georgians persecuted the Armenians and the Azeris, the Armenians the Turkamens and the Azeris, while later on the latter did the same to the Armenians...; the Ukrainian Rada declared its hatred of the Russians, Poles and Jews... and these events were an omen of the terrible nightmare which has unfolded throughout capitalism's decadence: simply remember the Hindus' bloody orgy against the Muslims in 1947, that of the Croats against the Serbs during the Nazi occupation and the revenge of the latter against the former once Yugoslavia was 'liberated' by Tito. And now today we have the bloody witches' Sabbath of nationalist pogroms in Eastern Europe and Asiatic Russia. We have to be clear: 'national liberation' will not stop national oppression, but instead will reproduce it even more irrationally. It is like using petrol to put a fire out.

It is only in the proletariat, in its revolutionary being and in its struggle, that we can find the bases for combating and overcoming all the varieties of national, ethnic and linguistic discrimination engendered by capitalism: "big industry created a class, which in all nations has the same interest and with which nationality is already dead; a class which is really rid of all the old world and at the same time stands pitted against it." (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology)

National liberation pushes the non-exploiting strata into the arms of capital

The Bolsheviks, who always based their policies on the idea of reinforcing the world revolution, thought that they could win over the non-exploiting strata of these nations - peasants, certain middle classes etc - through supporting 'national liberation' and other classical demands of the programme of the bourgeois revolutions (agrarian reform, political freedoms, etc).

These strata occupy an unstable position in bourgeois society; they're heterogeneous, without any future as such. Although oppressed by capitalism they lack any clear or defined interests of their own, and this ties them to the conservation of capitalism. The proletariat cannot win them over by offering them a platform based on 'national liberation' and other demands situated on the bourgeois terrain. Such proposals push them into the arms of the bourgeoisie who can manipulate them with demagogic promises and so turn them against the proletariat.

Clearly the demands of the bourgeois programme, which are most sensitive to the peasants and petty-bourgeoisie (agrarian reform, linguistic freedom within the national terrain, etc), have never been completed by the bourgeoisie. But in the period of capitalism's decadence the new nations are incapable of completing these demands, which clearly constitute a reactionary utopia, impossible under a capitalism that cannot expand, but is increasingly rent by violent convulsions.

Does this mean that the proletariat must take up demands which historical evolution have thrown into the dustbin, in order to demonstrate that it is more 'consistent' than the bourgeoisie?

No way! This approach, which weighed so heavily on the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary fractions, was a poisonous residue secreted by the gradualist and reformist thinking which led social democracy to its ruin. It is a speculative and idealist vision of capitalism, which holds that it has to complete its programme 100%, and in all countries before humanity is ready for communism. This is a reactionary utopia which does not correspond to the reality of a system based on exploitation, a system whose aim is not to carry out a supposed social project but to extract surplus-value. If in the ascendant phase of capitalism the bourgeoisie usually forgot its 'programme' after it had achieved power, making frequent pacts with the remnants of the old feudal classes, once the world market was formed and capitalism entered into its historical decline, this 'programme' was converted into a vulgar mystification.

The proletariat will only open a crack in its revolutionary alternative if it attempts the realisation of 'the unfinished bourgeois programme', and the bourgeoisie will grab onto this as a means of salvation. The best way of winning over the non-exploiting strata to the proletarian cause, or at least neutralising them in the decisive confrontations with the bourgeois state, is for the working class to consistently and fully affirm its own programme. It is the perspective of the abolition of class privileges, the hope of a new organisation of society which will safeguard the survival of humanity; it is the clear and resolute affirmation of the proletariat as an autonomous class, as a social force that openly presents itself as a candidate to take power; it is the massive self-organisation of the class in workers' councils, that will permit the creation of a platform capable of winning over these vacillating and unstable classes.

"Because it cannot assign itself the task of establishing new privileges, the proletariat can only base its struggles on political positions which result from its particular class programme - the proletariat represents, within the diverse classes of capitalist society, the only one able to build the society of the future. It is only on this basis that it can pull the middle social strata into the struggle. These classes will only unite with the proletariat in particular historical circumstances, when the contradictions of capitalist society blossom fully and the proletariat begins to mount its revolutionary assault. Only then will they understand the necessity of combining with the proletariat" (Bilan no 5, 'Principles: weapons of the revolution').

'National liberation': a factor in the disintegration of proletarian consciousness

The proletarian revolution is not a predestined product of objective conditions in which any expedient tactic can serve to carry it out. Although it is a historical necessity and its objective conditions have been furnished by the formation of the world market and the proletariat, the communist revolution is essentially a conscious act.

On the other hand, the proletariat, unlike past revolutionary classes, does not posses any economic power in the old society: it is at the same time an exploited and a revolutionary class. What makes it decisive and unique in history are its weapons for the destruction of the old society: its unity and consciousness, weapons that in turn constitute the foundations for the new society.

Consciousness is vital for the advance of its struggle, in which "on each occasion, the problem that the proletariat has to confront is not one of obtaining the best advantage or the greatest number of allies, but of being coherent with the system of principles which define its class... classes must exist in an organic and political configuration without which, despite being determined by the evolution of the productive forces, it runs the risk of remaining bound for a long time by the old class which, in its turn - in order to resist - will shackle the course of economic evolution" (Bilan no 5, idem).

From this perspective the support for 'national liberation struggles' during the revolutionary period of 1917-23 had disastrous consequences for the world proletariat, for its vanguard - the Communist International - and for the first bastion to carry out its revolutionary task: Russia.

The historical period of decisive confrontations between Capital and Labour was opened up by the First World War. In this period there is no alternative between the international proletarian revolution and the submission of the proletariat to the national interests of each bourgeoisie. Support for 'national liberation', although conceived as a 'tactical' element, led to the disintegration, corruption and decomposition of proletarian consciousness.

We have already seen that the 'liberation' of the peripheral peoples of the Czarist empire did not bring any advantage to the Russian revolution, but rather contributed to the growth of a cordon sanitaire around it: a group of nations with proletariats who were combative and had an old tradition were firmly closed off from the penetration of revolutionary positions, and an insurmountable abyss was opened up between the Russian and German workers.

How is it possible that the workers of Poland, the Ukraine, Finland, Baku, Riga, who had been at the forefront of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, who engendered communist militants of the clarity and integrity of Rosa Luxemburg, Piatakov, Jogisches etc., were so rapidly defeated and crushed in 1918-20 by their own bourgeoisies and became, in many cases vehemently, opposed to the Bolsheviks' slogans?

There can be no doubt of the decisive influence of the nationalist poison: "The mere fact that the question of national aspirations and tendencies towards separation were injected at all in the midst of the revolutionary struggle, and were even pushed into the foreground and made into the shibboleth of socialist and revolutionary policy as a result of the Brest peace, has served to bring the greatest confusion into socialist ranks and has actually destroyed the position of the proletariat in the border countries" (Rosa Luxemburg, 'The Russian Revolution', idem, page 381).

Just as it pushed the workers of these countries towards the illusory lure of 'independence' and the 'development of the country free from the Russian yoke', 'national liberation' increasingly created a rift between them and the Russian proletariat, with whom they had shared many struggles and at times had taken the first step in decisive combats.

The International, the world communist party, is a pivotal factor in the class consciousness of the proletariat. Its clarity and coherence are vital to the strength, unity and consciousness of the proletariat. Support for 'national liberation' played a decisive role in the opportunist degeneration of the Communist International.

The Communist International was constituted on a central principle: capitalism has entered its decadent epoch, and the task of the proletariat cannot be to reform or improve it but to destroy it: "A new epoch is born: The epoch of capitalism's decay, its internal disintegration; the epoch of the proletarian, communist revolution" (Platform of the Communist International, 1919). However, support for 'national liberation' movements opened a very dangerous crack in this clarity, an opening towards the penetration of opportunism. It introduced into a programme aimed at the destruction of the old order a task that belonged entirely to that same old order. The tactic of combining the revolutionary struggles in the metropoles with the 'national liberation' struggles in the colonies led to the conclusion that the hour for the destruction of capitalism had not arrived yet: it implied that the world was divided into two areas (one 'ripe' for the proletarian revolution and another where capitalism still had to develop) and that capitalist expansion was still on the cards (for marxists 'national liberation' could have no other meaning than this).

This germ of confusion was an open door to the opportunism that increasingly developed with the reflux of the revolutionary struggles of the proletariat in Europe.

The party is not a passive product of the class movement, but an active factor in its development. Its clarity and determination are crucial to the outcome of the proletarian revolution; equally, its confusions, ambiguities and incoherence powerfully contribute to the confusion and defeat of the class. The evolution of the CI in its posture on the national question bears witness to this.

The 1st Congress, which took place when the revolutionary wave was at its height, posed as a task the abolition of national frontiers: "The end result of the capitalist mode of production is chaos, which only the largest productive class, the working class, can overcome. This class must establish a real order, the communist order. It must break the domination of capital, make wars impossible, destroy all national borders, transform the whole world into a community that produces for itself, and makes brotherhood and liberation of peoples a reality" (Platform of the CI).

In the same way, it was a given that the small states could not break the yoke of imperialism and could not but submit to its game: "The goal of Entente policy in the vassal states and in the recently created republics (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and also Poland, Finland and so on) is to organise national counter-revolutionary movements based on the ruling classes and social nationalists. This movement is meant to target the defeated states, maintain a balance of power among the newly created states, subordinating them to the Entente, retard revolutionary movements within the new 'national' republics, and, lastly, furnish the White guards needed for the struggle against the international revolution and the Russian revolution in particular" ('Theses on the International Situation and the Policy of the Entente', First Congress of the CI). And, in short, it demonstrated that the national state had been condemned by history: having given a vigorous impulse to capitalist development, the nation state had become too narrow for the development of the productive forces.

Thus we can see how the First Congress of the CI laid the bases for overcoming the initial errors on the national question; but these points of clarity were not developed. Instead, because of the defeats of the proletariat and the inability of the CI majority to take them further forward, they were liquidated little by little by the dark shadow of opportunism. The Fourth Congress (1922), with its theses on the Eastern Question, marked an important step in this regression since "proletariat and peasants were required to subordinate their social programme to the immediate needs of a common national struggle against foreign imperialism. It was assumed that a nationally minded bourgeoisie, or even a nationally minded feudal aristocracy, would be ready to conduct a struggle for national liberation from the yoke of foreign imperialism in alliance with the revolutionary proletarians and peasants, who were only waiting for the moment of victory to turn against them and overthrow them" (E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 3, pages 477-8).

With later events, the proclamation of 'socialism in one country', the definitive defeat of the proletarian bastion in Russia and its integration into the imperialist world chain, 'national liberation' was simply turned into a cover for the vile interests of the Russian state. It has not been the only one to use this banner: other states have also adopted it in many different forms, but always towards the same end: the war to the death for the re-division of the saturated world market. These innumerable imperialist wars under the guise of 'national liberation' will be the object of the second part of this article.

Systematising the work of clarification which took place after the degeneration of the Communist International by the fractions of the communist left, the Gauche Communiste de France adopted in January 1945 a resolution on the nationalist movements which concluded thus: "Given that the nationalist movements, due to their capitalist nature do not represent any kind of organic or ideological continuity with the class movements of the proletariat, the latter, if it is to maintain its class positions, must break with and abandon all ties with the nationalist movements".

Adalen 20.5.1991

Chaos

One word is on everybody's lips concerning the present world situation: chaos. A chaos seen as a crying reality or as an imminent threat. The Gulf war has not opened the door to a 'New World Order'. It has merely allowed American capital to reassert its authority, in particular over its allies/rivals in Europe and Japan, and to confirm its role as the world's cop. But society is still caught up in an accelerating whirlpool of disorder, stirred up by the devastating winds of the open recession now hitting the big economic powers. 

Four months after the end of the war blood is still flowing in the Kurdish and Shiite regions of Iraq, the fires of war have not gone out. In the Middle East, behind the talk of peace conferences, military antagonisms are exacerbating and Israel has resumed bombing southern Lebanon. In the Soviet republics, armed conflicts are not being attenuated but are on the increase, concrete evidence that the old empire has fallen apart. In South Africa the black population, supposedly freed from apartheid, lives under the shadow of murderous confrontations between the ANC and Inkatha. In the slums of Lima cholera is spreading, interspersed by the bombs hurled by the Stalinist Shining Path. In South Korea, young people are burning themselves to death in protest against government repression. In India the assassination of the last of the Gandhis reveals the dislocation of the 'world's biggest democracy', which is being torn apart by caste, religious, and national conflicts. In Ethiopia, one of the areas of the globe hardest hit by famine, the collapse of the Mengistu government, which was abandoned by its Soviet protectors, has left the country in the hand of three rival armed nationalist gangs who aim to divide up the country. Yugoslavia is on the verge of breaking up under the pressure of daily confrontations between the different nationalities which compose it. In Algeria young unemployed people dragooned by the fundamentalists of the FIS are being sent to fight the tanks of the FLN government. In the ghettos of Washington, Bruxelles or Paris there has been a series of riots and sterile confrontations with the police. At the heart of Europe, in what used to be East Germany, capital is ready to throw nearly half the workforce onto the dole...

The ruling class cannot understand why society, 'its' society, is plunging irreversibly into a growing disorder in which war vies with poverty, dislocation with despair. Its ideology, the ruling ideology, has no explanation. It only exists to sing the glories of the existing order. In order to maintain its grip, it can only resort to lies and deliberately organized confusion. A confusion which expresses both the stupid historic blindness of the decadent bourgeoisie and the lying cynicism that it is capable of when it comes to protecting and justifying its decrepit 'order'.

War, as we have been reminded in the most horrible way by the events in the Gulf, remains the most tragic expression of this reality, in which organized lying goes hand in hand with the most barbaric chaos.

The Balance sheet of the Gulf war

With the most abject cynicism, the ruling classes of the Coalition countries, the American government at their head, have set about the task of making a travesty of the Gulf massacre. When the eastern regimes collapsed, they made a huge song and dance about the triumph of 'western democratic freedoms' over Stalinist obscurantism; but when it came to the Gulf war they organized the most colossal operation of lies and disinformation in history[1]. An operation marked both by the scale of the means used (the American government had at its disposal, among other things, a television network disseminating its poisonous propaganda 24 hours out of 24 all over the planet) and by the enormity of the lies themselves: Michael Deaver, former 'communications' advisor to Reagan and now a secretary general linked to the White House clearly defined the object to be attained: the war had to be presented as "a combination of Lawrence of Arabia and Star Wars"[2].

This was done. The TV screens were inundated with images of the most sophisticated weapons and everything was done to give the impression that it was all a big Wargame. Not one picture of the victims of the deluge of fire which fell upon the Iraqi soldiers and civilians was allowed to disturb this ignoble spectacle of a 'clean war'.

The balance sheet of the war in Iraq is atrocious nonetheless. We will never know the exact number of victims on the Iraqi side[3]. But all the estimates count in hundreds of thousands. Probably nearly 200,000 killed among the soldiers: young peasants and workers, enrolled by force, a gun in their back, lined up en masse in front of the enemy, with the Republican Guard behind them, ready to shoot any deserters[4]. Nearly two thirds of the soldiers killed died during the aerial bombardments, buried alive in their bunkers; most of those who died during the land war were coldly massacred while trying to retreat. In the civilian population, the bombs must have taken a similar toll among the children, women, old people and others who escaped the forced enlistment.

The country has virtually been razed to the ground by the war. All the infrastructures were hit. "For the period to come, Iraq has been thrown back to a pre-industrial age" declared a UN commission of enquiry sent to Iraq in March. The state of the hospitals and the lack of medication will condemn to death thousands of wounded and the victims of epidemics resulting from the lack of food and water. This is the first result of the operation carried out by the 'heroic armies' of the western powers.

To this atrocious balance sheet you have to add the victims of the massacres of the Kurds and the Shiites.

Because at the very time that the American government was organizing the grotesque spectacle of a patriotic orgy in New York, in which the 'victors' of the Gulf butchery paraded between the skyscrapers of Broadway, in Iraq, the Kurdish and Shiite populations were still being subjected to bloody repression by the Saddam government.

What kind of victory was this? Didn't these soldiers go to the Gulf to stop the 'Hitler of the Middle East' from doing this sort of thing?

The reality, clearly confirmed by the declarations of the Kurdish nationalist leaders, is that it was the American government which coldly and cynically provoked the massacre of the Kurdish and Shiite populations[5]. And if Bush's team has kept the 'Butcher of Baghdad' in power it's because, among other things, he was the best man for doing this job, given his well-known talents in this domain. The massive destruction resulting from this repression, this time shown in detail by the media, was used to try to make us forget the destruction wrought by the Coalition. The allied armies, having sat doing nothing while this new butchery was going on, were now able to appear on all the TV screens of the world in the role of humanitarian saviors of the Kurdish refugees (see in this issue, 'The massacres and crimes of the 'great democracies'').

The barbarity of militarism and chaos, travestied by a huge machinery of ideological manipulation. This is what the Gulf war was, and this is the future that it announces.

For the exploited classes of the region, in uniform or not, the balance-sheet of the war is one of carnage in which they participated only as cannon fodder, as guinea-pigs for testing the efficiency of the latest and most sophisticated weapons. For the world proletariat, it is a defeat. Another crime by capital which it was unable to prevent. But it is also a lesson, a reminder of what lies in store if it does not manage to get itself together and put an end to this society.

The real victory of American capitalism

Things are very different for the criminals who provoked this war. For the American government, the mission of the soldiers sent to the Gulf was never to protect the local populations against the exactions of Saddam Hussein. Contrary to what they believed themselves, contrary to the propaganda of their governments, the one and only mission of the Coalition soldiers was to make a violent demonstration of force and determination on behalf of American capitalism. A bloody display of power, made indispensable by the international chaos which was unleashed by the collapse of the USSR and which threatened to undermine the position of the world's leading state[6].

It was the Washington government which wanted and provoked this war. It was its ambassador April Glaspie who, during her discussions with Saddam Hussein at the time when the latter was on the verge of invading Kuwait, declared that the USA was indifferent to the Iraq-Kuwait quarrel, which it considered to be "internal to the Arab world"[7]. Saddam was led to believe that the White House was giving the green light to his hold up.

For American capital, the stakes in this operation were much more important than control over Iraq-Kuwait or oil. The stakes were the whole world, the USA's place in a world tumbling into instability. The Soviet military threat, which had enabled the USA to keep the other powers in its bloc in line for 45 years, was no more. And the dust raised by the fall of the Berlin Wall had hardly fallen to Earth when the German and French politicians were already talking about the formation of a European military force, "more independent of the USA"; in Japan, the call for a revision of the constitution imposed by the American government at the end of the second world war, forbidding the Japanese from having a real army, was again rising to the surface...the main economic rivals and creditors of the USA were claiming a new place in the new situation, a new military and political place more in keeping with their economic power.

For the USA, the Gulf war had to be a brutal reaffirmation of its authority over the world, and above all over Europe and Japan. And from this point of view it was a real victory for the American Godfather, at least in the immediate. The events of the months which followed the war clearly illustrated this.

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"The USA, drawing profit from its recent military victory, is in the process of transforming its advantage into a political victory on every continent."[8]

This is how Boucheron, the president of the defense commission of the French National Assembly, recently summarized the international situation. He knows what he is talking about. In Europe, after the Franco-German fanfares that questioned the role of NATO, all the powers have slunk back into line under the pressure of the Americans. The American military has even pushed through the formation of a 'rapid intervention force' within NATO, the bulk of whose forces will be located in Germany, but under the command of America's most faithful ally, Great Britain. For the latter, as for certain eastern countries newly acquired to western influence (Poland, Czechoslovakia), the major fear is of a reunified German capitalism, and they see the American presence as an effective antidote to this menace. The Japanese government has also lowered the tone of all its recriminations, and, like Germany, it has made its 'war contribution' to its great American rival.

As for the countries in the Japanese sphere of influence, they generally look favourably at American pressure in the region because they are afraid of the chaos that would result from Japan's rise to political and military strength. Bob Hawke, the Australian prime minister, openly came out in favour of maintaining American military presence in this part of the world in order to dissuade the regional powers "from acquiring new military capacities which could destabilize the region and unleash a new arms race within it."

The fear of chaos isn't limited to the American government alone. In affirming its role as the world's military and political policeman, the USA is intervening as a 'last resort' against the centrifugal tendencies developing all over the planet, and it is imposing its 'order' with unprecedented arrogance. In Iraq, it dealt with the Kurdish problem in the most cynical manner, ridding itself of the danger of an even greater destabilization of the region, which would have resulted from the political autonomy of a population which lives in five key countries in the region (Iraq, Syria, Turkey, USSR and Iran); in the USSR it refused any real support to the independence movement in the Baltic republics in order to avoid a further destabilization of the former 'Evil Empire'; it also exerts a direct hold over the Moscow government itself, using the pressure of economic aid (see the article 'The USSR in pieces' in this issue); in Ethiopia, which was faced with the threat of breaking up after the victory of the 'rebels', the same authoritarian policeman took it upon itself to organize the London conference which made it possible to form an Ethiopian government around the Tigreans of the EPRDF, and which pressed the Eritrean separatists and the Oromos to cooperate with the new power; in Yugoslavia it's again the US government which has threatened to suspend economic aid if the Serbian bourgeois clique doesn't change its attitude to Croat demands, a situation which is threatening to lead to the breakup of the country; in Pakistan Washington has stopped supplying conventional weapons and a part of its economic aid as long as the Islamabad government fails to provide proof that it is not building nuclear weapons; the American bourgeoisie has even forbidden China from selling Pakistan certain materials that could be used to this end.

This is the 'victory' feted by American capital: the immediate consolidation of its position as the world's number one gangster. It is a victory over its direct competitors, proof of its determination to limit certain aspects of the decomposition which threatens its empire. But the worldwide tendency towards chaos and barbarism will not be held back for all that.

The inevitable slide into chaos

The power of American capital may exert itself all over the planet and momentarily moderate this or that aspect of global chaos. But it cannot reverse the course of the gigantic torrent of blood and filth invading the planet. The new world disorder is not a fortuitous coincidence between different phenomena which are unrelated to each other, and which could therefore be solved one after the other. Behind the present chaos there is a logic, the logic of the advanced decadence of a form of social organization. As marxism and marxism alone analyzed and predicted (the same marxism which the ruling class believes, or would like to have us believe, has been buried with the remains of Stalinism), it's at the very heart of the capitalist relations of production that we can find the key to the impasse which condemns society to this apocalyptic situation.

The economic crisis of capitalism has more and more wiped out the economic capacities of the 'third world' countries. In May 1991, in the aftermath of the huge and destructive waste of the Gulf war, and when the big agricultural powers of the west were deciding to sterilize millions of acres of cultivatable land in order to cope with 'overproduction;', the secretary general of that den of gangsters, the UN, launched an appeal on behalf of Africa, where 30 million people are threatened by famine.

It's this same economic impasse which has led to the collapse of the worm-eaten edifice of state capitalism in the eastern bloc.

It's the economic crisis which, in the industrialized western nations, has led to the industrial desertification of entire areas, generalized job insecurity and unemployment. It's this crisis which is now going through a new acceleration, hitting the centre of the system with full force (see the article on the economic crisis in this issue).

The economic machine is exploiting a diminishing number of workers. A growing portion of society has been ejected from capitalist production, and is being atomized, marginalized, condemned to live by all kinds of little jobs or expedients. This is the generalization of poverty[9]. It's the decomposition of capitalism's social tissue.

Within the possessing class, the economic crisis is also synonymous with sharpening competition. Whether between nations or within each nation, competition is intensifying on the economic and military levels. Blind violence, military language more and more replace economic language. The war of each against all, a feature of capitalism since its beginning, is reaching a paroxysm in this final phase of the system. It's every man for himself in a world without a future.

Capitalist relations of production have become a historic aberration whose survival can only give rise to barbarism, as was the case with slave or feudal relations in their periods of decline. But unlike the past where new social relations (feudal ones after slavery, capitalist ones after feudalism) could begin to develop within the old order, the installation of a new society based on communist relations can only come about on the political ruins of the previous system.

Capitalist logic leads to the economic collapse of the system, but not to its supersession. This can only be the conscious and deliberate act of the world proletariat. If the working class does not manage to take its fight against capital to a revolutionary conclusion, if it does not concretely open up the perspective of a new society, we will not have communism but the barbarous putrefaction of the old capitalist society and the threat of the disappearance of the human species, either through world war, or through decomposition and generalized chaos. The resistance by the proletariat of the central countries against being ideologically dragooned by capitalism has prevented the crisis from leading to world war between two blocs, but it has not been able to slow down the resulting putrefaction of capitalist society. What we are living through today, what is at the source of all the chaos today, is the phenomenon of capitalism simply rotting on its feet, deprived of any perspective.

This is why the action of American capital, however powerful the means it has at its disposal, cannot really reverse this march towards the abyss.

On the level of inter-imperialist conflicts, the Middle East remains an unstable powder-keg in which despite Washington's strongman diplomacy, the explosion of new armed conflicts is inevitable. Already Israel has resumed bombing areas of southern Lebanon and keeps on replying to the pressures on it to 'trade territories for peace' with accusations against Syria for 'devouring Lebanon'[10]. The Gulf war has not brought a definitive peace; it merely demonstrated the means that American capital will use to maintain its supremacy.

As for the economic competition between nations, there are no grounds for thinking that it's going to grow any milder. The aggravation of the economic crisis can only exacerbate it. Here again the action of American capital has functioned as a show of strength to compensate for its weakness vis-a-vis its competitors[11]. "I don't believe that US leadership should be limited to the areas of security and politics. I think that it also has to extend to the economic domain"[12]. This declaration by J Baker does not herald a conciliatory attitude by American capital, but, once again, the method it will use to face up to the economic war.

Whether on the political/military level or the economic level, the perspective is not one of peace and order but war and chaos between countries.

But the tendency towards disintegration also expresses itself within each nation. Whether we're talking about the dislocation of the USSR, of Yugoslavia, of India, of Ethiopia or the majority of African countries, the ravages of poverty and the war to the death between each clique of the capitalist class can only intensify. And a few crumbs of 'humanitarian' aid by the USA or some other power won't reverse the underlying tendencies that are tearing these countries apart.

The class struggle

There can be no struggle against chaos and the dislocation of society unless there is an attack on the source of all this: capitalist social relations. And only the struggle of the proletariat can be an irreconcilable fight against capital. Only the antagonism between labor and capital has the historic and international dimension that is indispensable if there is to be a response to a problem on this scale.

The future of humanity depends on the outcome of the struggle between the workers and the bourgeoisie in all countries. But this in turn depends on the capacity of the workers to recognize the real struggle they have to wage. If the proletariat does not manage to escape from the chaotic whirlpool which causes it to split up along religious, racial, ethnic or other lines, if it does not manage to unite itself by imposing the class terrain as the only terrain worth fighting on, the door will be wide open to the acceleration of chaos and decomposition.

In the underdeveloped countries, where the class is in a minority and has less traditions of struggle, the workers have much more difficulty in escaping the grip of these archaic divisions that are so alien to the class struggle. In the eastern countries, despite all the combativity that has been evident in recent months (in particular with the miners of the USSR and a number of sectors in Bylo-Russia), the working class is weighed down by all the current nationalist, democratic, and of course 'anti-communist' mystifications.

It's in the central countries of western capitalism that the antagonism between capital and labor exists in its most direct and complete from. The working class there represents the majority of the population and its historical experience is the richest, both as regards the mystifications of the bourgeoisie and its own mass struggles. Here are located the decisive battalions of the world proletarian army. The opening up of a new horizon for the workers of the entire world depends on the capacity of the workers in these countries to spring the traps laid by capitalist decomposition (competition faced with the threat of unemployment, conflicts between workers of different national origins, the marginalization of the unemployed), on their ability to clearly affirm their irreconcilable opposition to capital.

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

The Gulf war gave rise to a deep disquiet in the world population and in particular in the proletariat of the industrialized countries. The end of the conflict engendered a feeling of relief, reinforced by the gigantic ideological campaigns about the new era of peace, the 'new world order'. But this feeling can only be relative and short-lived as the dark clouds of chaos gather all over the planet and upset the 'optimistic' speeches of the ruling class. Nothing could be more dangerous for the revolutionary class than forgetting what the Gulf war was and what it heralds. In the face of the aggravation of the economic crisis and all the attacks on workers' living conditions that go with it, in the defensive struggles that these attacks will provoke, it is crucial that the working class is able to benefit from all the reflection that this disquiet about the war has given rise to. The class will only be able to raise its consciousness, understand the real dimensions of its struggle and carry out its historic task if it looks reality in the face, if it refuses to be 'consoled' by the seductive speeches of the ruling class, and if it rediscovers its revolutionary program and its principal weapon of political combat - marxism.

RV

16/6/91

[1] Since the First World War, the manipulation of opinion has been seen by the capitalist class as the job of the government. During the 30s, with fascism in Italy and Germany, with Stalinism in the USSR, but also and above all with the more subtle Hollywood democracy of the USA, this has become a truly gigantic enterprise, the major concern of every political leadership. Goebbels, the master of Hitlerite propaganda, cynically summed up the method that was being adopted by every government on the planet: "a lie repeated a thousand times becomes a truth".

[2] Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1991.

[3] The military spokesmen remained systematically vague or silent when questioned on this point "We are not here to discuss the pornography of war" a British colonel replied during a press conference on the balance-sheet of the war (Liberation, 26 March, 91). The official figures for losses on the allied side are on the other hand very precise: 236 men, including 115 Americans, plus another 105 in transport accidents on the way.

[4] We know now that there were massive desertions from the Iraqi army and that this led to ferocious repression by Saddam's elite corps.

[5] It has been proved that American planes dropped leaflets in the Kurdish zones at the end of the war, calling for an uprising against Saddam's regime, and that American officers encouraged the leaders of the Kurdish bourgeois nationalist movements to launch this adventure.

[6] When we say that the US Empire undertook this war to fight against chaos, we are sometimes accused of presenting the war as a 'disinterested' action by the American leaders. But we don't think that the USA was acting altruistically just because the most sordid and selfish interests of the USA are opposed to a disorder that would threaten its dominant position in the world. Those who benefit from an existing order always oppose those who call it into question. For a more developed analysis of the causes of the war, see nos 63, 64 and 65 of this review.

[7] cited by Claude Julien in Le monde Diplomatique, October 1991

[8] cited by J Fitchett in Herald Tribune, 12/6/91

[9] Marx's analysis predicting the "absolute pauperization" of society, which during the 1960s was so decried by the so-called theoretical gravediggers of marxism, is today being confirmed in a striking and tragic manner.

[10] American capital has no illusions on this score. Thus, at the same time as it was piling the pressure on Israel to take up a more conciliatory stance vis-a-vis its Arab neighbors, the USA decided to supply the Israeli state with major new stocks of weapons: 46 F-16 fighters, 25 F-15s, in all 700 million dollars worth of weaponry, transmitted directly from the USA's 'arms surplus'. The new weapons stocks will be able to be used by the armies of both states. What's more the USA is financing 80% of Israel's anti-missile missile program.

[11] Without losing a sense of proportion, the USA has been in a comparable position to that of the USSR, with an economy weaker than that of its main vassals. This is to a large extent due to the weight of military expenses which the head of a bloc inevitably has to bear (see 'What point has the crisis reached' in IR 65)

[12] Herald Tribune, 21/2/91.

Who said: "I am aware that we are on the verge of the dislocation of both economy and state"? Gorbachev himself! With every day that passes, the USSR plunges deeper into chaos. The ship of the state is rudderless, and when Gorbachev received the French President Mitterrand in early May, he gave a catastrophic overview of Perestroika, declaring that the soviets are "floundering in the dark", that "the instrumentation no longer works", and that "the crew is disunited". The new prime minister, Pavlov, a worthy representative of the Party nomenklatura, backs this up, saying that the USSR is threatened with "a colossal decomposition"[1]

Russian capitalism's road to disaster

The time, not so long ago, when the USSR's imperialist power made the world tremble, is definitively over. The USSR no longer has the means to keep up its rank as a world imperialist super-power. On the economic level, it never has had. The USSR, despite its under-development, had been able to challenge its American rival (whose GNP in 1990 was three times greater than its own) by concentrating the whole economy in the hands of the state and sacrificing it completely to the needs of its military power.

For decades, the USSR has devoted between 20% and 40% of national income to arms production and the maintenance of the "Red Army". This priority was imposed at the cost of increasing dilapidation in the rest of the economy. The high-tech sectors fell further and further behind. This then rebounded on the arms industry, with the growing technical superiority technical superiority of Western weapons, which still further handicapped Russian military power. Where technology was lacking, or machines unavailable, the brain and brawn of the proletariat was brutally exploited. Under the iron fist of the Stalinist party, the USSR was transformed into gigantic labor camp.

In the end, the USSR was unable to fight the war which it had prepared for so long. Not only were its weapons completely outclassed, the regime's utter rejection by the population made mobilization necessary for war completely impossible.

Faced with the economic collapse, the nomenklatura was forced into an agonizing reappraisal. Economic modernization became an urgent necessity: for this, reforms were required. Gorbachev was to be the standard-bearer of the new economic policy of Perestroika. However, calling into question the economic dogmas which served as a base for Stalinist state capitalism inevitably also meant calling into question the political dogmas at the heart of Stalinism itself, and in particular the dogma of the dictatorial power of the single party.

Far from putting the economy back to rights, Perestroika hastened the collapse of the politico-economic system established by Stalin. Today, the Russian bourgeoisie must confront not only the aberrations of its economy, but the USSR's accelerating plunge into the infernal spiral of economic, political and social chaos.

The question which posed today is that the very existence of the USSR.

The claim of Stalinism, the most brutal form of state capitalism, to represent communism has been the biggest lie of the century. Every fraction of the bourgeoisie, East and West, from extreme left to extreme right, has cooperated to keep it going. The language of Stalinism has prostituted Marxist vocabulary to the service of the USSR's imperialist ambitions, to providing it with an ideological umbrella and an alibi for the regime's exactions. The decomposition of the USSR today has laid bare the truth that revolutionaries have declared constantly for decades: the capitalist nature of the USSR, and the bourgeois nature of the CPSU.

The economic collapse accelerates

For the 1st quarter of 1991, relative to the same quarter of 1990, the state Office of Statistics announced an 8% fall in GNP, a 13% decline in agricultural production, a 40% plunge in exports, and an increase of 27 billion roubles in the federal budget deficit. Western estimates are more pessimistic still, and estimate the fall in GNP at 15%.

The military-industrial complex, the only branch to function with a minimum of efficiency until now, has become to all intents and purposes useless. The USSR has had to trim its imperialist ambitions. It no longer needs more weapons: it hardly knows what to do with the thousands of tanks and the tons of armaments it is being forced to evacuate from its bases in Eastern Europe. Industry's technological heart is almost at a standstill, while it waits for a hypothetical reconversion to the production of capital consumer goods, which would anyway take years. In the meantime, the USSR no longer knows what to do with the now useless technological pride of its industry.

The USSR's traditional customers in the ex-Eastern bloc are turning towards other suppliers, and Russian industry cannot hope to find other outlets for its products, which are technologically completely outdated, of poor quality, and unreliable. Nor is there any prospect of improvement with trade wars raging all throughout the world market.

The structure of the USSR's trade is characteristic of an under-developed country: it is above all an exporter of raw materials, especially oil, and at the same time an importer of food. In 1998, oil and mineral products accounted for 75% of hard currency earnings, while agricultural trade was in deficit to the tune of $12 billion.

Nonetheless, the oil industry has had to reduce production: because it has not been modernized for years, its equipment is constantly breaking down and hampered by a chronic shortage of spare parts. As a result, oil exports fell by 36 % in volume in the 1st quarter of 1991, relative to the same quarter last year.

Agriculture is in a terrible state. The specter of famine has returned to haunt the country, after being pushed back last year by an abundant grain harvest. Cereal production is expected to fall this year by 10%. A shortage of equipment, silos, transport, and machinery, means that 30% of the harvest is simply lost. The USSR will have to make up the deficit on the world market simply to face up to the immediate needs of an already severely rationed population. It will only be able to do so by going still further into debt.

Traditionally, the USSR has always been highly solvent, with a low level of debt. Today, the country is folding under the weight of a debt estimated at $60 billion. Every month sees new delays or defaults on payment, which has recently led Japan to refuse it any new credits. Gorbachev has been reduced to crying for help, begging for aid and new international loans.

But this picture of economic collapse would not be complete if we did not include the destructive effect on the economy of the dynamic of chaos into which the USSR is plunging.

In several republics, production has been virtually brought to a standstill by nationalist conflicts. The situation in the Caucasus is a revealing example. The road and rail blockade that Azerbaijan has imposed on Armenia - many of which have thus been forced to shut down - it has also created a huge bottleneck which encumbers goods transport throughout the southern USSR, forcing the closure of factories right outside the Caucasus region.

The discontent of workers, faced with a constant degradation of their already wretched living conditions, is constantly growing. Stoppages proliferate, massive strikes explode. In recent months, the miners blocked coal production for weeks.

Confronted with this catastrophic situation, the bourgeoisie is paralyzed and impotent. An important fraction within the party is deeply hostile to reform, and is deliberately sabotaging them, further accelerating the breakdown of the economy. The bureaucratic hierarchy's natural passivity is reinforced by the dithering and impotence of the hierarchs in the Kremlin. With decisions being handed down by different fractions at the center, local chiefs   prefer to wait to see which way the wind turns rather than take any decisions themselves.

In the meantime, the economy is becoming more and more dilapidated; as it waits for decisions which never come, utter disorganization reigns. Against a backdrop of increasing poverty, the black market has imposed its law of generalized corruption on the whole economy.

The paralysis of the ruling class

The form taken by the counter-revolution in Russia determined its ruling class' mode of organization. The state which emerged from the Russian Revolution, and the Bolshevik Party which had become identified with it, had been devoured from within by the Stalinist counter-revolution. The old possessing classes had been expropriated by the proletarian revolution; a new capitalist class was reconstituted within the Stalinist-Party-State, controlling all the means of production and the whole of social life. The political forms of the one-party state corresponded to the juridical form of state ownership of the means of production.

The members of the Party nomenklatura enjoy privileges which guarantee them living conditions which are simply incomparable with those of the proletariat, which subjected to a grinding poverty. The state ensures a luxurious way of life to those who control its functioning: specially reserved housing, access to shops abundantly stocked with all kinds of consumer goods, especially Western, "company" cars; over and above the salary it brings, a post in the bureaucracy is a source of hidden income from all kinds of traffic and dealing. More than any theoretical analysis, the reality of these facts is ample proof that a privileged class does exist in the USSR, a capitalist bourgeoisie which exploits the working class through the state. The form of exploitation differs from that in Western countries, but the end result is the same.

During the last decades, behind the monolithic façade of the so-called Communist party, quasi-feudal clans, Mafiosi, and dynasties have emerged. Wars between cliques have left their corpses behind, in the course of successive purges. Waste and incompetence reign at every level of the party, its leaders more preoccupied by their rivalries for power, source of wealth and influence, and be every kind of corrupt dealing, than by the management of the productive apparatus.

Brezhnev's death at the end of 1982 was the signal for the outbreak of a "war of succession" in the party, strengthening the centrifugal tendencies within it. When, after the brief interlude of Andropov and Chernenko, Gorbachev's accession to the leadership of the Politburo in 1985 confirmed the victory of the reformist tendency, the collapse of the economy was already clear for all to see, and the decomposition of the ruling party and the development of chaos in general already well under way.

Perestroika proposed to promote economic reform without calling into question either the single party or its control of the state; it only accelerated the collapse of the Stalinist regime. To preserve the unity of the party, Gorbachev had to perform a delicate balancing act between conservative and reformist tendencies; this condemned him to taking no more than half-measures, and so to impotence. Ever since this accession to power, Gorbachev's whole art has been to present a belated recognition that the situation was slipping more and more out of state's control, as a determined policy of bold reform. From one day to the next, Gorbachev has been obliged to accept what he had refused the day before. The aim of Perestroika was to save the USSR and its bloc through a policy of reform; Gorbachev, after trying vainly to maintain in power reformist factions under Moscow's control, has had to abandon any control by the USSR over the countries which has used to form its "glacis" in Eastern Europe. After rejecting repressive methods, he has had to send the army to repress nationalist agitation in the Caucasus and Baku, and against the Lithuanian parliament. After allying with the reformers, he has had to seek support from the conservatives, and vice-versa.

The attempts to gain democratic credibility have been a resounding flop. The elections only highlighted the irredeemable unpopularity of the Party apparatchiks. Nationalist and radical reformers monopolize the votes. In the absence of any food to fill the abyss between the population of the USSR and the Stalinist state. The years of horror, when millions of proletarians and peasants fell under the repression of a corrupt and ferocious state will never be forgotten. Under such conditions, despite all his media skill Gorbachev is incapable of controlling any democratic process. The latest referendum on the Union is a fine example. After years of preparation, it only entrenched the perspectives of disunity: the Armenians, Georgians, and Balts are hostile to the union, and refused to take part; the vote embodied the continued decline of Gorbachev's popularity, and the growing influence of his reformist rival Yeltsin.

The party is imploding, blurring at the edges. A myriad of new organizations have appeared. The Stalinist nostalgics, in favor of strong-arm methods to restore order, go arm-in-arm with the ultra-nationalist, anti-semites Pamyat. The radical reformers leave the party to found democratic associations. In the peripheral republics, splits have created new "communist" parties on a nationalist basis, confirming the breakup of the CPSU. Opportunism is raging. For many one-time apparatchiks, the only means of survival are populist and nationalist demagogy. Under the flags of various nationalities that are stirring the USSR, new alliances of convenience are being formed between the old local fiefdoms of the CPSU, the milieu of wheeler-dealers that has emerged from the flourishing black market, the reformists ranging from the worst kind of opportunist to naïve sould full of democratic illusions, and the historically archaic nationalists.

Ever-wider regions of the USSR are escaping from central control. The independentists are in power in the Baltic states, in Moldavia, in Armenia. Everywhere, the prerogatives of the central power are being reined in, the ruling nationalism encourages disobedience to orders from the Kremlin, while the local state bureaucracy, confronted with the paralysis of the center, hesitates between immobility and support for the newly emerging local powers. Power centers are proliferating everywhere.

Party and state have fractured from top to bottom. The recent agreement between Yeltsin and Gorbachev on the devolution of central power over management of mines to the republics, and the creation of a KGB under the control of the Russian government is an indication of the impotence of the central power.

The long miner's strike has demonstrated the Kremlin's inability to impose its will and get production going again. Since it no longer has any control over whole branches of the economy, it has no other solution than to leave management in the hands of the various local authorities. The USSR's economy is in the process of disintegrating into different poles. The central government is even beginning to lose control over international trade: several republics have already begun to trade directly with each other and with the West, accelerating the centrifugal dynamic of the soviet economy.

Like the party, the police apparatus which is so closely linked to it is splitting up more and more, putting itself at the service of the new nationalist centers of power. New police forces and nationalist militia are taking place of the old police forces to closely tied Moscow.

Frontiers have been set up within the USSR, defended by armed nationalist militias. Lithuania has set up frontier posts, and its frontier guards have clashed several times with Moscow police, resulting in several deaths. The conflict between Armenian and Azerbaijani militias has not diminished in the least since the intervention of the "Red" Army. Pogroms, war and repression in Baku have caused hundreds of deaths. The "Red" Army has not bogged down, without being able to impose a solution on the conflict. In Georgia, recent clashes between Georgians and Ossetians grow that a new area of tension has opened. Ethnic conflicts are proliferating at the farthest confines of Russia.

Within this context of disintegration, the only structure which has all resisted the overall decomposition, and the loss of control by the central power, and which still makes it possible to maintain some pretense of cohesion within the USSR, is the army. However, the same dynamic which dominates the USSR as a whole, is at work here also. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers repatriated from Eastern Europe find themselves and their families unhoused, living in conditions of real poverty which are all the more resented in that they have just returned from countries with a higher standard of living. This is aggravating the general malaise that has infected the army since the retreat from Afghanistan. There are out and out battles in the barracks between soldiers of different nationalities. Draft-dodging, desertion, and insubordination are becoming commonplace.

The soviet bourgeoisie no longer has the means to conduct a generalized repression. Although its army can still undertake to keep the peace in some regions, its room for maneuver is nonetheless very limited. The repressive apparatus' hesitations over the situation in Lithuania or the Caucasus express perfectly the disarray and impotence of the Kremlin government. Only a few principles, nostalgic for the Stalinist past, still think that large scale repression is still possible without tipping the USSR still faster into civil war.

The proletariat caught in the whirlwind

Neither the widespread discontent, nor the regime's complete lack of credibility, much less the class struggle, lay behind the collapse of the Stalinist state. The discontent is not new, nor is the state's lack of credibility. As for the class struggle, we only have to remark that there was no significant struggle in the USSR before the miner's strike in 1989.

In the name of the defense of communism and proletarian internationalism, generations of proletarians have been subjected to the bestiality of Stalinism, the product of the defeat of the Russian revolution. In rejecting the regime the workers of the USSR have also rejected all the proletariat's revolutionary tradition, its class experience, leading the descendants of the proletarians of the Revolution into total political confusion, identifying the worst capitalist dictatorship with socialism. In reaction to Stalinism, soviet workers' hopes for change have turned towards the mythical past of national folklore, or towards the wonderful mirage of Western capitalist "democracy".

The proletariat is suffering even more strongly from the devastating consequences of this dynamic of disintegration and decomposition because it did not overthrow the Stalinist regime itself. The democratic illusion has no historical roots in Russia, and remains the domain of petty bourgeois intellectuals. The proletariat is more receptive to populist and nationalist demagogy. The weight of nationalism on the proletariat is due both to the backwardness of Russian capitalism which was unable to integrate the populations colonized by Tsarism, given its economic weakness, and to the gut reaction against the central government, which is the symbol of years of terror and dictatorship.

With Perestroika, in the name of reforms and change, the attacks on workers' living conditions have intensified. Wage rises have not kept pace with the repeated price increases for staple products. Inflation is expected to be in triple figures for 1991. At the beginning of April, the prices of bread rose by 200%, that of sugar by 100%. The same is happening with all staple products. Under the pretext of renewing bank notes, the state stole the saves of wage-earners and pensioners. Rationing is applied to more and more products. Under such conditions, discontent has grown. According to the Office of Statistics, strikes have cost 1.17 million working hours during the first quarter of 1991. But although these developing strikes show that workers have recovered their combativity, and that they are ready to resist the attacks on their living conditions, they also illustrate their political weakness and confusion. We can see this in the miners' strike which hit the whole USSR this spring, or in the general strike in Byelorussia at the same time.

Although this strike began on the economic terrain, their strike committees were soon under the control of the most nationalist elements. The miners' strike shut down production in hundreds of pits, and mobilized hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the USSR; it rejected all the central government's proposals. And yet, the separate negotiations by strike committees with representatives of each republic, led to the movement's fragmentation. In Russia, Yeltsin's nationalist and populist demagogy, promising the miners that they "would have the right to chose their type of management and property" had more effect in stopping the strike than Prime Minister Pavlov's offer to double wages. No sooner than the miners gone back to work than Yeltsin, who had been gaining a cheap radical credibility for Gorbachev's resignation, returned to an alliance with Gorbachev to establish "exceptional rules" banning strikes in transport, basic industry, and enterprises producing for soviet consumers.

The weakness of the proletariat in the USSR in confronting the mystifications of democracy and nationalism means that not only is it incapable of defending any perspective against chaos, its struggles are being dragged off their class terrain and doomed to defeat. Yeltsin has been able to use the miners' strike to reinforce his own political credibility and economic. The central government's recent abandonment of its sovereignty over coal production is only a forecasts of what is to come, and heralds the breakup of soviet capital.

Too weak to resist, the proletariat is also affected by the dynamic of decomposition and disintegration ravaging the USSR. The poison of nationalism is a gangrene which not only hampers the proletariat in its struggle, but is a mortal factor in the destruction of its class identity and the division of the workers. In Armenia, Azerbaidjan, Georgia, the Baltic states, the workers are demonstrating not on their own class terrain, but on the terrain of nationalism, where they are atomized, diluted in the generalized discontent which nationalism crystallizes, enrolled in nationalist militia, drawn into new conflicts as in the Caucasus. The situation of decomposition which has affected the proletariat in the peripheral republics threatens the working class throughout the USSR.

The fear of great powers faced with the break-up of the USSR

Far from rejoicing at the tribulations of their one-time imperialist rival, which had been an object of fear for decades, the Western powers are gripped with anxiety at the consequences of the Stalinist system's collapse.

The break-up of the Russian bloc has determined the disappearance of its Western rival which has lost its reasons for existence, thus liberating worldwide capitalism's natural tendency to struggle "every man for himself". Stalinism's political collapse in the USSR has dragged down its allies all over the world. The various communist parties have had to give up power throughout Eastern Europe; they are replaced by fragile, unstable regimes which has set the seal on their new independence and the USSR's loss of control. At the periphery of capitalism, dictatorships whose sole legitimacy lay in the military and political support they received from the USSR have had to give up power. The ex-Eastern bloc troops have had to withdraw from Angola, and the MPLA has had to give in to Western diktats. In Ethiopia, the loss of Soviet arms supplies forced Mengistu to save his skin by fleeing abroad. One can only wonder how long Castro will survive in Cuba. The example is contagious, and is making all the dictatorships more fragile. The USSR's collapse is a profoundly destabilizing factor in the world situation as a whole.

The reawakening of the nationalities is accompanied by the exacerbation of nationalist tension. The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan is a foretaste of the disorder that will afflict these new states, whose existence is founded on the most archaic and anachronistic aspects of different national cultures.

The gigantic arsenal of the "Red" Army is threatened with dispersal as the USSR breaks up. Tomorrow, nuclear weapons and power stations, thousands, or tens of thousands of tanks and cannon, and guns are liable to fall into the hands of the most anachronistic forces thrown up by the putrefaction of the Stalinist regime. Any idea of the great powers controlling nuclear proliferation will become completely outdated, and the risk of nuclear "accidents" like Chernobyl vastly greater. Chernobyl is no accident: it is the exact concentration of the situation in the USSR.

Faced with such destabilization, the world's other great powers, with the USA and the European powers to the fore have no interest in any acceleration of the USSR's collapse, and disintegration into a multitude of rival states. Together, they will make every effort to support the factors of political cohesion in the USSR, and promote reforms to try to stabilize the economic and social situation.

In these conditions, the West can only support Gorbachev, who is the last guarantor of the USSR's unity, and a proclaimed partisan of reforms. The Western powers have followed this policy strictly for years, but in doing so they trapped themselves in the same contradictions as Perestroika. The least decompose fractions of the Party whose support Gorbachev depends on regroup those most hostile, or most timid towards reforms. With Pavlov as Prime Minister, the old guard is back in command. The most reformist factions have joined the nationalists, and their victory today would mean acceleration of the dynamic towards disintegration. For the sake of maintaining international frontiers and preserving the increasingly theoretical existence of the USSR, Western "democracies" are supporting, by conveniently closing their eyes to it, the repression aimed at calming the fever for independence of the Armenians, Lithuanians, and Georgians. The incapacity of the various Perestroika governments to reform the production going again, has led to desperate appeals for international aid and new loans. Prime Minister Pavlov, who only recently was accusing the West of poisoning last winter's food aid with radio-active elements, now declares that "we won't make it without Western help".

But the Western economies are under pressure from the advancing recession; they do not have the means to coming to the rescue of the soviet economy. The scarcity of funds, and pressing priorities make a new Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe and the USSR impossible. We only have to look at the situation in East Germany, which was the most developed country in the bloc, to see that the chaos of the USSR could absorb billions of dollars without any productive effect. Western loans are going to plug gaps and ease the immediate social tension, without any other result than to put off the day of reckoning.

But if the West is forced to limit its economic aid, it is not so stingy with its political help to Gorbachev. The leader of the soviet state is recognized as its only valid spokesman, and is given first class world media coverage. As for the representatives of the various nationalities emerging in the USSR, whenever they travel abroad they find themselves being lectured. They are advised to be patient, to calm their nationalist ardor, to enter into a dialogue with Moscow. When Yeltsin travelled to Europe last spring, just after demanding Gorbachev's resignation, he was rebuffed time after time. There was no question of the West giving greater credibility to the Russian leader, whose victory would mean the faster breakup of the USSR. Apparently, Yeltsin got the message, since on his return he made a complete U-turn and made an alliance with Gorbachev. The West is using every means it can to put pressure on the different players in the drama of the USSR, in an attempt to calm things down.

But the West does not have the means to prevent the inevitable breakup of the USSR, any more than Gorbachev. The most it can do is to try to slow it down, to gain time in order to control the most explosive aspects of the situation. The impotence of both the West and Gorbachev is an expression of the fact that the same fundamental contradictions which determine the collapse of the USSR are also at work in the rest of the world[2]. The ‘Third World' has preceded the USSR into the chaos it is undergoing today. The USSR's decomposition is not merely a product of its own specificities; it is the expression of a worldwide dynamic, which has been concretized more explosively and faster in the USSR because of the weakness of its capital and its historic specificities.

Unable to find any palliatives, or any way out of its contradictions, world capital has been sinking for more than 20 years ever deeper into crisis. The economic collapse of the USSR, after that of the Third World, and its present "Africanization", reveals the advance gangrene of decomposition which weighs today, ever more strongly, on the planet as a whole[3]. JJ                                 

[1] See International Review no. 60, ‘Theses on the Economic and Political Crisis in Eastern Europe, and the Definitive Bankruptcy of Stalinism' and International Review no. 61, ‘After the collapse of the Eastern bloc, Destabilization and Chaos'.

[2] See International Review no. 57, ‘The Decomposition of Capitalism' and no. 62, ‘Decomposition, the final phase of Capitalist Decadence'.

[3] See the editorial in this issue of the International Review.

The Gulf War is a forceful reminder to the working class that capitalism itself is war, the very height of barbarism, and this can only encourage it to think deeply about the kind of society it 's living in. This is why, throughout the war, the bourgeoisie of the 'democratic' countries systematically hid the extent of the destruction and maneuvers it was carrying out, and why, after the war, it organized a gigantic humanitarian campaign around the massacre of the Kurds in order to make workers forget its own crimes and its responsibility in this massacre. The bourgeoisie of the great 'democracies' has long experience at this level, both in killing and in lies and cynicism. The proletariat must remember the crimes committed by the 'democratic' bourgeoisie, as well as its direct or indirect complicity in the massacres and destruction perpetrated by Stalinism and fascism.

Introduction:

Lies and Cynicism from the Bourgeoisie During and After the Gulf War

Throughout the war, we hardly saw any pictures of the massacres and destruction inflicted on the Iraqi population. The absolute rule was: total blackout and a strict control of the media. To this day there are no precise figures, but it's certain that more than 200,000 civilians and nearly 250,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed, not to mention the wounded and those who will be infirm for the rest of their lives. After all the obscene boasts about 'surgical precision bombing', an American general in charge of the US air force has admitted that out of the 88,500 tons of bombs rained on Iraq, less than 7 % were laser-guided, that 70 % of the bombs missed their target and that the airmen had 'sprayed' their bombs without too much concern for pin-point accuracy, using that old and sinister method of 'carpet bombing'! One can imagine the damage done to civilian areas in such conditions. But little or none of this ever filtered through.

By contrast, the media did their utmost to convey the morbid spectacle of thousands of Kurds, women, children and the old, dying of hunger and cold, lapping stagnant water like dogs and fighting around the trucks for a crust of bread or a bottle of water.

The incredible cynicism and duplicity of the American, French and British bourgeoisie was once again demonstrated in the most sinister manner. Because not only did they use these massacres in order to make people forget their own war crimes - they were also directly responsible for this genocidal massacre which took the total number of war victims close to a million.

The bourgeoisie of the 'Coalition' had deliberately pushed for the Shiite and Kurdish rebellions. They had encouraged the Kurdish bourgeois cliques to proclaim the uprising by leading them to believe they would receive the necessary support; and then they carefully ensured that no aid was forthcoming and that Saddam Hussein had the forces he required to repress the revolt. By laying this trap, in which at least 250,000 people died, the 'Coalition' bourgeoisie killed two birds with one stone.

On the one hand, jt made it easier for their own war crimes to be forgotten by focusing attention on the new crimes of the 'Hitler of the Middle East'; and at the same time, through this massive repression, they prevented the Lebanisation of the whole region, which would have been the result of a successful uprising by the Kurds and Shiites. And they did this without getting their own hands dirty, since that devil Saddam once again took on the butcher's job. This is why although the repression took place under the eyes of the American army, it wasn't until it had been completed that the tearful appeals for humanitarian action began to be issued.

The Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie, its capacity to manipulate events and send hundreds of thousands of human beings to their deaths, is nothing new. The horrors in the Gulf are the continuation of a long and macabre series. Throughout the decadence of capitalism, the grand 'democracies' have accumulated a huge experience in this bloody game, whether in dealing with the always dangerous situations which arise in a country defeated in war, or in justifying and obscuring their own crimes by fixing attention on the diabolic deeds of the 'other' side.

The Second World War: the crimes and massacres of democracy and anti-fascism

The list of crimes and butcheries perpetuated by those paragons of law and morality, the old bourgeois democracies, is so long that you could hardly do justice to it in an entire issue of this Review. Let's recall the First World War where the main protagonists were democracies, including the Russia of 1917 under the 'socialist' and 'democrat' Kerensky, and where the social democratic parties played a major role as purveyors of cannon fodder. The latter also didn't hesitate to put on the butcher's apron when it came to the bloody repression of the German revolution in January 1919, when thousands of workers perished in the city of Berlin alone. Let's also recall the British, French and American expeditionary corps sent to put down the October revolution; the genocide of the Armenians by the Turkish state with the direct complicity of the French and British governments; the gassing of the Kurds by the British army in 1925, etc ... The more capitalism has sunk into decadence the more its method of survival has become war and terror, and this goes for the 'democratic' states as well as the totalitarian ones.

But in the necessarily limited context of a single article, we will restrict ourselves to denouncing something that, without doubt, stands alongside the monstrous identification between Stalinism and communism as the greatest lie of the century, the so-called war of 'democracy against fascism', of law and morality against Nazi barbarism, which is still the way it is taught in school text books. A war in which the barbarism was supposedly on one side only, that of the Axis powers; a war which, as far as the virtuous democratic camp is concerned, is presented as being a purely defensive one and, to use the current terms of bourgeois propaganda, essentially a 'clean' one.

A study of the second world war not only enables one to measure the enormity of this lie, but also to understand how, during and after the Gulf war, the democratic bourgeoisie drew heavily on the experience it acquired during this crucial historic period.

The terror bombing of the German population

As soon as he came to power in 1940, the head of state of the world's oldest democracy, Britain, and also the real war leader of the Allied camp, Sir Winston Churchill, set up 'Bomber Command' - the central nucleus of the heavy bomber squadrons whose task was to sow terror in the German cities. To justify this strategy of terror, to provide an ideological cover for it, Churchill made use of the massive German bombing of London and Coventry in the autumn of 1940 and the bombing of Rotterdam, the scale of the latter being deliberately exaggerated (the Anglo-American media spoke of 30,000 victims when in fact it was more like 1000).

With this ideological cover assured, Linndeman, Churchill's adviser, could make the following suggestion in March 1942: "An offensive of extensive bombing could sap the moral of the enemy providing it is directed against the working class areas of the 58 German towns which have a population more than 100,000 ..." and he concluded by saying that "Between March 1942 and the middle of 1943 it should be possible to make one third of the total population of Germany homeless."

The British bourgeoisie then adopted this strategy of terror, but in all its official declarations, the government of His Gracious Majesty insisted on the fact that "Bomber Command was only bombing military targets, and any allusions to attacks on working class or civilian areas were rejected as absurd and as an affront to the honor of airmen sacrificing their lives for their country."

The first illustration that this was a cynical lie was the bombing of Hamburg in June 1943. The massive use of incendiary bombs left 50,000 dead and 40,000 wounded, mainly in working class residential areas. The centre of the city was entirely destroyed and, in two nights, the total number of victims was equal to the number killed by bombs on the British side throughout the war! In Kassel, in October 1943, nearly 10,000 civilians perished in a huge tempest of bombs.

Faced with certain questions about the extent of damage caused to the civilian population, the British government invariably replied that "there was no instruction to destroy homes and Bomber Command's targets were always military."

From the beginning of 1944, the terror raids on Darmstadt, Konisberg and Heilbronn claimed over 24,000 civilian victims. In Braunschweig the Allies had perfected their technique to the point where not one comer of the residential areas escaped the incendiary bombs. 23,000 people were trapped by a huge firestorm in the centre of the town and were carbonized or asphyxiated.

However there was a total black-out on all this and an American general (US forces began to participate massively in these 'extensive bombings') declared at the time that: "we must at all costs avoid giving the historians of this war any reason for accusing us 0!4irecting strategic bombing against the man in the street." Fifteen days before this declaration as US raid on Berlin had wiped out 25,000 civilians, and the general must have been quite well aware of this. The lies and cynicism which prevailed throughout the Gulf war are part of a long and solid tradition among our great democracies.

This strategy of terror inspired and led by Churchill had three objectives: first, to accelerate the military defeat of Germany by sapping the morale of the population; second, to stifle any possibility of revolt, and above all of proletarian movements. It was no accident that the terror bombing became systematic at the time when workers' strikes were breaking out in Germany and when (late '43) desertions from the German army were on the increase. Churchill, who had already played the role of bloodhound against the Russian revolution, was particularly aware of this danger. Third and final of Churchill' s objectives, particularly in 1945 with the Yalta conference of February fast approaching, was the question of using these bombings to place the 'democracies' in a position of strength faced with the advance of the Russian army, which Churchill judged to be taking place too rapidly.

The barbarism and murder unleashed by these air raids, whose principal victims were workers and refugees, reached their paroxysm in Dresden in February 1945. In Dresden there was no industry of any importance, nor any military strategic installations, and it was for this reason that Dresden became a place of refuge for hundreds of thousands fleeing the air raids and the advance of the 'Red Army'. Blinded by the democratic propaganda of the Allies, they thought that Dresden would never be bombed. The German authorities were also taken in because they set up a number of civilian hospitals in the city. The British government was well aware of this situation, and some military heads of 'Bomber Command' expressed serious reservations about the military validity of this target. The dry response was that Dresden was a priority target for the Prime Minister, and that was that.

When they bombed Dresden on February 13 and 14 1945, the British and American bourgeoisie knew perfectly well that there were nearly a million and a half people there, a large number of them women and child refugees, wounded, and prisoners of war. 650,000 incendiary bombs fell on the city, producing the most gigantic firestorm of the Second World War. Dresden burned for 8 days and the fires could be seen from 250km away. Certain neighborhoods burned so fiercely that it was weeks before anyone could enter the cellars. Out of 35,000 residential buildings, only 7000 remained standing. The entire town centre had disappeared and most of the hospitals had been destroyed.

On February 14, 450 US Flying Fortress bombers, following on from the British bombers, dropped another 771 tons of incendiary bombs. The balance sheet of what was undoubtedly one of the greatest war crimes of WW2 was 250,000 dead, nearly all of them civilians. By way of comparison, that other odious crime, Hiroshima, claimed 75,000 victims and the terrible American bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, 85,000.

Ordering the bombing of Chemnitz in the days that followed, the commandeers didn't mince their words. The airmen were told: "Your objective tonight is to finish off all the refugees who may have escaped from Dresden." With this butcher's language, one can see that the anti-fascist coalition was fully the equal of the Nazis when it came to barbarism. By November 1, 1945, after 18 months of bombing, 45 of the 60 main cities of Germany had been almost completely destroyed. At least 650,000 civilians died in these terror raids.

And in terms of shameful lying and cynicism, the Allies were equal to a Goebbels or a Stalin. In reply to the questions raised about these terrifying massacres, the Anglo-American bourgeoisie replied, against all evidence, that Dresden was a very important industrial and military centre. Churchill at first added that it was the Russians who had requested the bombing, which all historians today consider to be false; then he tried to push the responsibility onto the military, using it as a kind of smear!

The Labourites, those bloodhounds, those rotten clowns of bourgeois democracy, tried to wash their hands of this horror. Clem Atlee, who succeeded Churchill, drew this reply from the head of Bomber Command: "The bombing strategy criticized by Lord Ailee was decided by Her Majesty's government, in which he [Atlee] served throughout most of the war. The decision to bomb the industrial towns was taken, and taken very clearly, before I became commander-in-chief of Bomber Command."

The strategy of terror was a political decision, taken by the entire British bourgeoisie, and also fully involved that other great democrat, Roosevelt, the man who decided to build the atomic bomb. Democratic barbarism was equal in measure to fascist and Stalinist barbarism. The grandchildren of Churchill and Roosevelt - Bush, Mitterrand, Major - showed that they had learned their lessons well, whether in terms of massacres, blackouts, lies or cynicism[1].

How the democracies made use of the Nazi concentration camps

Another example of this long tradition is the democratic bourgeoisie's ability to hide and justify its own crimes by shining all the light on the crimes of others: in this case, the way the concentration camps were used to justify the imperialist butchery on the Allied side.

We have no intention of denying the sordid and sinister reality of the death camps, but the obscene publicity made about them ever since has nothing to do with any humanitarian considerations, still less with the legitimate horror provoked by such barbarism. The bourgeoisie, both British and American, knew quite well what was happening in the camps; however, strange as it may seem, it hardly talked about them throughout the war and did not make them a central theme of its propaganda.

It wasn't until after the war that it made them the principal axiom of its justification for the world imperialist slaughter and more generally for the defense of its sacrosanct democracy. In fact, the governments of Roosevelt and Churchill were terribly afraid the Nazis would empty the camps and expel the Jews en masse. At the Anglo-American meeting in Bermuda in 1943, the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden expressed this anxiety and the decision was taken that "no United Nations ship should be equipped to effect the transfer of refugees from Europe." This was clear enough: better they die quietly in the camps!

When Romania, an ally of Germany, wanted to free 60,000 Jews, when Bulgaria wanted to do the same, they were met with a categorical refusal by that great freedom fighter, Roosevelt, for whom "transporting so many people would disorganize the war effort."

The unfortunate adventures in April 1944 of Joel Brandt, leader of an organization of Hungarian Jews, confirmed quite strikingly than the British and American democrats did not give a toss for the suffering of the Jews in the concentration camps: When the bourgeoisie invokes the Rights of Man, it's only for propaganda purposes and so it can quietly get on with its criminal activities behind this fig-leaf.

Eichmann, the SS head of the Jewish section, confided in Brandt, with the agreement of Himmler himself, that the Nazi government wanted to free 1 million Jews in exchange for 10,000 lorries, or even less. Armed with this proposal, Brandt went to see the Anglo-Americans convinced that they would accept. But as it says in the pamphlet, Auschwitz or the Great Alibi, published by the PCI (Programme Communiste), "Not only the Jews but the SS as well were taken in by the humanitarian propaganda of the Allies! The Allies didn't want this 1 million Jews! Not for 10,000 lorries, not for 5000, not even for nothing!"

Brandt met with a complete and categorical refusal from the governments both of Churchill and of Roosevelt, even though the Nazis had proposed freeing 100,000 Jews without anything in exchange as proof of their good faith. So the 1 million Jews were left to die in the camps.

At the end of the war, the USA kept most of the Jewish prisoners in the same camps as the Germans, in the most frightful conditions. The American general Patton even declared at the time: "The Jews are inferior to animals." Once again, where is the difference between a Nazi scoundrel and a democratic one? Throughout the war, the bourgeoisie of the anti-fascist camp didn't care a fig about what was happening to the Jews, or to the population in general. Later on it used the genocide of the Jews to hide its own war crimes, to hide the fact that it was capitalism as a whole that was responsible for the butchery of 1939-45 and all the unspeakable horror that went with it[2].

How democracy dealt with the workers' strikes in Italy (1943) and

the Warsaw Uprising (August 1944)

The massive repression against the Kurdish and Shiite population in Iraq, and the total complicity in these massacres of the countries defending 'human rights', can to a certain extent be compared to the attitude of the Allies during the Second World War. It's not a question of comparing clearly bourgeois movements in which the working class played no role at all, such as the Kurdish nationalist movement, with what happened in Italy in 1943 when the workers, at least in the beginning, were acting on their own class terrain. But once this fundamental distinction has been made, it's important to see what's common in the attitude of the democratic bourgeoisie yesterday and today.

In Italy at the end of '42 and especially in '43, there were strikes in nearly all the main industrial centers of the north. Everywhere, the demand was for more food and higher wages and some workers even called for the formation of factory councils and soviets, which went against the position of Togliatti's Stalinist PCI. The movement was all the more dangerous for the bourgeoisie in that the immigrant Italian workers in Germany also came out on strike and often won the support of their German class bothers.

It was largely in response to the workers' strikes that the decision was taken to dump Mussolini and replace him with Badoglio. The Allies, who had called on the Italian people to revolt against fascism, were then landing in the south and by autumn '43 had totally and solidly occupied the whole of southern Italy.

But anxious about this potentially revolutionary situation, they quickly stopped their advance, at Churchill's request, and stayed put in the south. Churchill, well versed in the experience of the revolutionary wave which ended the First World War, feared like the plague the renewal of such a scenario. So he convinced the USA to "let the Italians stew in their own juice" and to deliberately halt the advance of the Allied army towards the north. His goal was to give the German army the chance to break the back of the working class by occupying the entire north of Italy and all its big working class concentrations.

The German army was thus deliberately allowed to fortify its positions and the Allies took 18 months to conquer the entire peninsular. 18 months in which the workers would be crushed by the German army with the objective complicity of the Stalinists who called for national unity behind Badoglio. With the dirty work being done by the Germans, the Allies armies could then pose as the liberators of Italy and calmly impose their views by installing a Christian Democrat government.

In Greece, a country left to the British in the great division of spoils among imperialist sharks, Churchill again exercised his talents as a champion of freedom and democracy. Workers' strikes and demonstrations broke out at the end of 1944, though this movement was quickly taken over and derailed by the Stalinists who dominated the Greek resistance via the ELAS. ELAS led the Athenian population to confront, virtually barehanded, the British tanks occupying the city.

The democratic tanks of His Very Gracious Majesty bloodily reestablished order, to the point that Athens, which had not been bombed because of its status as a historic city, was soon half reduced to ruin. Churchill said to the British general in charge of the troops: "You are responsible for maintaining order in Athens, and must destroy or neutralize all ELAS bands that approach the town ... ELAS will of course try to push women and children forward whenever the firing begins. But don't hesitate to act as though you were in a conquered city where a local revolt has broken out," (A Stinas, Memoirs of a Revolutionary). Result: caught between the Stalinist anvil and the democratic hammer, thousands of workers perished.

What happened in Warsaw can be compared even more closely to the cynical strategy employed by the western bourgeoisie at the end of the Gulf war. The Red Army was at the gates of Warsaw, 15km from the city, on 30 July, 1944. It was then that the Warsaw population rose up against the German occupation.

For months, the Allies and the USSR had called on the population to rise, promising them all their aid; on the eve of the uprising, Radio Moscow called for an armed insurrection, assuring the support of the Red Army. The whole population revolted and, initially, this popular uprising, in which the workers played a great role, even though the weight of nationalism was very strong, succeeded in freeing a good part of the city from the German military occupation.

The population launched itself all the more massively into revolt because it was convinced it would soon get help. "Allied help for' our uprising seemed to go without question. We were fighting Hitlerism, and so we had the right to suppose that all the nations united in this fight would provide us with effective aid. We hoped that help would arrive immediately," (Z Zaremba, La Commune de Varsovie).

Stalin had initially planned to enter Warsaw right at the beginning of August: the German army was in disarray, and there was no serious military obstacle to this. But faced with such a widespread uprising, he changed plan and deliberately delayed the advance of the Russian army, which was kept waiting at the gates of Warsaw for two months. It only resumed its advance once the uprising had been bloodily crushed by the German army, after 63 days. He coldly declared that "this insurrection was reactionary, that he dissociated himself from this terrible and impudent adventure instigated by criminals," (Z. Zaremba).

Throughout this time, the German troops were regaining position after position in the city; there was no water, electricity or munitions and the insurgents were dwindling more and more. The latter were still waiting for help from the Russian army, but it never came, and Stalin denounced them as "seditious fascists." The population also expected help from the Americans. But apart from fine words of enthusiasm and solidarity from the British and American governments, they got no more than a few derisory parachute-drops of weapons, totally insufficient for opposing the German troops, and in fact serving to increase the number killed and wounded and prolong the vain suffering of the population of the Polish capital.

Confronted with an uprising on such a scale, Stalin had decided, like Churchill vis-a-vis Italy, to let Warsaw stew in its own juice, the aim being to swallow up Poland without encountering any serious resistance from the Polish population. If the Warsaw uprising had been successful, nationalism would have been considerably strengthened and would have thrown a major obstacle in the way of Russian imperialism.

At the same time, Stalin was playing the role of anti-proletarian gendarme, faced with the potential threat of the working class in Warsaw. Indeed, at the end of the war, he fulfilled this role zealously throughout eastern Europe, including Germany. By allowing the German army to crush the Warsaw uprising, he then only had to deal with a population that had been decimated and exhausted, hardly capable of resisting Russian occupation. At the same time he kept his hands clean because the 'barbaric Nazi Hordes' had done his dirty work for him.

On the Anglo-American side, they knew quite well what was going on, but let things be, because Roosevelt had tacitly consigned Poland to Russian imperialism. The population of Warsaw was thus coldly sacrificed on the altar of wheeling and dealing among imperialist sharks. The balance sheet of this deadly trap set by Stalin and his democratic accomplices was particularly heavy: 50,000 dead, 350,000 deported to Germany, a million people condemned to exodus and a city in ruins[3].

The cynicism of the bourgeoisie about the events in Warsaw is all the more monstrous when one recalls that it was the invasion of Poland which made Britain and France enter the war to save 'freedom and democracy' in Poland ...

When one compares the situation of August 44 in Warsaw with the aftermath of the Gulf war, and if you replace the Poles with the Kurds, Hitler with Saddam and Stalin with Bush, one finds the same ruthless cynicism, the same bloody traps where the bourgeoisie, for its sordid imperialist interests, calmly condemns tens or hundreds of thousands of human beings to be massacred - all the while mouthing on about freedom, democracy and the Rights of Man.

The second world imperialist butchery was a formidable experience for the bourgeoisie - both in the art of killing millions of defenseless civilians, and in the trick of hiding and justifying its own monstrous war crimes by 'demonizing' the opposing imperialist coalition. Despite all their efforts to give themselves an air of respectability, the 'great democracies' emerged from the Second World War covered from head to foot in the blood of countless victims

Democracy and colonial massacres

"Capitalism was born with its feet soaked in blood and filth," as Marx put it, and the crimes and genocides it perpetrated throughout the process of colonization clearly illustrate this monstrous birth. "Africa turned into a sort of commercial hunting ground for black skins ... the bones of Indian weavers whiten the planes of India," (Marx), the result of the British colonization of the Indian continent, etc, etc ... An exhaustive list of all these genocides would again be too long for this article.

However, despite all the terrible suffering it inflicted upon humanity, the capitalist system in its ascendant phase was still progressive, because by permitting the development of the productive forces, it was also developing both the revolutionary class, the proletariat, and the material conditions needed for the creation of communism.

This is no longer the case in the "epoch of wars and revolutions", the period when the system enters into decadence and becomes purely reactionary. From now on, colonial massacres are nothing but the terrible blood-price ensuring the survival of a Moloch that now threatens the very existence of the human species. In this context, the numerous colonial crimes and massacres committed by the countries of the 'Rights of Man', the old bourgeois democracies, appear for what they are: pure acts of barbarism[4].

At the end of the second world war, the victors, and in particular the three old democracies, the USA, Britain and France, promised the whole world the coming of an era of freedom and democracy - for wasn't this why so many sacrifices had been made?

Since we have already talked a lot about the role played by the British and the Americans, let's examine the behavior of the third member of this inestimable democratic gang, the country par excellence of the Rights of Man - France.

In 1945, the very day that Germany surrendered, the oh- so democratic government of De Gaulle, then including some 'communist' ministers, ordered the French air force (under the auspices of the Stalinist minister Tillon) to bomb Setif and Constantine, where national movements were daring to put into question the colonial domination of this wonderful French democracy. There were thousands of dead and wounded and some popular neighborhoods were reduced to ashes. In 1947, the French overseas minister, the very democratic and socialist Marius Moutet, organized a terrible repression of the movement for the independence of Madagascar, again using aircraft, and after that tanks and artillery. A number of villages were obliterated, and for the first time the army experimented with the sinister tactic of hurling prisoners out of aero planes to be mangled in the villages below. Total number of dead: 80,000.

At more or less the same time, the same Monsieur Moutet ordered the bombing of Haiphong in Indochina without any prior declaration of war. During the war in Indochina, the French army used torture in the most systematic way: the whole arsenal was employed. It established a very democratic rule indeed: for every French soldier killed, eight villages would be burned. A witness said that "the French army behaved like the Boches did in our country," and added that "as at Buchenwald, where human remains were used as paper weights in the offices of the camp Kommandant, a number of French officers had similar objects in their offices." Once again, there's nothing the Nazis or Stalinists can teach their democratic officer caste counterparts.

And as for the atrocities of the 'Viets', which the press of the time made so much of (let's recall in passing that in 1945 Ho Chi Minh had helped the 'foreign imperialists' to crush the Saigon Commune, cf our pamphlet, Nation or Class?), or later of the FLN in Algeria - these showed that the colonial bourgeoisies had been to a good school and were well able to apply the lessons taught by the very democratic French army.

When the nationalist rebellion broke out in Algeria, the 'socialists' were in power in France and the government included Guy Mollet, Mendis-France and the young Mitterrand, then minister of the interior. All these 'authentic democrats' responded in the same way and full power was confided in the army to reestablish 'republican order'. Very quickly, the most extreme measures were being used: in reprisal for attacks, entire villages were razed to the ground; caravans were systematically machine-gunned by aircraft. Two million Algerians, nearly a quarter of the total population, were chased from their villages or neighborhoods and parked at the mercy of the army in 'regroupment camps' where, according to a report by M Rocard, then a financial inspector, "the conditions are deplorable and at least one child dies every day."

Very quickly, general Massu and his accomplice, Bigeard, later on one of Giscard's ministers, discovered their talents as torturers. Torture became systematic and in Algiers a word became famous: 'disappeared'. A large number of those taken by the soldiery never reappeared. As was underlined in a note from inspector general Wuilhaume, addressed to Mitterrand in 1957: "blows, beatings in the bath, hose-pipes, electric shocks are being used everywhere ... In Boulemane, as in many small villages in the Aures, the torture chamber was operating day and night ... and it was no rarity to see in the officers' mess champagne being drunk from the skulls of fellagas [FLN fighters]".

In 1957 the secretary general of the Prefectory of Algiers, P Teitgen, said this about the tortures to the lawyer P Verges: "All this I know, alas, and you will understand that as a former deportee, I can no longer bear it [and so he was going to resign]. We're sometimes behaving like the Germans did." And he added that he knew all the villas in Algiers where torture was taking place ...

This declaration by a high-ranking official is particularly interesting because it once again highlights the incredible duplicity of the people who govern us, and particularly of the social democrats. Thus G Mollet declared on 14 April 1957 to the Socialist Federation of Marne: "No doubt there have been some rare but deplorable acts of violence. Bui I insist that they flowed from terrorist attacks and atrocities. As for premeditated, thought-out acts of torture, I say that if this happened it's intolerable. On this matter the French army's behavior has been compared to that of the Gestapo. This comparison is scandalous. Hitler gave out directives calling for such methods, whereas Lacoste and I have always given orders absolutely in the opposite sense."

People like Mollet pretended to know nothing, but they were quite aware of what was going on and it was they who were giving the orders. As in any band of gangsters, there are always those who order the crime, and those who carry it out. Attention is always focused on the goons, in this case Massu and Bigeard, in order to whitewash those really responsible, in this case the social democratic crew in power.

The French bourgeoisie, with its 'socialists' to the fore, has subsequently always presented the massacres and atrocities committed in Algeria[5] (from 1957 to De Gaulle's arrival in power in 1958, 15,000 Algerian children disappeared each month) as being the work of bloody handed military types who overstepped their orders. But the one giving the orders was without doubt the 'socialist' government. Once again, who is the biggest criminal: the one who executes the crime or the one who orders it?

The bourgeoisie, in its democratic version, whenever its crimes can no longer be hidden, always tries to present them as an accident, an exception, or as the work of military men over-reaching themselves. We saw this in France vis-a-vis Algeria, in the USA vis-a-vis Vietnam. All this is a sinister fraud whose sole aim is to preserve the great democratic lie.

In order to perpetuate its rule over the working class, it's vital for the bourgeoisie to maintain the democratic mystification, and it has used the definitive bankruptcy of Stalinism to reinforce this fiction. Against the lie of a so-called difference between 'democracy' and 'totalitarianism', the whole history of decadent capitalism shows us that democracy is just as stained with blood as totalitarianism, and that its victims can be counted in millions.

The proletariat must remember that when it comes to defending class interests or sordid imperialist appetites, the 'democratic' bourgeoisie has never hesitated to support the most ferocious dictators. Let's not forget that Blum, Churchill and company called Stalin 'Mister' and feted him as the 'man of Liberation'! More recently, let's recall the support given to Saddam Hussein and Ceausescu by the likes of De Gaulle and Giscard. The working class must take on board the fact that, whether yesterday, today or tomorrow, democracy has never been anything but the hypocritical mask behind which the bourgeoisie hides the hideous face of its class dictatorship, the better to enslave the working class and bring it to its knees. RN

[1] The quotes from this section are from La Destruction de Dresde, David Irving, Editions Art et Histoire d'Europe, and from La Seconde Guerre Mondiale de Henri Michel, Editions PUF.  

[2] Pierre Hempel A Bas La Guerre! A few years ago there was a whole campaign waged by the residues of the 'ultra left' around Sieur Faurisson's alleged 'revelation' about the non-existence of the concentration camps - a campaign largely recuperated by the extreme right. Our point of view has absolutely nothing to do with this campaign, which is suspicious, to say the least. It's true that, before being transformed into death camps, most of the camps were first of all labor camps; it's also true that all the morbid publicity about the camps and the gas chambers, from 1945 to today, was above all aimed at whitewashing all the crimes committed by the 'democratic' camp. But there can be no question of minimizing the very real genocide perpetrated in these camps and of banalising the barbaric horror of decadent capitalism, one of the summits of which were the massacres and crimes committed by the Nazis.

[3] La Commune de Varsovie. trahie par Staline, massacree par Hitler by Zygmunt Zaremba, Editions Spartacus.

[4] On the difference between bourgeois democracy in the ascendance and in the decadence of capitalism, it would be useful to consult our Platform and our pamphlet, The Decadence of Capitalism.

[5] Les Crimes de l'armee francais by Pierre Vidal- Naquet, Editions Maspero. While the French bourgeoisie tries to present Algeria as its last 'colonialist sin', it gives us to understand that subsequently its hands have been much cleaner. In fact, other massacres have been committed since the Algerian war, notably in the Camaroons where some bloody atrocities were committed by the French army.

The first part of this tribute to our comrade Marc, who died in December 1990, was published in the previous issue of the International Review, and dealt with the period from 1917 to World War II.

“In particular, Marc belonged to that tiny minority of militants who survived and resisted the terrible counter-revolution which battened on the working class from the 1920’s to the 60’s: militants like Anton Pannekoek, Henk Canne-Meijer, Amadeo Bordiga, Onorato Damen, Paul Mattick, Jan Appel, or Munis. Moreover, not only did he maintain his untiring loyalty to the communist cause and his complete confidence in the proletariat’s revolutionary capabilities, he was able to pass on his experience to a new generation of militants, and to avoid becoming wrapped up in analyses and positions that had been overtaken by historical events. In this sense, his whole activity as a militant is an example of what marxism means: the living, constantly developing thought of the revolutionary class, which bears with it humanity’s future” (International Review no.65 [44] ).

In this second part, we will follow our comrade’s activity, first in the French Communist Left (“Gauche Communiste de France”, GCF), then during the last period of his life, when his contribution was decisive in the foundation and development of the ICC.

‘INTERNATIONALISME’

In July 1945, the GCF held its second conference. It adopted a report on the international situation drawn up by Marc (reprinted in the International Review No. 59, 4th quarter 1989), which made an overall evaluation of the war years. Starting from the classical marxist positions on the question of imperialism and war, especially against the aberrations de­veloped by Vercesi, this document achieved a more profound understanding of the main problems that the working class confronts in decadent capitalism. This report is on the same level as all the GCF’s contribution to revolutionary thought, which we can see in the various articles published in its theo­retical review, Internationalisme[1].

From 1946 onwards, L’Etincelle ceased publishing. This was because the GCF realised that its predictions of a revo­lutionary end to World War II (in the same way as World War I) had not come to fruition. As the Fraction had feared already in 1943, the bourgeoisie had learnt the lessons of the past, and the “victorious” countries succeeded in preventing any proletarian upsurge. The “Liberation” proved to be, not a stepping-stone to revolution, but the opposite. The GCF drew its own conclusions, and considered that the time was not ripe either for the formation of the Party, or for the agi­tation in the working class, of which L’Etincelle was to have been a tool. The tasks awaiting revolutionaries were still the same as those taken up by Bilan. This is why the GCF de­voted itself henceforth to an effort of clarification and theo­retical-political discussion, unlike the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt), which for years was agitated by a feverish activism leading to the 1952 split between Damen’s more activist tendency and Bordiga (along with Vercesi). The latter withdrew into sectarian isolation and a self-proclaimed “invariance” (in fact, a fossilisation of the positions of the Communist Left in 1926), which were to be the mark of the International Communist Party which published Communist Program. For its part, the Damen tendency (which, being in the majority, had kept control of the publications Prometeo and Battaglia Comunista) could hardly be accused of the same sectarianism, since it launched into a whole series of at­tempted conferences or common activities with non-proletar­ian currents like the anarchists or the Trotskyists.

The GCF maintained the same open attitude that had been characterised by the Italian Left before and during the war. Unlike the PCInt, which carried “openness” to the point where it did not look too closely at the class nature of those it frequented, the GCF’s contacts, like Bilan’s, were based on precise political criteria that distinguished it clearly from non-proletarian organisations. And so in May 1947, the GCF took part in an international conference organised at the ini­tiative of the Dutch Kommunistenbond (a “councilist” ten­dency), along with amongst others Le Prolétaire which had sprung for the RKD, the Belgian Fraction, and the au­tonomous Turin Federation, which had split from the PCInt due to its disagreements on participation in elections. The Kommunistenbond had also invited the Anarchist Federation, and during the preparation of the Conference the GCF insisted on the need for more precise selection criteria, to eliminate any groups, like the official anarchists, which had taken part in the Spanish Civil War and the Resistance[2].

However, in this period dominated by counter-revolu­tion, the GCF’s main contribution to the proletarian struggle lay in the domain of theory and the programme. The GCF’s considerable effort in this domain led it, in particular, to clarify the function of the revolutionary party, going beyond the classic “Leninist” conceptions, and to recognise the definitive and irreversible integration of the unions, and unionism, into the capitalist state.

In the 1920s, the Dutch-German Left had already seri­ously criticised Lenin’s and the Communist International’s incorrect positions on these questions. The confrontation with this current, first by the Italian Fraction before the war, then by the GCF, allowed the latter to integrate some of these criticisms of the CI.

However, the GCF avoided the Dutch-German current’s excesses on the question of the Party (whose function the latter ended up by denying completely), and at the same time went much further on the question of trade unionism (since although it rejected classical unionism, the Dutch-German Left advocated a form of “rank-and-file” unionism based on the German “Unionen”).

The union question especially illustrates the difference in method between the German and Italian Lefts. The former understood the main lines of a question during the 1920’s (e.g., on the capitalist nature of the USSR, or the nature of the trade unions); but because it failed to elaborate its new posi­tions systematically, it was led either to call into question some of the foundation stones of marxism, or to avoid any further deepening of its positions. The Italian Left, on the other hand, was much more cautious. Before the Vercesi episode in 1938, it was always careful to subject any steps it took to systematic criticism, in order to make sure that they did not depart from the basic framework of marxism. By do­ing so, it was in fact capable of going much further, and of thinking much more audaciously, for example on the funda­mental question of the state.

This approach, which Marc had absorbed in the Italian Fraction, gave him the ability to push forward the immense theoretical work accomplished by the GCF. This work also led the organisation to further elaborate the Fraction’s posi­tion on the question of the state in the period of transition from capitalism to communism, and to develop a vision of state capitalism which went far beyond an analysis of the USSR alone, and brought out the universality of this essential characteristic of the capitalist mode of production’s deca­dence. We can find this analysis in the article on ‘The Evolution of Capitalism and the New Perspective’, published in Internationalisme no.46 (and reprinted in the International Review no.21). This text was drawn up by Marc in 1952, and constituted, in a sense, the GCF’s political testament.

In June 1952, Marc left France for Venezuela. This de­parture followed a political decision by the GCF: the Korean War had convinced the GCF that a Third World War between the Russian and American blocs was both inevitable and im­minent (as the text in question says). Such a war would rav­age Europe, and was likely to destroy completely the few communist groups that had survived World War II. The GCF’s decision to send some of its militants to “safety” out­side Europe had nothing to do with their personal security (Marc and his comrades had all proved, throughout World War II, that they were ready to take enormous risks to defend revolutionary positions in the worst possible conditions), but with a concern for the survival of the organisation itself. However, the departure of its most experienced militant was to prove fatal for the GCF; despite their constant correspondence with Marc, the elements who had remained in France were unable to keep the organisation alive in a period of pro­found counter-revolution. For reasons which we have not space to deal with here, World War Ill did not happen. It is clear that this error of analysis cost the life of the GCF (and of all the mistakes Marc made during his life as a militant, it was probably this one which had the most serious conse­quences).

Nonetheless, the GCF left behind a theoretical and po­litical legacy which laid the foundations for the groups which were to form the ICC.

THE ‘INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST CURRENT’

For more than 10 years, while the counter-revolution contin­ued to weigh on the working class, Marc underwent an ex­tremely difficult period of isolation. He followed the activity of the revolutionary organisations, which had survived in Europe, and remained in contact with them and with some of their members. At the same time, he continued his own re­flection on a number of questions that the GCF had not been able to clarify sufficiently. But for the first time in his life, he was deprived of the organised activity that consti­tutes the framework for such reflection. As he said himself, it was an extremely difficult test: “The period of post-war re­action was a long march through the desert, especially once the Internationalisme group disappeared after 10 years of existence. The desert of isolation lasted some 15 years”.

This isolation continued, until the day when he was able to gather around him a small group of school students who were to form the nucleus of a new organisation: “Then in Venezuela in 1964, a new group was formed, of very young elements. And this group still exists today. To live for 40 years through the period of counter-revolution and reaction, and all of a sudden to feel hope, to feel that once again the, crisis of capital has returned, and that the young are there, then to watch this group grow little by little, developing during and after 1968 throughout France and then spreading to ten countries… all this is really a joy for a militant. These last 25 years have certainly been my happiest. It is during these years that I have really felt the joy of this development, and the conviction that we were beginning again, that we had emerged from the defeat and that the proletariat was re­grouping, that the forces of revolution were gathering. It is an enormous source of joy to take part in this yourself, to give everything you can, the best of yourself, to this recon­struction. And I owe this joy to the ICC...”

We will not deal here, as we have for the other organi­sations where Marc was a militant, with the history of the International Communist Current (we have already done so on the 10th anniversary of the ICC’s foundation in International Review no.40). We will simply highlight some aspects of the enormous contribution that our comrade made to the process that led to the formation of our organi­sation. Already, before the ICC was formed, the little group in Venezuela which published Internacionalismo (the same name as the GCF’s review) owed mainly to him its ability to move towards greater clarity, especially on the question of national liberation, which was particularly sensitive in Venezuela, and where enormous confusions persisted in the proletarian movement.

Similarly, Internacionalismo’s policy of seeking contacts with other groups in Europe and on the American continent sprang directly from the GCF and the Fraction. And in January 1968, at a time when everyone, and even some rev­olutionaries, talked of nothing but capitalism’s “prosperity” and its ability to eliminate crises, when Marcuse’s theories about the “integration of the working class” were all the rage, and when the revolutionaries that Marc met in the summer of 1967 during a journey to Europe displayed an utter scepticism as to the revolutionary capacities of a proletariat supposedly still in the midst of counter-revolution, our comrade was not afraid to write, in Internacionalismo no.8:

“We are not prophets, nor can we claim to predict when and how events will unfold in the future. But of one thing we are conscious and certain: the process in which capitalism is plunged today cannot be stopped (...) and it leads directly to the crisis. And we are equally certain that the inverse process of developing class combativity which we are witnessing to­day, will lead the working class to a bloody and direct strug­gle for the destruction of the bourgeois state”.

A few months later, the May 1968 general strike in France strikingly confirmed these predictions. Obviously, this was not time for the “direct struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state”, but for a historic recovery of the proletariat, driven on by the first signs of open capitalist cri­sis, after the deepest counter-revolution in history. These predictions were not the fruit of clairvoyance, but quite sim­ply of our comrade’s remarkable mastery of marxism, and of the confidence which he retained in the class’ revolutionary abilities, even in the darkest moments of the counter-revolu­tion.

Marc immediately set off for France (hitch-hiking for the last part of the journey, since all public transport was com­pletely paralysed). Here he renewed contacts with his old comrades of the GCF, and began discussions with a whole series of elements and groups in the political milieu[3]. This activity, along with that of a young member of Internacionalismo who had already arrived in France in 1966, were determinant in the appearance and development of the Revolution Internationale group, which acted as the original pole of regroupment for the ICC.

Nor can we, here, give a full account of all our com­rade’s theoretical and political contributions within our or­ganisation once it was constituted. Suffice it to say that on all the essential questions that have confronted the ICC, and the class as a whole, on all the advances we have been able to make, our comrade’s contribution was decisive. In fact, Marc was usually the first to raise the new points that needed dealing with. This constant vigilance, this ability to identify rapidly, and in depth, the new questions which demanded an answer, or the old questions which still remained confused within the political milieu, lived in our International Review throughout its 64 previous issues. The articles we have pub­lished on such questions were not always written by Marc. Marc found writing very difficult; he had never studied, and above all he was forced to express himself in languages, like French, which he had only learnt as an adult. Nonetheless, he was always the main inspiration behind the texts that have allowed our organisation to fulfil its responsibility of constantly updating communist positions. To cite only the latest of many examples where our organisation has had to react rapidly to a new historic situation - the irreversible collapse of Stalinism and the Eastern bloc - our comrade’s great vigilance and the depth of his thinking played an essential part in the ICC’s ability to respond in a manner whose validity has been demonstrated by events ever since.

But Marc’s contribution to the ICC was not limited to the elaboration and deepening of its political positions and theoretical analyses. Right up to the last moments of his life, despite the superhuman effort it represented for him, he con­tinued to reflect on the world situation and to discuss with the comrades who visited him in hospital; he continued, too, to pay attention to the slightest detail of the ICC’s life and functioning. For Marc, there was no such thing as “subordinate” questions or tasks which could be left to com­rades with less theoretical training. Just as he was always concerned that all the militants of the organisation should be capable of the greatest possible political clarity, and that the­oretical questions should not be reserved for “specialists”, so he never hesitated to “lend a hand” in all our practical daily activity. Marc has always given the ICC’s younger militants the example of a militant in the fullest sense, committing all his capacities to the life of this organism which is so vital for the proletariat: its revolutionary organisation. Our comrade always knew how to pass on to new generations of militants all the experience he had accumulated at many levels in the course of an exceptionally long and rich militant life. And these new generations could not fully gain such experience just by reading the political texts, but in the organisation’s daily life, and in Marc’s presence.

In this sense, Marc occupied a truly exceptional place in the life of the proletariat. The counter-revolution had elimi­nated, or frozen with sclerosis, the political organisations which the working class had secreted in the past. Marc was a bridge, and irreplaceable link between the revolutionary or­ganisations which took part in the revolutionary wave that followed World War I, and those which will confront the next revolutionary wave.

In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky at one point considers the special and exceptional role played by Lenin. And although he adopts marxism’s classical theses on the role of the individual in history, he concludes that without Lenin to push the redressement and political “arming” of the Bolshevik Party, the revolution would not have taken place, or would have ended in defeat. It is clear that without Marc, the ICC would not exist today, or not in its present form, as the largest organisation in the international revolu­tionary milieu (not to mention the clarity of its positions, on which other revolutionary groups may, of course, have an opinion different from our own). In particular, his presence and activity prevented the enormous and fundamental work accomplished by the Left fractions, and especially the Italian Fraction, expelled from the Communist International, from falling into oblivion. On the contrary, this work was to bear fruit, and in this sense, although he was never known within the working class in the same way as Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, or Trotsky, or even as Bordiga or Pannekoek (it could not be otherwise in the period of counter-revolution), we do not hesitate to say that his contribution to the prole­tarian struggle stands at the same level of his great predeces­sors.

Our comrade always detested this kind of comparison. Always, he carried out his tasks in the organisation with the greatest simplicity. Never did he demand the “place of hon­our” in the organisation. His greatest pride lay not in the ex­ceptional contribution he made, but in the fact that he had remained faithful in all his being to the combat of the prole­tariat. This too, is a precious lesson to the new generations of militants who have never had the opportunity to experience the immense devotion to the revolutionary cause of past gen­erations. It is on this level, above all, that we hope to rise to the combat. Though now without his presence, vigilant and clear-sighted, warm and passionate, we are determined to continue

ICC, 1991.

The decomposition of capitalist society

.... The third point to be highlighted (see the resolution for the first two points) is the duration of this phe­nomenon of decomposition. The latter was first identified by the ICC in autumn 1986 during the terrorist attacks in Paris.  This of course does not mean that the phenomenon only ap­peared then. In fact, it emerged throughout the 1980's.

Implicitly, the ICC had already pointed to this kind of phe­nomenon in the resolution on the international situation adopted at its 6th Congress in November 1985 (and which took up the analysis contained in an internal text written in October 1983). This document showed that, increasingly, the serious aggravation of political convulsions in the peripheral coun­tries made it impossible for the great powers to rely on them to 'keep order' at the regional level, and forced them to in­tervene directly and militarily. This was based especially on the situation in Lebanon and Iran. Iran in particular was a relatively new kind of situation: a militarily important mem­ber of one bloc went out of control, without falling into the hands of the opposing bloc. This was not due to any weak­ening of the bloc as a whole, nor to any improvement in the situation of the national capital in question: quite the con­trary, since these new policies led straight to economic and political disaster. From the standpoint of the interests of the national capital, there was no rationality in the evolution of the situation in Iran, since it led to the seizure of power by the clergy: a social stratum which has never been competent to manage the economic and political affairs of capitalism.

The rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and its political victory in a relatively important country, was itself one of the first signs of decomposition. This upsurge of religion in a num­ber of third-world countries cannot be considered as a return to the golden age of religion's dominant influence on social life. The wheel of history never turns backwards. The third world countries, like certain countries of the Eastern bloc which are particularly infested with religion, are not return­ing to feudalism. Capitalism has long since subjected these countries to its laws - not of course through any signifi­cant development of their productive forces on a capitalist basis, but by the irreversible destruction of their 'natural' econ­omy. In these countries, the upsurge of religious fundamen­talism is a sign of the decomposition of capitalist society's ideological superstructures which should be put on the same level as the spread in the developed countries of mysticism and drug addiction.

We can thus note that the first signs of decadent capital­ism's entry into its phase of decomposition appear at the end of the 70's, to reach full fruition throughout the 80's (in this sense, these years were indeed years of truth both for the bour­geoisie and for the working class, both of which began to be confronted with the final phase of the capitalist mode of pro­duction). It is important to take account of this if we are to understand both the causes and the perspectives of the up­heavals that have shaken the world in the last two years. It also determines, as we will see later, a clear understanding of the dynamic of the class' struggle and development of con­sciousness since the beginning of the 1980's.

The collapse of the Eastern bloc

.... The historic tendency towards state capitalism, which is a precondition for understanding Stalinism, appears first, not in backward countries, but on the contrary in the most ad­vanced. For revolutionaries during WWI (and for Lenin in particular), Germany was the typical example. Classically, the state's control over the whole economy appeared as an organic process of the national capital, affecting first and foremost the most developed sectors both of the economy and of the bourgeoisie, in particular through an increasing inter-penetration of the bourgeoisie and the state apparatus. The organic and generally gradual development of the state's control over civil society (although in some cases it was ac­companied by a violent settling of accounts within the bour­geois political apparatus, as in the case of fascism) made it possible for the advanced countries to maintain the classic mechanisms of the capitalist economy, and especially the market sanction as a stimulant to company competitivity and the 'rational' exploitation of labor. It also had the merit of keeping in place most of the ruling class' economic person­nel, which allowed the national capital to benefit from their experience.

The development of the Stalinist form of state capitalism is quite different, and had nothing 'organic' about it. On the contrary, it appears as a sort of historical 'accident' as a re­sult of the revolution and counter-revolution in Russia. Inas­much as the state which arose after the revolution in Rus­sia also led the counter-revolution, it was obliged to take ex­clusive control of the national capital. As a result, it abol­ished the internal market mechanism, and for the most part deprived itself of the services of the one-time specialists of capitalist exploitation. The criteria for belonging to the ex­ploiting class are no longer economic as under classical capi­talism (which makes it possible to select and train competent personnel for this task of valorization), but political. Eco­nomic power is essentially determined by rank in the 'nomenklatura' - the Party-State hierarchy. Servility, cun­ning, and lack of scruples are the essential talents for rising in the party, but are not necessarily the most useful in run­ning the national capital, especially since there is no internal market sanction to provoke emulation and weed out the in­competents from among those 'responsible' for the economy. The whole management personnel is completely uninterested in valorizing the national capital. This cynicism and lack of interest infects the whole productive apparatus, and especially the workers. This kind of 'management', where the main 'stimulant' for the workforce consists of police compulsion, may work in a relatively backward and self-sufficient econ­omy; it is completely inadequate to meet the demands of the world market. The Stalinist regime owed its extreme fragility in the face of the economic crisis, as well as its bru­tal collapse, essentially to this 'accidental' way in which it was formed.

The reasons behind the Eastern bloc's weakness are much the same. Traditionally, imperialist blocs have been formed gradually; their component bourgeoisies have been willing to associate themselves with, or at least to rally be­hind, the dominant economic power, whose preeminence de­pended first and foremost on its economic potential.  This was not at all the case with the formation of the Russian bloc. On the contrary, this too appears as a sort of historical acci­dent. At the head of the bloc is a backward country with a low level of industrialization, less developed than many of its vassals and so totally unfitted to hold its rank. It owes this privilege solely to the peculiar circumstances at the end of WWII, when the allies 'compensated' it for opening a second front against Germany by handing over control of the coun­tries of central Europe. It was thus only military force that rallied the bourgeoisies in these countries to the Russian bloc. And for the most part, the USSR only maintained its grip on its 'allies' by continued military force (Hungary 56, Czechoslo­vakia 68), even when the latter were run by Stalin­ist parties. The fact the bloc had to be held together in this way was an expression of its extreme weakness. And it was this weak­ness that was revealed in 1989.

We should therefore emphasize the gulf separating the central capitalist countries from those of the ex-Eastern bloc, in their relative ability to resist the crisis. Even if the chaos that is becoming endemic to the latter is indicative of capi­talism's evolution worldwide, it would be wrong to think that the ad­vanced countries will undergo the same kind of situa­tion in the short term.

.... This being said, it is clear that the specific weakness of the Stalinist state and of the ex-Russian bloc does not ex­plain ev­erything. In particular, it does not explain why this collapse happened at the end of the 80's and not at the begin­ning, for example. It is here that the framework of decompo­sition be­comes indispensable.

"The absence of any perspective (other than day-to-day stop-gap measures to prop up the economy) around which it could mobilize as a class, and at the same time the fact that the pro­letariat does not yet threaten its own survival, creates within the ruling class, and especially within its political ap­paratus, a growing tendency towards indiscipline and an at­titude of 'every man for himself'. This phenomenon allows us in par­ticular to explain the collapse of Stalinism and the en­tire Eastern imperialist bloc.

".... The spectacle which the USSR and its satellites are offering us today, of a complete rout within the state appa­ratus itself, and the ruling class' loss of control over its own political strategy is in reality only the caricature (due to the specifici­ties of the Stalinist regimes) of a much more general phe­nomenon affecting the whole world ruling class, and which is specific to the phase of decomposition" ('Decomposition, Final Phase of the Decadence of Capital­ism, point 9, International Review no. 62).

The collapse of the Stalinist regimes is thus one of the ex­pressions of decomposition. In particular, it is an expres­sion of one essential element: capitalist society's utter lack of per­spective. Similarly, the present situation of the USSR it­self (and of parts of Eastern Europe), disintegrating under the blows of nationalist movements, is another illustration of one major result of this absence of perspective: the tendency to­wards the breakup of social life, towards 'every man for him­self' (...)

The new pattern of imperialist conflicts

As with the examination of the col­lapse of Stalinism and the eastern bloc, when we analyse the evolution of imperialist con­flicts we have to take into account what derives from the general framework of decadence, and what derives more partic­ularly from the phase of decomposition. This is obvi­ously true for the Gulf war (...) Unlike the EFICC, for ex­ample, who iden­tify impe­rialism, imperialist blocs, and state capi­talism, we pointed out that while imperial­ism (as well as state capital­ism) is a permanent and universal feature of deca­dence, the same isn't true for the imperi­alist blocs. This is why we were able to announce that the collapse of the eastern bloc would lead to the disappearance of the western bloc, while at the same time we could fore­see that the end of the blocs would not at all inaugurate an era of peace.

Having said this, it is important to un­derline the fact that even though you don't need blocs for wars to erupt, and even though the formation of imperialist blocs isn't an automatic product of imperi­alism, the latter does exert a very strong pressure towards their formation. This is why we wrote in Jan 90 "the disappear­ance of the two imperialist constella­tions which emerged out of the second world war carries with it the tendency towards the formation of two new blocs" ('After the collapse of the Eastern bloc, decomposition and chaos', in IR 61). This is an important point for under­standing what was at stake in the Gulf war. If we don't take it into account, we will miss the real antago­nisms operating in the present period and which were lurk­ing underneath this war.

One of the essential aims of the USA's show of force was to issue a preemptive warning against any am­bition to set up a new imperialist bloc. It's obvious that the conditions for this aren't there at the moment (...) However (...) it is im­portant right now for the worlds' first power - in real­ity the only superpower - to bar the way to such a perspective, to dis­suade any country from pursuing it. In more concrete terms, a certain number of sectors of the bourgeoisie may have been counting, following the collapse of the Eastern bloc, on the strengthening of the 'European Com­munity' and the setting up of an EC armed force which could eventu­ally form the basis of a bloc led by Ger­many ....

The Gulf war has destroyed any hope in an eventual Euro­pean bloc. If there was a particularly clear result of this con­flict, which all sectors of the bourgeoisie have underlined, it was, apart from the military non-ex­istence of Japan and Ger­many, the total political non-existence (not even to men­tion military) of Europe: there were almost as many positions on the war as there were states in Europe ... We can thus say that, at least on the level of squashing any move towards the formation of a new bloc, the USA has for the moment achieved its aims even beyond what it might have hoped for.

Understanding this function of the Gulf war as a barrier against the formation of a new bloc is essential faced with the false interpretations that have developed (...) in particular, it is important to refute the thesis, dear to the leftists, that it was a North-South conflict, a conflict between the ad­vanced countries and the underde­veloped ones.

A conflict between advanced countries and backward ones?

.... It's true that there are common interests among the great powers to limit the spread of the chaos now present in the third world. This was in fact one of the keys to the Gulf war. The cru­sade for 'world order' and 'international law' was able (though with difficulties of all kinds) to gain the assent of all the permanent mem­bers of the Security Council and the financial support of Germany and Japan thanks to the pres­sure exerted by the USA on their former allies and their for­mer rival.

But what was this pressure based upon? Partly on eco­nomic and finan­cial aspects (attitudes adopted in the negotia­tions about the customs duties for Europe and Japan, the fi­nancial aid accorded to the USSR). But this was only the visible part of the ice­berg. In reality, the USA's deal with its 'allies', notably during Baker's tour in November 1990, which al­lowed the US to get the Security Council to vote in favor of military interven­tion, involved recognizing that the US would play the role of world cop in exchange for its 'protection' and 'aid' in case of difficulties resulting from global instabil­ity. In order to make a really convincing demonstration, the US acted like any other racketeer: you break the shop win­dow (this was the trap laid for Iraq) in or­der to convince the shopkeeper that he has an interest in paying for 'protection'. In the chaotic world that has emerged from the end of the 'cold war', there are plenty of op­portunities for regional 'disorders' - in Africa, in Indochina, between India and Pak­istan, as well as, with the break up of the Eastern bloc and of its leader, in central Asia, central Eu­rope and the Balkans. Moreover, the proliferation of nu­clear weapons (which, at the moment, as well as the five 'big' powers who are perma­nent members of the Security Coun­cil, are already in the hands of countries like Israel, India, Pak­istan, Brazil, and will tomorrow be owned by still more) is an­other dangerous factor. The big advanced countries obvi­ously have an interest in limiting this instability which threatens what remains of their spheres of influence and mar­kets. This is why they ended up lining up behind the only power which really has the means to be the planet's po­liceman, as it showed pre­cisely through the Gulf war.

But the 'world order' proposed by this policeman is not entirely conve­nient to other countries because it is designed to suit its interests to the detriment of other imperialist inter­ests. In the chaos now opening up, the world's most powerful bourgeoisie has to play this role because it has most to lose from this chaos and it alone has the means to do anything about it. And this is what it has done. But the way it has done it, the spectacular and brutal nature of its action, also signals that it will not tolerate any 'disorders' (ie encroach­ments on its own interests) by the advanced countries any more than by countries like Iraq. This is why, contrary to most of the 'allies' who preferred to rely on economic and political pressure, the American bour­geoisie had no option but to destroy the essential military and economic potential of the 'wrongdoer' (an op­tion which these other countries were trying to sabotage up to the last mo­ment)[1]. With the clas­sic method of gangsters, the boss of the bosses rubbed out a sec­ond rate hood in or­der to win the alle­giance of the other bosses. And for the lesson to be well understood, for the demonstration to have a weight well be­yond the sort of thing it did in Panama for example, the USA couldn't just use any old scapegoat. It required the 'enemy' to have a certain credibility, to be pow­erfully armed in order to justify the enormous deployment of US military power: spy satellites, AWACS, 6 air­craft carriers, huge guns firing 1200kg shells, cruise missiles and Patriots, 7 ton bombs, fuel air bombs, Abrams tanks, etc, all of this serviced by 600,000 soldiers. It was also nec­essary that the intervention in­volved a part of the world which has a real strategic importance: with Operation Desert Storm, the USA has demon­strated to the countries of Europe and to Japan, which are more depen­dent on Middle East oil, that supplies of this raw material so vital to their military and economic power are de­pendent on American good will.

In fact, the thesis of a 'holy al­liance' of the advanced countries against the insta­bility and chaos reigning in the third world is close to an extremely dangerous theory that has long been fought by revolu­tionaries: the theory of super-imperi­alism. It is based on the hypothesis that the great powers can overcome, or at least contain, their imperialist antagonisms in order to establish a sort of 'condominium' over the world. This is a thesis which has been re­futed by the whole history of imperi­alism and which certainly won't be­come correct in the phase of decom­position. In reality, since the exis­tence of capitalism and particu­larly since the system established its domi­nation over the whole world, all the ma­jor phenomena of its way of life didn't start in the periphery and then affect the center, but on the contrary first appeared in the central countries. This is particu­larly true with all the major features of deca­dence such as imperialism, militarism and state capitalism, whose first ma­jor manifestations af­fected the ad­vanced countries of old Europe before extending to the rest of the world where they often took on a carica­tured form. It's the same for the open crisis of the capitalist econ­omy, no­tably the one that began to de­velop in the mid 60s, even if the most dis­astrous effects were for a while pushed onto the countries of the pe­riphery. In fact, like all societies in history, capital­ism does not collapse from its pe­riphery but from its cen­ter. And decomposition is no excep­tion to this; it's a phenomenon that we first identified in the advanced countries even if has taken on the most caricatured forms in the third world.

Imperialist conflicts in the phase of decomposition

As for imperialist antagonisms, a typical manifestation of capitalist decadence that can only be exacer­bated by decom­position, they don't escape the rule. It is first of all and fun­damentally the central coun­tries which are going to unleash them, even if they will find in the instabil­ity and chaos of the peripheral countries a particularly suitable ter­rain for express­ing these antagonisms (especially since they can't directly in­volve wars between the advanced countries given that the proletariat is not defeated). To give any credit to the thesis of a 'North-South ' conflict or to one of its variants is in the end to conclude that capitalism can over­come its fundamental contradic­tions. This means falling into a re­formist view ....

Thus, as we saw with the collapse of the eastern bloc, we have to under­stand the imperialist conflicts of to­day in the framework of decadence before we can ex­amine the particular­ities of the phase of decomposition. These particu­larities are not foreign to decadence; it is their exac­erbation and accumulation on an ever wider scale which introduces a new qual­ity into the life of capitalism today, and it is here that we find the differ­ences be­tween the phase of decompo­sition and the preceding phases of decadence.

The Gulf war clearly illustrates this re­ality. In particular it is a striking confir­mation of the profoundly irra­tional char­acter of war in the period of decadence ....

This economic irrationality of war is not a recent 'discovery' by the ICC. In par­ticular, it was dealt with at length in IRs 52 and 53: 'War, Mili­tarism, and Imperialist blocs'). In fact, it isn't even a discovery of the ICC because more than 45 years ago the Gauche Communiste de France could write: "the decadence of capi­talist society is strikingly expressed by the fact that whereas wars were once a factor for economic develop­ment (ascendant period), today, in the decadent period, economic activity is geared essentially to­wards war. This does not mean that war has become the goal of capitalist production, which remains the production of sur­plus value; it means that war, taking on a permanent character, has become decadent capital­ism's way of life." (see International Review no. 59)

In this sense, it is necessary to reject any conception that looks for directly economic causes behind the Gulf war, such as oil or the opening up of new markets for the 'winners' etc. We have already seen how inade­quate the argument about oil is: even though it was an element for putting pressure on America's 'allies', fixing the price of oil or the revenues this would represent for American capital would not have been sufficient moti­vation for such a huge and costly military oper­ation. Similarly, while the American firms have obvi­ously taken the lion's share of contracts for the reconstruction of Kuwait, it would be absurd to see the recent war as a means of reviving the economy of the US or the rest of the world. The fig­ures speak for themselves: the profits that would flow back from these con­tracts are well below the cost of the war, even if you take into account the cheques handed out by Germany and Japan. As for the 'revival' of the world economy, it's clear that this isn't on the agenda. As we have underlined on a number of occasions, war and militarism are in no way an­tidotes to the capitalist crisis, but on the con­trary major fac­tors in aggra­vating it.

Furthermore, it would be wrong to pre­sent the accentua­tion of imperialist antag­onisms, of which the Gulf war is up to now the most obvious expres­sion, as the result of the imme­diate aggravation of the economic situation, and partic­ularly of the open recession now developing. While it is clear that in the last instance imperialist war derives from the exacer­bation of eco­nomic rivalries between nations, itself the result of the aggravation of the crisis of the capitalist mode of pro­duction, we must not make a mecha­nistic link between the different manifestations of the life of decadent capitalism[2]. In fact, the major cause explaining why this war broke out in 90-91 is to be found in the situation created by the collapse of the Russian bloc. Similarly in the fu­ture the factor which will further ac­centuate imperialist antagonisms won't be con­stituted by each successive development of the crisis, but by the increasingly absolute historic im­passe in which the capi­talist mode of pro­duction finds itself.

While the Gulf war is an illustration of the irrationality of the whole of decadent capitalism, it also contains an extra and significant element of irrationality which is characteristic of the opening up of the phase of de­composition. The other wars of deca­dence could, despite their basic irra­tionality, still take on apparently 'rational' goals (such as the search for 'lebensraum' for the German econ­omy or the defense of im­perialist po­sitions by the allies during the sec­ond World War). This isn't at all the case with the Gulf war. The objec­tives of this war, on one side or the other, clearly express the total and desperate impasse that capitalism is in today:

- on the Iraqi side, the invasion of Kuwait undoubtedly had a clear eco­nomic objective: to grab hold of the consider­able wealth of this country while hoping that the great pow­ers, as they had done on a number of previous occasions, would turn a blind eye to such a hold-up. On the other hand, the objectives of the war with the 'allies' which was accepted by the Iraqi leaders as soon as they remained deaf to the ul­timatum of 15 January 1991, were simply to 'save face' and inflict the maximum damage on the enemy, at the price of consid­erable and insurmountable damage to the national economy;

- on the 'allied' side, the economic ad­vantages obtained, or even aimed for, were nothing, including for the main vic­tor, the USA. The central objective of the war, for this power - to put a stop to the tendency to­wards generalized chaos, dressed up in grand phrases about the 'new world or­der' - did not contain any perspective for any amelioration of the economic situation, or even for preserving the present situation. In contrast to the time of the Second World War, the USA did not enter into this war to improve or even preserve its markets but simply to avoid a too-rapid amplification of the in­ternational political chaos which could only fur­ther ex­acerbate economic convul­sions. In doing this, it could not avoid ag­gravating the instability of a zone of prime impor­tance, while at the same time aggravating the difficulties of its own economy (especially its indebted­ness) and of the world economy (...)

For some, the present situa­tion of the USA is similar to that of Ger­many before the two world wars. The lat­ter tried to compensate for its economic disadvantages, illus­trated by the fact that it didn't have a significant colonial empire (in fact it was smaller than Belgium's, Hol­land's or Portugal's before the first world war and nothing at all before the sec­ond) by overturning the impe­rialist division of spoils through force of arms. This is why, in both world wars, it took on the role of 'aggressor' because the better-placed powers had no interest in upsetting the apple-cart. Similarly, the USA's essential advantage faced with the economic threat from Germany and Japan is its crushing military superi­ority. As long as the East­ern bloc existed, the US could use this superi­ority as a way of holding its allies together, which en­abled it, in ex­change, to impose its 'views', espe­cially at the eco­nomic level. In such a context, the USA had no a priori need to make great use of its weapons be­cause the essential part of the pro­tection accorded to its allies was of a defensive nature (even though at the beginning of the 80s the USA be­gan a general offensive against the Russian bloc). With the disap­pearance of the Rus­sian threat, the 'obedience' of the other great powers was no longer guaranteed (this is why the west­ern bloc fell apart). To obtain obedience, the US has had to adopt a systemati­cally offensive stance on the military level (as we have just seen with the Gulf war), which looks a bit like the behavior of Germany in the past. The difference is that today the ini­tiative isn't being taken by a power that wants to overturn the imperialist balance but on the contrary the world's leading power, the one that for the moment has the best slice of the cake.

This difference is significant. The fact that at the present time the maintenance of 'world order', ie basi­cally of Ameri­can order, doesn't imply a 'defensive' attitude (which was adopted by the Entente or the Allies in the past) on the part of the domi­nant power, but by an increasingly systematic use of the military offen­sive, and even of operations that will destabilize whole regions in order to ensure the submission of the other powers, ex­presses very clearly deca­dent capital­ism's slide into the most unrestrained militarism. This is pre­cisely one of the elements that dis­tinguish the phase of de­composition from previous phases of capitalist deca­dence ...

The balance of forces between proletariat and bourgeoisie

The proletariat in the period of decomposition

" .... We must be especially clear on the danger of decom­position for the proletariat's ability to raise itself to the level of its historic tasks (...) the decomposition of society, which can only get worse, may in the years to come cut down the best forces of the proletariat and definitively compromise the perspective of communism. This is because, as capitalism rots, the resulting poison infects all the elements of society, including the proletariat.

In particular, although the weakening grip of bourgeois ide­ology as a result of capitalism's entry into decadence was one of the conditions for revolution, the decomposition of the same ideology, as it is developing appears essentially as an obstacle to the development of proletarian consciousness. ('Decomposition, Final Phase ...', point 14, IR 62)

"Throughout the 1980's, the proletariat has been capa­ble of developing its struggles against the consequences of the crisis despite the negative weight of decomposition, which has been systematically exploited by the bourgeoisie" (IR 59: 'Presentation of the Resolution on the International Situation to the 8th ICC Congress').

Until the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the difficulties result­ing from the weight of decomposition had not funda­mentally called into question the overall dynamic of the class struggle. But the event was to determine a marked break in this dy­namic ....

Already in 1989, the ICC highlighted the new difficulties that this immense historic event would create for the prole­tariat's consciousness (see the 'Theses on the Economic and Political Crisis in the Eastern Countries', IR 60) ....

This was the context when the working class was dealt an­other brutal blow: the Gulf war.

The impact of the Gulf War

.... The paralysis of the workers' struggle as a result of the war has been greater, and has lasted longer that which ac­companied the collapse of Stalinism. This is be­cause the working class in the central countries has felt itself much more directly affected by the Gulf war, in which these coun­tries were more or less directly involved, than by events in the East, which could appear, as we have seen, as some­what 'external' (which is why we saw no demonstrations around these events in the West). The collapse of Stalinism, while it encouraged a whole series of highly dangerous illu­sions in the class (illusions in democracy and a 'world at peace'), and a considerable retreat of any idea of capitalism's replacement by another kind of society, provoked a feeling not so much of anxiety as of euphoria. By contrast, the Gulf crisis and open warfare provoked amongst tens of millions of workers a profound disquiet, which pushed worries about de­clining living conditions into the background far more strongly, and more durably, than the collapse of the Eastern bloc had done; at the same time, the war created a strong feeling of impo­tence.

Apparently then, the Gulf war had a still more negative im­pact on the working class than the collapse of the eastern bloc. But it is precisely the responsibility of revolutionary organizations - the most conscious fraction of the working class - to see behind appearances to the true underlying ten­dencies within society.

When we consider they way in which the bourgeoisie's main forces maneuvered to make the working class in the central countries accept the military intervention in the Mid­dle East, we cannot help but be struck by their extreme skill­fulness:

- at the beginning of the crisis, while most of the popu­lation, and especially the working class, was reticent about such an intervention, the Western 'democracies', with the USA in the lead, focused attention on the embargo on Iraq, while at the same time setting up on the spot the most mas­sive mili­tary arsenal since WWII;

- at the same time, the pacifist movements set to work to channel into a dead-end all those (workers especially) who re­fused to have anything to do with this crusade for 'international law';

- when the war did break out, it was presented as a 'clean war', which was causing no civilian victims in Iraq and no casualties among the 'Coalition';

- on the eve of the ground offensive we heard a different story, with the insistence on the heavy losses it would pro­voke amongst the Coalition forces; the speed of the offen­sive, and the limited losses thus provoked a feeling of relief in the population (and so the working class) of the countries con­cerned;

- after the war was over, the horrible massacre of the Kurds, which was planned by the victors, was exploited to justify the military intervention against Iraq, and to provoke the feeling that the offensive should have been continued un­til Saddam Hussein was overthrown and his military forces completely destroyed.

These maneuver, systematically supported by a servile me­dia, attained their goal - but their very sophistication demon­strated that the bourgeoisie did not have its hands free for warmongering. In particular, it was aware that although this policy was vital in defending its interests (with different nu­ances according to country, as we have seen), unlike the col­lapse of the Eastern bloc it could be a non-negligible factor in the clarification of the proletariat's consciousness (...)

Whatever the appearances, the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Gulf war (not in itself but because of what it an­nounces for the future) have quite opposite dynamics as far as the process of coming to consciousness in the class is con­cerned (...) in the latter we were confronted by a real anxi­ety, and fundamental questions, which followed the euphoria that ac­companied the events in the East ... and in contrast to this kind of euphoria, anxiety, although at first it may paralyze the workers' combativity, is a powerful stim­ulant in the present period, for reflection in depth.

It is therefore important to insist on the fact ... that the events of the last two years do not at all call into question the historic course that the ICC has highlighted for more than two decades.

The historic course

The reversal of the historic course would presuppose, in fact, a serious defeat for the working class and the ability of the bourgeoisie to take this defeat as a basis to enroll the working class under its ideological banners. Neither the collapse of the Eastern bloc, nor the Gulf war can be considered as de­feats for the proletariat, or as opportunities for the bour­geoisie to bring it under control.

The first event occurred independently of the prole­tariat's action (and this indeed is why it provoked a reflux in the de­velopment of consciousness within it). It has put diffi­culties on the road towards a revolutionary confrontation, but it has not pushed the proletariat back in any lasting way (this is what we said a year ago when we pointed out that the dy­namic of the reflux had come to an end). In particular, the decisive sectors of the proletariat have not really been drawn into the mystifications which have weakened its conscious­ness, since "the sectors of the class which are today in the front line of these mystifications, those in the Eastern bloc, are relatively peripheral. The western proletariat must con­front these difficulties today because of the 'wind from the east', but not because it is itself 'in the eye of the storm'" (IR 61, 'After the collapse of the Eastern bloc, destabilization and chaos').

As for the second event, it is, as we have seen, funda­mentally an antidote to the ideological poison poured out with the collapse of Stalinism, and strengthens the healthy ef­fects of the increasingly obvious economic bankruptcy of the capital­ist mode of production. The Gulf war could only hap­pen be­cause the proletariat in the advanced countries did not have the strength to oppose it. But it was not a direct defeat, since the masses were not mobilized in a war conducted solely by professionals, and accompanied by a great insis­tence on the fact that the conscript workers in uniform (in those countries where conscription exists) were not being sent to fight. This insistence, and the low number of 'Coalition' casualties is one of the best proofs that the bourgeoisie fears the war be­coming a factor in the development of the working class' struggle and consciousness ....

This is the case because although today imperialist war is fully a part of decomposition, it is not its most typical ex­pression; rather it is capitalism's way of life throughout the decadent period; and it is this decadence which is the neces­sary objective condition for the system's overthrow.

This being said, although the consequences of decompo­sition will be wholly negative for the working class right up to the revolutionary period, this does not imply any calling into question of the historic course. Certainly, as we have seen, it is an extremely serious threat for the working class and for the whole of humanity, since it can lead to their de­struction. And this danger is all the more serious in that "while un­leashing the world war demands the proletariat's adherence to the bourgeoisie's ideals ... this is not a precon­dition for decomposition to destroy humanity" (IR 61, op cit). But un­like world war, the effects of decomposition (apart, of course, from the collapse of Stalinism) are rela­tively slow to act, and have not to date been able to block the development of the struggle and of proletarian class con­sciousness (as we saw during the 80's with the development of the 3rd wave of struggles). Moreover, the permanent state of war combined with the growing collapse of the capitalist economy will necessarily provoke the proletariat's mobilization on its own class terrain, which is a powerful antidote to the typical poi­sons secreted by decomposition ....

Similarly, the combat that the proletariat will be forced to engage, through the class solidarity which it implies, will be a prime factor in overcoming the tendencies towards the atomization of the workers, and the 'every man for himself' attitude prevalent especially in corporatism.

This does not mean that decomposition will not hence­forward put a negative pressure on the working class. It sim­ply means that decomposition has not to date, and is not likely to provoke a defeat of the proletariat and its enrolment under the bourgeoisie. This is why revolutionaries have the re­sponsibility of putting forward all the potential within the class for the development of its struggle and consciousness.

ICC 20.4.91

[1] The unremitting loyalty of the British bourgeoisie to the policies of the USA ex­presses both the particu­lar intelligence of the former, which has understood that the stakes are too important, for capitalism as a whole, to risk participating in the aggrava­tion of global instability by trying to oppose the US, and a carefully con­sidered defense of its national inter­ests, which, since the first world war, have been firmly as­sociated with the American bourgeoisie which sup­planted it. Through this loyalty to the most powerful bour­geoisie, the British bourgeoisie has at the same time acquired a 'right hand man' status from which it can expect cer­tain guarantees. Such an alliance also has the advantage that there is no threat of a simple colonization (as is the case in Canada) to the ex­tent that 'big brother' is 5000 km away. If a country like France has not, in gen­eral, shown such docility to­wards the US, it's because there's no place for two 'right hand men' next to the US. This is why France has had a particular al­liance with Germany for over 30 years, an alliance which, with the rise to power of its big neighbor, is threatening to become a bit of a bur­den. This is an­other barrier to the for­mation of a 'European bloc'.

[2] This was already true for the First World War which did not break out as a direct result of the crisis. There was, in 1913, a certain aggra­vation of the eco­nomic situation but this was not especially greater than what had happened in 1900-1903 or 1907. In fact, the essential causes for the outbreak of world war one in Au­gust 1914 resided in:

- the end of the dividing up of the world among the great capitalist pow­ers. Here the Fashoda crisis of 1898 (where the two great colonial powers, Britain and France, found them­selves face to face af­ter con­quering the bulk of Africa) was a sort of symbol of this and marked the end of the ascendant period of capitalism;

- the completion of the military and diplomatic prepara­tions consti­tuting the alliances which were going to confront each other;

- the demobilization of the Euro­pean proletariat from its class terrain faced with the threat of war (in con­trast to the situation in 1912, when the Basle congress was held) and the dragooning of the class behind the flags of the bourgeoisie, made possi­ble above all by the open treason of the majority of the leaders of so­cial democracy, a point that was carefully verified by the main governments.

It was thus mainly political factors which, once cap­italism had entered into decadence, had proved that it had reached an historic impasse, de­termined the actual moment for the war to break out.

The same phenomenon could be seen at the time of the Second World War. The objective conditions for the war were there at the beginning of the 30s when the system, the recon­struction over, once again faced an impasse. Once again, it was mainly political fac­tors of the same order which ensured that the war did not break out until the end of that decade.

In the same way, while the main rea­son that capital­ism did not unleash a third world war during the 50s was that the re­construction gave it a certain mar­gin of maneuver, we must also take into account another factor: the weakness of the East­ern bloc and especially of its leader. The latter, which found itself in a simi­lar situa­tion to Germany prior to the two world wars since it was worst placed in the division of the impe­rialist cake, made a certain number of attempts to im­prove its position (Berlin blockade of 48, Korean war in 52). But these attempts were easily repulsed by the US and its bloc, which preventing them from leading to a third world war.

IR67, 4th Qtr 1991

With the violent massacres of the Persian Gulf, world capi­talism has revealed its true face and what its 'new world or­der' is all about: chaos, barbarism and war.

The reality of imperialist war - which has in­volved, al­though not in a direct fashion, the whole of the proletariat in the imperialist metropoles - has stimulated a healthy decanta­tion in the proletarian political camp.

On the one hand, a group like the Internationalist Com­munist Organisation, which has been specialising for many years in the po­sition of support to the 'oppressed bour­geoisies', has fully integrated itself, bag and baggage, into the Iraqi imperialist camp, demonstrating how totally alien and opposed this group is to the very interests of the prole­tarian political camp.

On the other hand, the milieu as a whole has demon­strated the ability to respond to the chal­lenge posed by the war, in defending clearly the two criteria essential to re­maining solidly within the borders of proletarian internation­alism:

1) No to the imperialist war. No support to any imperi­alist camp involved in the war, even and above all if this camp claims to be 'anti-im­perialist';

2) No to pacifism, capitalism is war! Only a war against capitalism, only the proletarian rev­olution can allow a future without war.

By unanimously defending these two solid proletarian basics, the internationalist groups have demonstrated a simi­lar exemplary approach to the one adopted by the revolution­ary minori­ties which, in the full swing of World War 1, in­tervened to speak against the imperialist mas­sacre.

There is however a striking difference:

In 1916, the huge divergences which existed between the various currents opposed to the war did not prevent these currents launching a uni­fied appeal to the proletariat of all countries, with the famous Zimmerwald Manifesto, which represented a ray of light for millions of work­ers facing death in the trenches.

Today, the internationalist groups have de­fended with the same words opposition to the war, showing an even greater level of unity than the one which existed at Zimmer­wald. Nonetheless, all this has not been enough to al­low them, at least on this occasion, to speak with one voice to the proletariat of all countries.

This is a shame which weighs on the whole of the pre­sent communist movement and one which can't be min­imised. It's not enough to say that we state the same things and that's good enough. The threat today posed to the work­ing class by capitalism in decomposition is the destruction of the proletariat's class unity in a thousand fratri­cidal con­frontations, from the sands of the Gulf to the frontiers of Yu­goslavia. It's for this rea­son that the defence of its unity is a question of life or death for our class. But what hope can the proletariat have to maintain this unity, if even its conscious avant garde renounces the fight for its unification? Don't anyone tell us that this an appeal to 'kiss and make up', an 'opportunistic avoiding of divergences'. Remember that it was precisely the participation at Zimmerwald which allowed the Bolsheviks to unify the left of Zimmerwald, embryo of the Communist International, and make the defini­tive separa­tion with Social Democracy. It's pre­cisely because profound divergences exist be­tween internationalists, differences which pre­vent them talking with the same voice, that it's necessary that these divergences are openly dis­cussed between revolu­tionaries. The example of discussions between Rosa Luxem­burg, Lenin, and other revolutionaries before them shows this. Finally don't anyone tell us that we are wasting our breath, that we're just doing this to show that we're not sec­tarian and others are.

In l983, our appeal towards the proletarian milieu, which was in the midst of a profound crisis, illustrated by the ex­plosion of Programma Comunista, the transformation of their ex-Algerian section, El-Oumami, into a nationalist Arab group, went almost unnoticed in a general climate of back­wardness and sectarianism. Our appeal was an invitation to fight the tendencies which were then dominant in the milieu.

Today, the situation is different. With the in­tegration of the ICO into the camp of the bour­geoisie, the internationalist groups of the Bordigist tradition have responded with an ex­plicit rejection of support to 'oppressed national bour­geoisies', a rejection which marks an im­portant clarification for the whole of the milieu. Instead of a total sectarian isola­tion, we find to­day in the different groups a greater will to air their reciprocal critiques in the press or in public meet­ings. Furthermore, there is an explicit ap­peal from the com­rades of Battaglia Comunista to overcome the present disper­sion; an appeal whose arguments and aims we largely share. Finally, there exists - and this must be encour­aged to the full - a 'push from below' against sectarian isolation, which comes from a new generation of young elements that the earthquake of these last two years has pushed towards com­munist positions and who remain baffled by this politically unexplained dispersion.

We are well aware that the difficulties are enormous, and that, for the moment, openness to discussion - when it exists - is very limited. There are those who say that the debate must in­clude only those groups which descend from the communist left of Italy, thus excluding the ICC. There are those who see the debate exclusively as an annihilation of other groups in their press. There are those who think that the real debate won't be possible until a pre-revolutionary phase and there are who are open to discuss with new ele­ments but not with 'old-timers'. As we can see, the roots of sectarianism are too profound for over-ambitious proposi­tions to be made, whether in their content (work toward the recon­struction of the party) or in their form (an inter­national conference for example). What can be done then to con­cretely overcome this present state of dispersion? It's neces­sary to facilitate everything that goes towards the increase of contact and debate between internationalists [1] [47]. It's not a question of hiding divergences in order to rush into 'marriages' between groups, but of beginning to openly dis­cuss the divergences that are at the origins of the existence of dif­ferent groups.

The point of departure is to systematise the re­ciprocal critique of positions in the press. That may appear a banality, but there are still revolu­tionary groups who, in their press, seem to be alone in the world.

Another step that can be taken immediately is to sys­tematise the presence and intervention at public meetings of other groups.

A more important step is the confrontation of positions in jointly convoked public meetings by several groups faced with particularly important events, such as the war in the Gulf.

It's clear that all this, and in particular the last point, will not be immediately realisable every­where and between all the groups. But even if there are only two organisations who meet to publicly discuss their agreements and diver­gences, that will in any case be a step forward for the whole milieu and we would support it with conviction, even if the ICC wasn't amongst the direct participants at this particular discus­sion.

Our propositions may appear modest, in fact they are. But faced with decades of unbridled sectarianism, it's already ambitious to only want TO BEGIN a process of confrontation and re­groupment between internationalists. And it's the only road that can lead to the decantation and programmatic de­marcation which will en­able communist minorities to fully play their es­sential role in the class battles which are being prepared.

ICC July 1991.

A torrent of chaos and decomposition is sweeping the world, and has laid low the crumbling walls of one of world capitalism's main bastions. The world's second imperialist power, whose nuclear arsenal alone could have destroyed the whole planet, the "land of the great lie" where the cynical perpetrators of the greatest anti-communist massacre in history have ruled for decades in the name of communism, the ultimate model of the most statified form of capitalist exploitation, has collapsed in convulsions following a still-born coup d'état.

Notwithstanding the hysterical lies of the ruling order's hired propagandists, it is not communism that is dying in the USSR, but Stalinism, and its death-throes are plunging a whole section of capitalism into ever-growing chaos. The violent tremors that are shaking the biggest country in the world are not even the birth pangs of a new, rejuvenated "democratic bourgeois revolution" of capitalism, but a sundering of this world order's weakest links. Just as in Yugoslavia, drowning in blood under the pressure of its nationalist antagonisms, the devastating breath of capitalist decomposition offers no perspective but a headlong decline into chaos.

A government that no longer knows what are its powers, nor whom it is governing; a country which does not know where its frontiers are, because it is exploding into autonomous republics; an army 4 million strong, with 30,000 nuclear warheads, but whose command is completely paralyzed by the threat of an 80% cut in numbers and hardly knows whose orders to obey; a moribund economy strangled by conflicts between its constituent parts, its organs of decision paralyzed. This is the state the USSR finds itself in after the "conservatives'" failed coup d'état, and the triumph of the "forces of democracy".

The coup undertaken by the nomenklatura's conservative fractions, nostalgic for the lost grandeur of empire, had long been denounced as an imminent threat by "reformist" leaders such as Shevardnadze and Yakovlev. Now it has happened. The determining element which forced the "conservatives" to undertake such a desperate adventure seems to have been the signature of the new "Union Treaty", planned for 20th August, which would have been an irreversible step in the USSR's breakup[1]. But the coup was no more than a ludicrous fiasco whose main result was to strengthen the hand of the "reformists", and allow them to regain the offensive. The stalinist straitjacket, or what was left of it, was torn apart in a few days, and the chaos which the old state power had had so much difficulty reining in went completely out of control.

After the disintegration of the Eastern bloc, stalinism is now collapsing at the very heart of its one-time empire. The hurricane which the USSR's weakness unleashed on the stalinist fortresses of central Europe, from Warsaw to Bucharest and from Berlin to Prague, has returned with a vengeance to strike the centre, in Moscow and Leningrad themselves. But here the phenomenon is clearer and of greater significance. In the countries of Eastern Europe, the political upheavals which accompanied the overthrow of stalinism were strongly marked by local specificities: anti-Russian feeling, the idea that all that need be done was to get rid of Russian domination for everything to work better, the fact that stalinism was not the result of a local counter-revolution, but imported by Russian tanks, the active presence of pro-Western political and economic forces impatient for the fruits, however tattered, of the decomposing empire: all this undoubtedly attenuated the anti-stalinist specificity of events. By contrast, Russia is the cradle of Stalinisn, as well as the scene for the 1917 October Revolution. Here, the full extent of stalinism's putrefaction appears in all its sordid reality.

As a result, the ideological campaign that was launched two years ago with the aim of presenting the collapse of stalinism as the bankruptcy of communism, marxism, and the class struggle has plumbed new depths of ignominy.

The bourgeoisie all over the world has taken a delight in showing the "crowds" in the "socialist fatherland" destroying the statues of Lenin, Marx, and Engels: workers spitting on the images of those who declared the possibility of a world without classes or exploitation; the memory of the greatest revolution ever undertaken by the exploited classes utterly deformed from being identified with the stalinist counter-revolution, and trodden under foot in the same streets where the workers in arms once "shook the world"; the bourgeois press indulging in the luxury of full column headlines declaring that "communism is dead!".

Stalinism has been riddled with falsehood since its inception. It could only die, drowned in lies.

The events of 19th-24th August in Moscow, which marked the final downfall of stalinism, are themselves cloaked in falsehood: as to the nature of the confrontations, presented as a "popular revolution"; as to what was at stake in the fighting, presented as a "struggle against communism"; lies as to the future, presented as a world where (after a few inevitable upheavals and sacrifices) peace and prosperity will reign thanks to the miraculous virtues of free competition and the electoral games of bourgeois democracy.

A popular revolution?

"We have won! Thanks to the Muscovites, and especially the youth, the coup d'état has been defeated, democracy has beaten reaction, and the USSR has been saved" (Yeltsin[2]).

"What we are seeing today is a true popular revolution. At last, liberty has triumphed" (Yakovlev[3]).

This is how the events in Moscow are presented by Yeltsin and Yakovlev, two figureheads of the bureaucratic "reformers". And this is the same tale that has been taken up by all the international media: against an attempted coup d'état by those elements most attached to the old stalinist forms, the "people" and the workers of Moscow rose as one, behind the great Yeltsin. Some journalists have gone one better, and even call the events a "new 1789 French revolution", and Yeltsin "a new Danton".

What is the truth? What part was played by the millions of proletarians in Moscow's suburbs? Who defeated the coup?

The image of Yeltsin on the day of the coup, standing on a tank denouncing the putsch's illegality and calling for a general strike, has been published ad nauseam all over the world. What is less known, is that Yeltsin's call to the workers of Moscow and the USSR was hardly followed, and that the mobilization in the demonstrations were timid, to say the least.

"If there's no heating this winter, then neither Gorbachev, nor Yeltsin, nor Ianaev will heat my home! In my opinion, they're all playing the same game, and the loser will be the people, as always". Such remarks, on the very day of the putsch and from an ordinary Russian "woman in the street"[4] well reflect the two dominant emotions among Russian workers: anxiety faced with a terrible decline in living conditions, and a profound distrust, born of decades of experience, of anything to do with the world of the Nomenklatura and its apparatchiks[5]. The preponderance of such ideas largely explains the low level of "popular" mobilization in response to Yeltsin's appeals.

It is more than likely that had the confrontations been more violent - for example, had the army really attacked the Russian parliament - then the workers in Moscow and elsewhere in the USSR would have played a larger part. Illusions in democracy, nationalism, and the virtues of "market capitalism" still weigh heavily on workers who anyway think that "there can't be anything worse than stalinism". But this time, with the exception of the mines (where Yeltsin controls an influential trade union), and of some large enterprises in big cities like Moscow, there was no massive "popular" mobilization (to the extent that this bourgeois term includes the working class).

Contrary to the official fairy-tale, the coup d'état was not defeated by a "popular revolution", but by the disrepair of the entire political apparatus, and the divisions within the ruling class. The soldiers in the tanks that protected the Russian parliament had not broken with the military hierarchy to fraternize with the demonstrators: they were obeying the orders of General Lebedev, who himself came under the command of the air force chief Shaposhnikov[6] who had gone over to the Yeltsin camp. If the military offensive against the Russian parliament never happened, this was not, as Ianaiev afterwards claimed, to avoid a bloodbath, but because high-ranking officers in both the army and the KGB refused to obey their superiors. The 300 cars and buses used to make barricades around the parliament building were not seized from the Moscow traffic: they were supplied by banks, enterprises, and the Moscow stock exchange. The Russian parliament's telephone links were kept open, not by decision of the telephone workers, but because the American company Sovamer Trading kindly made available its own telephone links through Finland[7].

The real protagonists of events in Moscow were two fractions of the ruling class. Five years of hesitant perestroika have only succeeded in creating profound divisions amongst the apparatchiks, as well as a new layer of enterprise managers who are no longer directly integrated into the state structure. The so-called "conservative" camp, represented by Genady Ianaiev, Pugo, Yazhov, and the other conspirators, consists of that fraction of the nomenklatura which resists the dismantling of the old Stalinist organizational forms, because they see in them a suicide both for themselves and for the empire[8]. Like its "reforming" rival, this fraction is recruited throughout every state institution, for the entire state machine is split from top to bottom: the military-industrial complex, the KGB, the army staff, and above all in the gigantic apparatus of the CPSU. The opposing fraction, whose most flamboyant spokesman is Boris Yeltsin, also springs from the same bureaucratic cesspit, as the putsch itself revealed. Amongst others, it includes the representatives of the "alternative economy" and the leaders of the new economic structures. As Arkady Volski, one of the reforming clique's most representative members, recently stated "In the USSR, the non-state sector of the economy is much larger than is generally thought"[9]. The creed of this gathering of businessmen and repented apparatchiks is to destroy the rigid stalinist machine, to try to save the machine of exploitation itself, and with it their own position as exploiters.

What we have just seen is thus not a "people's revolution" against "reactionary putschists", but a confrontation between two cliques of the same reactionary class, long since condemned by history and infested to the core with divisions and treachery, desperately trying to keep afloat their inexorably sinking "ship of state".

Only the venal stupidity of the ruling class' hired hacks could see a "popular revolution", a "new fall of the Bastille", in the Moscow events or a "new Danton" in the Russian president. The bourgeois heroes of 1789 had the historic stature of men taking part in the revolutionary birth of a new society. By comparison, Yeltsin's apparatchiks are nothing but historic midgets, offspring of the stalinist nomenklatura which is one of the most monstrous and degenerate forms of the capitalist class, confronted with the impossible task of maintaining an "order" in a state of complete putrefaction.

A combat against Leninism?

But the biggest, most gigantic lie, the cornerstone of the whole gigantic edifice of propaganda erected since the collapse of stalinism in the USSR, is the idea that the putschist thugs of Genady Ianaiev are "the last defenders of communism". The same communism whose principles were defined by Marx and Engels. The communism for which the Russian proletarians fought, with Lenin and the Bolshevik party at their head, alongside their class brothers in Germany, Hungary, and Italy.

Only ignorance, and decades of totalitarian lies, scientifically organized and propagated in every country in the world, still gives credit to the identification of stalinism and communism. The most elementary confrontation between the reality of stalinism and communist principles immediately reveals the enormity of the falsehood.

The starting point for the 1917 Russian Revolution was the struggle against war, in other words the struggle against the militarization of the working class under the national flag. Unlike the whimpering pacifists, who as always dreamed of peaceful capitalist nations, the revolutionary struggle against war was fought under the banner of Marx' and Engels' Communist Manifesto: "The workers have no fatherland! Workers of all countries, unite!". Over and over again, the Bolsheviks proclaimed: "The revolution is only a detachment of the world socialist army, and the success and triumph of the revolution which we have accomplished depends on the action of this army. This is a fact which none of us forgets (...) The Russian proletariat is aware of its revolutionary isolation, and it sees clearly that a vital precondition and a fundamental premise for its victory is the united intervention of workers of the whole world" (Lenin, 23rd July, 1918). From the start, the communism of marxists, both in the struggle and as an objective, has never been imagined as anything other than worldwide. By contrast, stalinism as a current was born historically with the rejection, after Lenin's death, of internationalist principles and with its becoming the spokesman for the theory of "socialism in one country". It wallowed in the most abject patriotism and nationalism. During World War II, Stalin took pride in his "democratic" allies' compliments for his "military genius", and in the USSR's 24 million corpses slaughtered on the altar of imperialism.

Communist society is defined by the abolition of wage labor and all forms of exploitation. Stalinism will go down in history a regime where capitalist exploitation reached an unprecedented degree of intensity and barbarity. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: "The old bourgeois society, with its classes and class conflicts, gives way to an association where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all". In Russia, the "free development" of the state bourgeoisie, the nomenklatura, took place at the price of the direst poverty for the workers.

In the marxist conception, the struggle for communism goes through a phase of "dictatorship of the proletariat", whose first precondition is the massive and active participation of all workers in wielding political power. In 1905, the workers in Russia spontaneously created the "finally discovered form" of this dictatorship (the Soviets, councils of delegates elected and instantly revocable by factory and district committees); in 1917, the Soviets took power. Stalinism only developed on the corpse of these organs, keeping only their name to disguise the institutions of the totalitarian dictatorship of capitalism[10].

Stalinism is not the negation of capitalism, but capitalism statified to the point of absurdity[11].

Today's "conservative" nomenklatura is not the last expression of communism, but like the "reformist" fraction, the direct heir of the stalinist executioners who massacred all the real protagonists of the communist October revolution[12].

The conflict between cliques of bureaucrats in the USSR has nothing to do with "communism". The real antagonism only concerns how to manage the exploitation of the workers and peasants of the USSR: poverty and scarcity under the heel of stalinism, or poverty and unemployment under the whip of the "businessmen".

The only part that the exploited classes can play in this conflict is that of cannon fodder. To join the "democratic" or the "conservative" forces is to run head first into a massacre, and to desert the only struggle which can offer a way out of capitalism's nightmare: the revolutionary struggle of the world proletariat against all the fractions of the exploiting class.

On the way to prosperity, peace, and freedom?

Prosperity?

The economic question lies at the heart of the "victors'" democratic lies: before the putsch, Yeltsin did not hesitate to promise that he would bring the country out of disaster in "500 days".

And with good reason. The USSR's economic situation has been getting consistently worse during the five years of perestroika, with an abrupt acceleration since the beginning of 1991[13]. During the last six months, domestic production has fallen by 10%; imports have fallen by 50%, and exports by 23.4%. By August 1991, inflation had already reached an annual rhythm of 100%. On the financial level, the USSR was no longer able to repay its debts. At the beginning of September, Volski declared that the USSR was "on the brink of financial collapse"[14] - while the oxygen of Western capital, its masters made more and more uneasy by the advancing chaos, has become more and more rarified. The economy is suffering from the effects of political and social instability: the conflicts between republics, and between national groups within the republics, end up in a state of mutual strangulation in wars where economic pressure (eg blocking lines of communication) is constantly used as a weapon; institutional and political instability (accompanied since the putsch by a constant fear of purges) leads to a complete paralysis of the bureaucracy in the decision-making centers of the economy. Famine looms this winter.

The economic crisis is indeed at the centre of the situation in the USSR. It is no accident that the first organ of central power created by the "victors" has been a "Committee for economic management", nor that this same committee has been given the job of forming a new government for the USSR, or what is left of it.

But what of the future, now that the "500 day man" is in power? Now that Yavlinsky, the author of Yeltsin's famous plan, is a member of what serves as a government, his proposal has become a... 5-year plan. Its content? "Shock therapy", "Bolivian-style" as the IMF experts say: "real prices", which means an explosion of inflation (inflation is expected to reach 1000% in four months); a faster privatization of the economy[15], which will mean redundancies for the workers in enterprises considered uncompetitive (unemployment is expected to rise to 30 million by 1992); an increase in the number of people living below the poverty line, to the tune of 170,000 every month.

This is the future that is forecast. The reality will certainly be far worse: bloody civil wars between and within the republics, and the consequent exodus of civilian populations, can only aggravate the disaster. The much proclaimed emergence from the quagmire will not happen in 500 days, nor in 5 years, not just because of the world's dramatic economic situation, but also because the chaos into which the USSR is plunging will make it impossible to master the economic machine.

Freedom?

"Freedom has triumphed at last" proclaimed the father of perestroika, Yakovlev, when it was certain that the putsch had failed. But the freedom he is talking about is the freedom of the new sharks: the converted apparatchiks, the businessmen, the black marketers, the leaders of the powerful mafia, in fact all the scum which has been raised, Reagan-style, to the rank of "hero" in the cult of "free enterprise". What does this "freedom" which "has triumphed at last" mean for the workers and poor peasants? What does freedom mean for the unemployed? What does freedom mean for those who spend most of their time in endless queues in front of empty shops? What does liberty mean when life is a daily struggle to survive in the midst of uncontrolled chaos? Liberty in wretched poverty is only a cynical lie. The only thing which will change for soviet workers, and then only in the industrialized zones, will be the introduction of a chaotic caricature of bourgeois democracy: instead of the gross falsification of stalinist propaganda, they will be treated to the sophistication of democratic falsehood (of elections, media, and trade unions), which lets its own professionals "criticize" freely, the better to stifle any real social criticism, and which encourages a "credible" network of trade union and political organizations within the working class, the better to sabotage its combats from within.

Peace in the USSR?

Even as the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan, and lost its control over Eastern Europe, nationalist conflicts began to explode within its borders. The peripheral republics began to arm themselves, and to proclaim their independence of the centre and the other republics.

The new conquerors also have a plan (though this time without any dates) to restore peace and harmony to the nation: the "Union treaties", which are supposed to give freedom to all and establish new, amicable, ties based on voluntary cooperation. Certainly, the impulsive Yeltsin did let slip a few explicit threats on the renegotiation of borders, but only to withdraw them immediately after.

The putschists intended to prevent the signature of the new Union treaty drawn up by Gorbachev and those republics willing to go along with him. The main effect of the putsch's failure and the triumph of the "democrats" has been to destroy what little coherence remained in the relations between the republics[16]. In the space of a few days, the map of the world has been redrawn, and nobody knows where it will stop: the three Baltic states have had their independence recognized by the Western powers, all the other republics have proclaimed their independence. In a few days, the USSR has ceased to exist.

Most of the republics aim to form, or to reinforce, their own political institutions and their own army. The already catastrophic degree of anarchy is becoming more and more widespread (13). The antagonisms between different republics are getting worse, for example between Armenia and Azerbaidjan over Nagorny Karabakh. And the same centrifugal tendencies are increasing the general disorder within the republics themselves. Minority populations, whether Russian[17], "national" or "ethnic", are all declaring their "autonomy", confronting each republic with the same problem that exists for the USSR as a whole. Moldavia is an especially good example: the new local authorities have declared their intention to integrate their region with the Romanian state, but are confronted with the active resistance of the "authorities" of the Dniestr region (where the majority of the population is Russian or Ukrainian), who are threatening the Romanian part of Moldavia with "economic sanctions"[18]; at the same time, the latter must contend with the Gaugauz region and its russified turkic population; in Georgia, Ossetians are subjected to a merciless repression by the local authorities; the tiny zone of Crimea, which is an integral part of the Ukraine, has proclaimed itself "autonomous", and declared that "Only the people of Crimea have the right to use and possess the land and its riches"[19].

There will be no return to peace in what was once the USSR. The underlying forces which are throwing all these nationalist antagonisms are the same that are plunging the entire planet into chaos. Economic paralysis, the development of poverty and the consequent disintegration of the social fabric, the explosion of antagonisms between different capitalist factions, this entire course of decomposition of the "capitalist order", has become irreversible in the USSR and everywhere else. It can only be stopped by the revolutionary action of the world proletariat.

World peace?

The promise of peace plays an important part in the gamut of mystifications of the "democratic forces". To announce the reduction of military spending thanks to a thawing in international relations is an effective propaganda argument, in the USSR even more than in other countries. By announcing their continued pursuit of Gorbachev's policy in this respect, the "reformists" are making the most of it.

This is an argument which in fact makes a virtue out of necessity: if Gorbachev's USSR has become less of a threat, it is because it has no choice in the matter. The days when the USSR could ensure its allies' victory in Vietnam against the USA are indeed long gone. The complete impotence of Gorbachev's government against the US diktat during the Gulf war is eloquent in this respect. On the international stage, the leaders of the Kremlin have been reduced to the status of beggars, kept waiting on the doorstep at the "great powers'" summits. Under such conditions, the USSR is hardly in a position to conduct an aggressive policy.

This does not mean that the "reformers'" victory will bring peace with it: quite the reverse. It is impossible to measure all the consequences of the disintegration of the biggest country in the world. From the Baltic Sea to the North Pacific, a huge powder-keg is just waiting to erupt. As the "Russian bear" lets its prey slip, the greed of the surrounding countries, but also of the great powers, increases correspondingly. And even if the pickings are often bereft of any economic value, the permanent conflict of imperialism forces all countries, and especially the dominant powers, to do all they can if only to prevent their rivals getting stronger. Moreover, the USSR's political instability and centrifugal nationalisms will prove contagious.

The list of "trouble spots" created by the empire's collapse is a long one: Japan is demanding the return of the Kurile islands, seized by the USSR at the end of World War II[20]; the longest frontier in the world, between China and the USSR, is one of the planet's greatest military concentrations, and the object of a series of quarrels just waiting to spring to life; China itself, the last major bastion of stalinism, is also subject to the same internal political and nationalist tensions as the USSR; the enmity between India and Pakistan has been still further intensified; the frontier zones with Iran and Turkey are already seriously destabilized by the conflicts in the Caucasus (Azerbaidjan, Armenia, Georgia); and last but not least, the whole of Central Europe, from Romania to the Baltic, is a veritable jigsaw of nationalities (Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, and... Russians), riven with archaic nationalisms and ancient feuds, which will create still more centers of tension.

The tremors are already being felt well beyond the confines of the empire's frontier. The process of dislocation of the ex-Western bloc, begun with the collapse in the East, is bound to accelerate with the disappearance of the "common enemy", and the conflicting appetites for the shreds of the USSR. The effects have already spread as far as Cuba.

The fires of the Gulf war revealed the lie of the "peace" that our rulers promised after the destruction of the Berlin Wall.  The new promises of peace that are being made as the USSR disintegrates are no less hollow. The shockwave of the USSR's collapse is only beginning to make itself felt.

Yugoslavia

The bloody civil war in Yugoslavia is a crying demonstration of the destructive tendencies sweeping capitalism, and which the USSR's collapse has only served to accelerate. Yugoslavia's dislocation is partly a result of the movement of destabilization which began two years ago with the end of the Eastern bloc and of blocs in general. The defeat of the putsch in Moscow has also encouraged the separatism of the Croats. But this nationalist bloodbath is above all an expression of the destructive tendencies which are present throughout capitalism: the tendency to "look after number one", towards the dislocation of capitalism's organization under the pressure of the economic crisis, and to "settle" problems through military means[21].

As we go to press, the war is both spreading and intensifying: the "federal" army and Serb forces are starting new offensives against Croatia with naval blockades and aerial bombardments. The fighting has reached Zaghreb, which lives in constant fear of air-raids. In their turn, the Croat armies have launched a "general offensive". In Montenegro and Voivodina the federal government has called up its reservists. The slaughter has taken a qualitative step forward.

In this war, proletarians and peasants, unable to free themselves from the poison of nationalism are massacring each other for the sordid and absurd interests of the bourgeois cliques that rule them. The war is no longer limited to the "Third World": it is happening in Europe, only a few kilometers from Austria and Italy, which, like Hungary, are already receiving refugees from the civil war.

Combining cynicism and hypocrisy, the governments of Western Europe claim to play a "peacekeeping" role, when in fact some of them (Germany and Austria in particular) are directly supporting the Slovene and Croat separatists. The ceasefires "brokered" by the European powers have all collapsed, while the idea of sending a European peacekeeping force has only served to highlight the imperialist antagonisms between them (the opposition between Germany and Britain on this question, in fact conceals the fundamental and growing antagonism between US and German capital)[22].

This is the peace that the "pacifist reformers" and champions of the "new world order" have to offer us.

Yugoslavia is not "an isolated case". It is the future, not only for the USSR, but for the whole planet, unless the capitalist mode of organization is destroyed, unless the working class puts an end to a system which is plunging head first into suicide.

The end of the class struggle?

But is the proletariat capable of carrying out this gigantic task? The lynchpin of the deafening ideological campaign around the events in the USSR is to reply "no!" to this crucial question. Pushing their ignominy a step further, the bourgeoisie's ideologues, who had already announced two years ago the "end of communism", are now finding new arguments to tell us, not only that the final goal of communism has collapsed in the USSR, but that marxism and the very idea of the class struggle are dead. And if they occasionally recognize a difference between stalinism and the October revolution, it is only to describe the latter as "utopian", and to conclude that "the class struggle, even with the finest ideals can only lead to the gulag". The media repeat endlessly: "class struggle has come to an end".

After the "Third World" and the Eastern bloc, the Western industrial powers - less affected until now - are in their turn plunging into an open recession, heralding new and violent attacks against the living conditions of the entire world proletariat. And the world bourgeoisie expects us take its dreams for reality: a definitively beaten and apathetic working class, workers ready to slaughter each other in wars to defend "their nation", and to sacrifice themselves to save the profits of "their company".

This propaganda is based on the limitations of the workers in the East, mired in "nationalist" ideology[23] and illusions in "capitalist democracy, the source of well-being and freedom", and on the low level of combativity, especially during the last two years, among the workers in the West.

But for the proletarians in the East, the opening of a class perspective depends essentially on their class brothers in the Western powers. As long as Western workers have not shown clearly, in struggle, their rejection of capitalism and the democratic lie, the workers in the ex-stalinist countries will keep their illusions in the possibilities offered by the creation of "new democratic nations". The precondition for the workers in the East to overcome their ideological limits is essentially the same as the condition that could have prevented the October revolution from dying of suffocation: the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat in the central countries.

It is true that the Western, and especially European proletariat has suffered a retreat in its combativity, under both the weight of the new ideological campaigns and the confusion they have created, and the daily and ubiquitous repression of unemployment or the threat of unemployment. But it is neither defeated, nor apathetic, nor gangrened by nationalism and democratic illusions. The oldest proletariat in the world, because it has suffered at the forefront of two centuries of capitalist war, because it lives in the part of the world where the interdependence of the international economy is the most obvious, is the least subject to the mystifications of nationalism[24]. This is why, during the Gulf war, the governments of these countries did not take the risk of using conscripts, and used professional armies to conduct their massacres. The same is true for the democratic lie: after more than a century of experience, the general disgust for politicians, the high level of abstention at elections (unless the vote is... obligatory), the workers' rejection of the union machines, all demonstrate how worn out these mystifications are.

After reducing the proletariat of the "Third World" and the Eastern countries to misery, the Western bourgeoisie is now attacking the living conditions of this fraction of the world proletariat, more violently than at any time since the beginning of the 1980's. Even if conditions today, marked by the weight of ideological campaigns and the debilitating atmosphere of capitalist decomposition, make a proletarian mobilization more difficult at first, it is nonetheless inevitable as the bourgeoisie's attacks increase.

No, whatever the claims of bourgeois propaganda, the time has not come for an "end to class struggle", but on the contrary its intensification, and its development at a higher level. It is the struggle of the workers in the central countries which will open a perspective for the world proletariat, for it will sweep away the nationalist lies and the illusions in a "better capitalism". This alone will open the way to the decisive confrontations which will put an end to capitalism, not only in its stalinist form, but in all its forms.

RV, 20/09/1991

[1] Other immediate factors help to explain the putschists' decision: the violent acceleration of the economic crisis, especially since the beginning of 1991, and the fear of further destabilization as a result, especially during next winter; Gorbachev's improved relations with Yeltsin during recent months, which directly threatened the government positions conquered last winter by the "conservatives".

[2] Le Monde, 24/08/91

[3] International Herald Tribune, 23/08/91

[4] Liberation, 21/08/91

[5] The Russian workers know that today's anti-stalinist heroes are nothing but ex-stalinists, who owe their position today to their skill in navigating through the quagmire of the bureaucracy. They know that Yeltsin had no hesitation in flirting with the anti-Semitic Pamyat organization, that Shevardnadze used to be a three-star KGB general, and that Gorbachev's most powerful protector was Suslov, one-time favorite of Stalin.

[6] Nezavissimaia Gazeta, 22/08/91. An article in the same issue declared that "The putschists' biggest problem was probably the elite troops".

[7] Liberation, 27/08/91

[8] See International Review no 60, September 1989, "Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the Eastern countries"

[9] A year ago, Arkady Volski founded the "Scientific and Technical Union", designed to bring together the country's main industrial managers; today, it claims to represent 60% of Soviet industry. This association, a sort of bosses' and bankers' union, along with the Union of businessmen and proprietors, is a veritable spearhead for the adepts of the market. Its role has grown constantly, during and since the putsch. It comes as no surprise that Volski should be one of the co-founders, along with Edward Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev, of the "Movement for the union of the forces for democracy and reform".

[10] For an analysis of the nature of the October revolution and of stalinism, see our pamphlet Russia 1917, the start of the world revolution.

[11] Capital is possessed by the state, and managed by the bureaucracy. The nomenklatura's income is made up of surplus-value extorted from the workers. Profit is distributed, not in the form of dividends or private property, but in the form of "wages" and "perks".

[12] The persecution of the "old Bolsheviks", hunted down, deported, pushed to suicide, assassinated and shot down by stalinism; the monstrous Moscow trials of the 1930's, organized with the same methods as used by the Nazis and conscientiously broadcast by all the "democratic" media, putting on show the old Bolshevik leaders condemned to death after being forced to accuse themselves of the worst crimes: all this will remain forever one of the blackest and bloodiest pages of working-class history. When the GPU - the forerunner of the KGB - assassinated Trotsky in 1940, not one member of the 1917 Bolshevik central committee was left alive... except Stalin.

[13] See "The USSR in tatters" in the previous issue of the International Review.

[14] International Herald Tribune, 02/09/91.

[15] "Privatizing" the Soviet economy is altogether more difficult than in the other ex-Eastern bloc countries. Here, the whole of social life is oriented towards one goal: military power. What can it mean to "privatize" the only thing the economy is capable of producing: weapons, military and space research, millions of soldiers and their equipment, tanks, aircraft, warships, submarines, satellites, etc?

[16] The resulting chaos at the centre has been all the more dramatic in that the backbone of central power, the CPSU, has been outlawed. After five years of perestroika, the constitution had already become illegible, so much had it been modified and remodified following the twists and turns of the struggle for power amongst different fractions of the political apparatus. It is trodden under foot daily, both by the various republican governments declaring their independence, and by the central authorities completely incapable of following a coherent line. The day after the coup d'état, the central institutions plunged into the domain of the "temporary" without any idea whether they will ever emerge from it. And this is true both for the USSR as a whole, and for the republics, as they all try to establish some kind of rules in the midst of chaos.

[17] There are almost 25 million Russians living in the different republics of the USSR.

[18] The Dniestr controls almost 80% of Moldavia's gas and electricity supplies.

[19] International Herald Tribune, 6/9/91

[20] In theory, the USSR and Japan have been at war since 1945.

[21] See "Militarism and Decomposition" in the International Review no.64, October 1990.

[22] For an analysis of the war in Yugoslavia, see the ICC's different territorial publications (list on the back cover of this issue).

[23] There is a great difference at this level between the workers in the USSR's great industrial centers, who are less affected by the nationalist poison if only because they live in the empire's metropoles, and those in the USSR's peripheral republics or the countries of the ex-Eastern bloc, where "anti-Russian" feeling has been extensively used by the local ruling class to create a feeling of a "unity of national interest" between the exploited and their exploiters.

[24] This does not mean that it has been immunized for ever. The bourgeoisie takes every opportunity to try to infect it with the most abject "nationalism" against immigrant workers, or against the refugees flooding in from the East.

A few weeks before the events in the USSR, the ICC held its ninth International Congress. As the reader will see from the documents presented at this meeting which are published below, the break-up of the USSR, as well as the war in Yugoslavia, which are clear products of the dynamic opened up by the disappearance of the eastern imperialist bloc, did not surprise us and are an illustration of the orientations that we had drawn up at this Congress. They are in fact a confirmation of what we have been saying since the very beginning of the explosion of the eastern bloc, in the summer of 1989: throughout this period, our organization has shown itself capable of analyzing the main tendencies of the new historic situation that was opening up, in particular the perspective of chaos and of the disintegration of the eastern bloc and the USSR.

As the real general assembly of the ICC, the most important expression of its centralized and international character, a congress has to draw up a balance sheet of the work accom­plished in the preceding period, and, on this basis, define the perspectives for future activity in line with the analysis of the international situation, particularly with regard to the world­wide balance of forces between the proletariat and the bour­geoisie. Consequently, this Congress had the essential task of discussing the validity of our analyses (in particular the gen­eral analysis about the historic phase of decomposition that capitalism has entered) and of the positions we have taken up in response to the huge historic convulsions that we have been through since the end of 1989:

- the collapse of the Stalinist regimes

- the disappearance of the east-west imperialist configu­ration that came out of Yalta in 1945

- the Gulf war, which was a product of this situation, and which led to the destruction of Iraq and Kuwait

- the growth of chaos in a number of countries, and particularly in the countries of eastern Europe

- the reflux in the international class struggle.

The new situation: a historic break and a reflux in the class struggle

What balance sheet did the Congress draw about the analyses and positions developed by the ICC - all of them published in the press, and which we shall be referring to - in the face of the gigantic events we have been living through? As the res­olution on activities that we adopted put it:

"The events of historic significance which have marked out the last two years have put the organization to the test, obliging it to re-examine the whole of its analyses and activ­ity in the light of the conditions of the international situation ...

"The central criterion for evaluating the ICC's activity over the last two years is, necessarily, given the importance of events, its ability to understand and analyze the signifi­cance and implications of the latter."

What do these events signify? What do they imply? This is what the Congress had to return to and take a position on.

The historic phase of capitalist decomposition is at the root of the disappearance of the eastern bloc and the USSR

In the dramatic and catastrophic conditions of the open, irre­versible crisis of capitalism, the bourgeoisie has been in­capable of imposing on the world proletariat the only per­spective that it could offer humanity: a devastating third world war. But at the same time, the proletariat has itself been unable to outline or present its own revolutionary per­spective, the destruction of capitalist society. Given this lack of any historical perspective, capitalist society - whose eco­nomic crisis has not stopped - is in an impasse and is rotting on its feet like an overripe fruit. This is what we call the new historic phase of the decomposition of capitalism (see 'Decomposition, Final Phase of the Decadence of Capital­ism', in International Review 62, third quarter, 1990).

This phase of decomposition, of historic impasse and blockage, is at the root of the collapse of the eastern bloc and the USSR and of the death of Stalinism, as we were able to see as early as October 1989:

"Already the eastern bloc is in a state of profound dislo­cation. For example, the invective traded between East Ger­many and Hungary, between 'reformist' and 'conservative' governments, is not just a sham. It reveals real splits which are building up between different national bourgeoisies. In this zone, the centrifugal tendencies are so strong that they go out of control as soon as they have the opportunity. And today, this is being fed by fears from within the parties led by the ‘conservatives' that the movement which started in the USSR, and grew in Poland and Hungary, should contaminate and destabilizes them.

"We find a similar phenomenon in the peripheral re­publics of the USSR. These regions are more or less colonies of Tsarist or even Stalinist Russia (eg the Baltic countries annexed under the 1939 Germano-Soviet pact). ... The na­tionalist movements which today are profiting from a loos­ening of central control by the Russian party are developing more than half a century late relative to the movements which hit the British and French empires; their dynamic is towards separation from Russia.

"In the end, if the central power in Moscow does not re­act, then we will see the explosion, not just of the Russian bloc, but of its dominant power. The Russian bourgeoisie, which today rules the world's second power, would find itself at the head of a second-rate power, a good deal weaker than Germany for example." ('Theses on the Economic and Politi­cal Crisis in the Eastern Countries', adopted in October 1989, IR 60, first quarter 1990).

The decomposition of capitalism further aggravates
imperialist antagonisms, wars and militarism

The effects of this historic phase, in this case the explo­sion of the eastern bloc and the USSR, in their turn accentu­ate and reinforce the decomposition of society. This phase is marked by the exacerbation of all the characteristics of deca­dent cap­italism, in particular war, imperialism and militarism (as we showed in the text 'Militarism and Decomposition' in Octo­ber 1990, IR 62), and state capitalism, all this in a con­text of growing chaos. This is what we wrote just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the world bourgeoisie was singing loudly about the virtues of capitalism and claiming that it could of­fer humanity an era of peace and prosper­ity...and announcing its victory over marxism:

"Does this disappearance of the eastern bloc mean that capitalism will no longer be subjected to imperialist con­frontations? Such a hypothesis would be entirely foreign to marxism...In the period of capitalist decadence, all states are imperialist, and take the necessary measures to satisfy their appetites: war economy, arms production. etc. We must state clearly that the deepening convulsions of the world economy can only sharpen the opposition between different states, including and increasingly on the military level. The difference, in the coming period, will be that these antago­nisms which were previously contained and used by the two great imperialist blocs will now come to the fore. The disap­pearance of the Russian imperialist gendarme, and that to come of the American gendarme as far as its one-time 'partners' are concerned [Note: by this we meant the disap­pearance of the western bloc following the death of its east­ern rival] opens the door to the unleashing of a whole series of more local rivalries. For the moment, these rivalries and confrontations cannot degenerate into a world war (even supposing that the proletariat were no longer capable of putting up a resistance). However, with the disappearance of the discipline imposed by the two blocs, these conflicts are liable to become more frequent and more violent, especially of course in those areas where the proletariat is weakest". ('After the Collapse of the Eastern bloc, Decomposition and Chaos', IR 61, second quarter 1990).

This is exactly what was to happen in the most bloody manner a few months later, with the war in the Gulf.

The collapse of the eastern bloc: a historic break in the world situation

The disappearance of the eastern imperialist bloc, the death agony of Stalinist state capitalism, the imperialist war in the Gulf, marks a clear break in the evolution of history. In par­ticular for the class struggle of the world proletariat.

The end of the 1960s had opened up a period of slow, non-linear, but real development of workers' struggles throughout the world in response to the attacks resulting from the inexorable aggravation of the economic crisis: 1968-75 (France, Italy, Poland, etc); Poland 1980; the struggles of 1983-88 in Western Europe. This relative strength, this re­sistance by the world working class, by preventing the differ­ent national bourgeoisies from mobilizing the proletariat be­hind them, is at the origins of the historic blockage which has seen the phenomenon of decomposition become a determin­ing factor in the life of capitalism. The collapse of the Stal­inist regimes, which has to be understood in the framework of decomposition, was to lead to a profound reflux in the consciousness of the working class (see IR 60, 'New Diffi­culties for the Proletariat', and thesis 22 of the 'Theses on the Economic and Political Crisis in the Eastern Countries', al­ready cited). It was still weighing on the working class when the Gulf war came in its turn to influence the balance of forces between the classes:

"Today, this development of consciousness continues to be hampered by the after-effects of the collapse of Stalinism and the eastern bloc. The discredit suffered, for over a year and a half, under the effect of a huge campaign of lies, by the very idea of socialism and the proletarian revolution, is still far from having been overcome ... Likewise the crisis and war in the Gulf, while they've had the merit of silencing all the prattle about 'eternal peace', have also engendered in the first instance a feeling of impotence and an indisputable paralysis in the broad mass of workers in the advanced countries," ('Resolution on the International Situation', adopted by the Congress and published in this IR).

And it's hardly necessary to point out that, since the Congress, the failure of the 'conservative' coup in the USSR in August, the death of the Stalinist CP in the USSR, the break-up of the USSR itself, have provided the world bour­geoisie with an opportunity to relaunch its campaign against the working class about the 'death of communism', using and abusing the greatest lie in all history, the identification be­tween Stalinist state capitalism and communism. No doubt this campaign will prolong a little longer the negative effects that the nauseating putrefaction of Stalinism is having on the proletariat. The world proletariat will have paid very dearly indeed for the Stalinist counter-revolution, in its flesh and its mind.

The 9th Congress of the ICC declared itself in agreement with this analysis and with the various positions taken up in reponse to the events. It thus drew up a positive balance sheet of its activities at the level of the theoretical analysis of the international situation, and of the positions this analysis led it to take up.

Balance sheet of activities

This historic break, the events we have been through since the collapse of the eastern bloc, and the reflux in the class struggle, have demanded an adaptation of our general inter­vention. From this point of view as well, the Congress drew a positive balance sheet. In all our interventions we have been able to take up a militant position in response to the main questions posed by the present situation, in particu­lar through: the uncovering of the new historic phase of de­composition and of the gravity of what's at stake; the expla­nation of the historic and particular causes of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes; the denunciation of the bourgeoisie's campaigns, in particular the identification between the Rus­sian revolution and Stalinist barbarism, between communism and Stalinist state capitalism; the denunciation of the murder­ous and cynical barbarism of the bourgeoisie, of its system and of 'democracy' during the Gulf war, and so on.

At the same time, with the reflux in the struggle and the circumstances in which it took place, "the aspect of propa­ganda has been uppermost in our intervention, with the press as the main instrument for this ... The territorial publications were on the whole able to respond to the eruption of major events, by advancing the date of their appearance, and by bringing out supplements when necessary" (Resolution on Ac­tivities). The ICC, as a unified and centralized whole, dis­tributed an international supplement to its publications at the time of the collapse of the eastern bloc, and two international leaflets in the 12 countries where it is present, and anywhere else it was able to intervene, denouncing the imperialist con­flict in the Gulf both at the beginning and the end.

At the level of its organizational life, the ICC has been able to reinforce its international links and centralization, thereby following the orientations adopted at the previous International Congress. The mobilization of the organization, of all its militants, and the strengthening of the links between all its parts and territorial sections, were an essential means for the organization to face up to the demands of the present situation.

While the Congress drew a positive balance sheet of our activities, this didn't mean that we have not shown any weaknesses, notably through delays in the various territorial presses, in particular in our response to the collapse of the Stalinist regimes. These weaknesses were basically a result of the real difficulty there has been in grasping the full breadth of the historic break that has taken place; in putting into question the framework of analyses that corresponded to the period preceding the disappearance of the eastern bloc; in rapidly seeing and understanding the collapse of the bloc; in grasping the negative repercussions that the downfall of Stalinism would have for the working class; in recognizing the reflux in the class struggle.

Facing up to the dramatic acceleration of history

History is accelerating dramatically. There's no point in go­ing back over all the events and over the most recent of them, which is taking place at the time of writing: the end of the USSR. You only have to read the papers and watch the TV. The decomposition of capitalist society is the cause of this acceleration. It affects the whole of society, all classes, in­cluding the proletariat. The characteristics of the phe­nomenon of decomposition are such that they exert on the working class and on revolutionary organizations - the ICC included - a particular weight of petty bourgeois ideology which undermines confidence and conviction in the historic strength of the proletariat and in the role of revolutionary political organizations.

The pressure of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology in full decay, and the resulting flight into the most reac­tionary illusions, such as nationalism, corporatism and even racism; the fact that huge numbers of workers are being thrown into unemployment, with no perspective of finding any other work, or, in the case of the young, of finding any work in the first place, with all the lumpenisation, marginalization and despair that follows (drug addiction, crime, pros­titution...): these and many others are dangers that threaten the world proletariat more and more violently, more and more massively. They hinder the development of its con­sciousness, of its confidence in its revolutionary strength. This situation is developing in a terribly wide-scale manner in the countries of the former eastern bloc. The disorientation, blindness and despair hitting the broad mass of workers in these countries is particularly dramatic. And there's no doubt that the explosion of the USSR, the independence of the re­publics and the resulting nationalism - all the illusions in democracy and the 'prosperity' of the western countries - will further reinforce the disarray and impotence of the proletariat in this part of the world.

The same kinds of dangers weigh on communist militants and their political organizations. Doubts, skepticism, demoralization, lack of confidence in the working class, go hand in hand with the temptation to take flight into 'private life', into individualism, with the bitter and cynical denigration of any collective and organized militant activity, or the rejection of thought and theory.

Similarly at the collective level, at the level of the func­tioning of the revolutionary organisation, dilettantism, local­ism, attitudes of laxity and of 'every man for himself' are also dangers which are a much greater threat to the function­ing of communist political organizations than they were in the past.

This pressure also operates at the theoretical-political level. The absence of historical perspective which results from this unprecedented situation of decomposition also manifests itself in a lack of rigorous thought, in a loss of method, in a tendency to mix up categories, in an immedi­atist, a-historical vision. For communist organizations, this pressure expresses itself in a growing tendency towards im­mediate and superficial approaches to events, a day-to-day, immediatist approach which fails to understand or even to try to see the unity of the historical process as a whole.

A lack of rigorous thinking, a lack of interest in theory - characteristics which affect the whole of capitalist society and which are in fact getting stronger all the time - manifest themselves through the pressure to give up reading theoreti­cal and historical works, to ignore or forget the 'classics' of marxism and the history of the workers' movement and of capitalist society.

This pressure is also illustrated - we can see it in a num­ber of revolutionary groups - by the tendency to call into question the theoretical and political acquisitions of the workers' movement, and even - whether openly or not - by the rejection of marxism.

It was for this reason that the 9th Congress called upon all parts of the organization, on all its militants, to strengthen the international centralization of the ICC, to be extremely vigilant about matters of organisation and militant life, but also to involve ourselves with all our strength in theoretical reflection and deepening and in the elaboration of our analy­ses. These are indispensable conditions for being able to make the most effective intervention in the working class.

Intervention in the coming period

In this situation of the growing pressure of decomposi­tion on the proletariat and revolutionaries, of a terrible accel­eration of history, the 9th Congress of the ICC drew out the per­spectives for its general activities, in particular the per­spectives for intervention towards the working class and the proletarian political milieu.

Obviously, the disappearance of the USSR and the dis­gusting campaign of the bourgeoisie against communism are going to prolong the effects of the reflux that the proletariat has suffered for over two years now. It will also reinforce the necessity for us to strengthen our denunciation of the lie that Stalinism is the same as communism. Since it corresponded to our framework of analysis, this event didn't surprise us and has confirmed the orientations for our intervention as de­fined by the 9th Congress:

"Our intervention must confront both the need to help the working class overcome the ever-present aftermath of the re­treat in consciousness that followed the collapse of the east­ern bloc, and the need to facilitate the decantation of con­sciousness brought about by the Gulf war, which can only be deepened by the fact that the threat of war is more and more present. This is why the main axis of our intervention is to contribute as much as possible to the deepening of con­sciousness, through the general denunciation of the bour­geoisie and its system, and by highlighting what are the stakes in the new historic situation, linked to the general per­spective for the class struggle. Because of this, the question of war must remain a central axis of our intervention" (Resolution on Activities).

The working class is going to have to struggle in a situa­tion dominated by the development of chaos, wars and eco­nomic crisis. And this is also the context in which we will have to develop our activity and our intervention:

"The general chaos which characterizes the final phase of capitalist decadence, the phase of decomposition, can only be marked by an unleashing of the dominant characteristic of the period of decadence: imperialist conflicts and mili­tarism" (Resolution on the International Situation).

The imperialist wars that are going to break out, even if they don't take the form of a world war between two blocs - at least not for the moment - will be no less murderous. They will give rise to the most awful ravages, and, combined with the other effects of decomposition - pollution, famines, epi­demics - they could very well lead to the destruction of hu­manity. Sharpened more and more by the blows of the eco­nomic crisis, imperialist antagonisms between the former al­lies of the ex-western bloc will spark off and fuel the numer­ous fires of war that will break out in the phase of decompo­sition.

This perspective of a multiplication of bloody imperialist conflicts, of a catastrophic development of the effects of de­composition - especially in the countries of Eastern Europe - cannot fail to have consequences for the working class. As we have said, the working class is going through a reflux in its consciousness and its combativity. But as a world class it is not defeated and the historic course still points towards de­cisive class confrontations. In particular, and this is a crucial point, the experienced and concentrated working class of western Europe has not been mobilized behind the banners of the bourgeoisie.

"In reality, if the disarray provoked by the events of the Gulf may resemble, on the surface, that resulting from the collapse of the eastern bloc, it obeys a different dynamic: while what came from the east (elimination of the remains of Stalinism, nationalist confrontations, immigration, etc) can only, and for a good while yet, have an essentially negative effect on the consciousness of the proletariat, the more and more permanent presence of war in the life of society is tending, by contrast, to reawaken this consciousness...

"The growing evidence of the irreversible bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, including and above all its 'liberal' form, the irremediable militarism of this system, will constitute, for the central sectors of the proletariat, a pow­erful factor in the exhaustion of illusions coming from the events at the end of 1989," (ibid).

The barbarity of war and the multiplication of economic attacks will push the proletariat to return to the path of strug­gle, and to develop its awareness of the terrible historical stakes being played for. The aim of the 9th Congress was to prepare the ICC for this perspective.

Appeal to the proletarian political milieu

It is in this increasingly dramatic world historic situation that the 9th Congress addressed an 'Appeal to the proletarian po­litical milieu' (published in this issue). Despite the impor­tant difficulties of the proletarian milieu, the ICC must par­ticipate and work towards the political clarification and unifi­cation of what constitutes the political avant-garde of the proletariat. Since its foundation, our organisation has always put this task at the heart of its preoccupations.

"The ICC, because of the importance of its place in this milieu, possesses a primary responsibility ... to use every oc­casion to help overcome the present situation of dispersion and sectarianism. The Gulf war, which gave rise to a clear internationalist position by revolutionary groups, but in a very dispersed way, and to a lesser extent the collapse of the eastern bloc, whose capitalist nature was affirmed by the groups, albeit in an insufficient and confused framework, provides such an occasion ...

"The 9th Congress of the ICC has decided to address the groups whose existence has a real historic basis, to the exclu­sion of parasitic groups, with an appeal putting forward the necessity:

 - to take heed of the importance of the present historical stakes and the class positions shared by these groups

 - to fight attitudes marked by sectarianism

 - to work towards a development of contacts and open debate through the press ... through taking part in public and open meetings of groups in the milieu, and eventually through common interventions (leaflets for example) on par­ticularly important occasions," (Resolution on the Proletarian Political Milieu).

The 9th Congress, a moment in the homogenization and strengthening of the ICC

We draw a positive balance sheet of this Congress. It was a moment in the homogenization and strengthening of the ICC. After the overturning of the capitalist order which emerged from the second world war, it has been necessary to 'digest' this historical rupture, to verify our analyses and re­group be­hind our perspectives, in order to be able to confront the in­tense period to come.

History continues to accelerate. Dramatic events follow each other at a breakneck pace. The immense majority of the world population lives in extreme misery under the deadly menace of wars, disease, famine and catastrophes of all kinds.

The world proletariat faces redoubled economic attacks in a growing atmosphere of decomposition and war. Even if today it is suffering from a reflux in its consciousness and also in its combativity, it is the only force capable of getting rid of the cesspool that capitalism in decay has become. In­evitably, under the blows of capital, it's going to have to en­gage in a fight to the death with the world bourgeoisie. The stakes of this gigantic confrontation? The destruction of cap­italism, the creation of a communist society, the survival of humanity.

ICC, 1.9.91

9th Congress of the ICC

Imperialist war, crisis and the perspectives for the class struggle in the decomposition of capitalism

We are publishing below the Resolution on the International Situation adopted by the 9th Congress. This text is the synthesis of the two reports presented at this Congress - on the economic situation and the other aspects of the international situation. In order to make more precise and explicit certain points in the Resolution, we reproduce after it extracts from the second report. Owing to lack of space, the passages retained are not always in continuity and fall short of dealing with all the elements covered either by the report or in the discussions at the Congress. At the same time, these passages don't always concern the most important points in the international situation, which have already been amply discussed in other articles from the International Review. Rather we have given priority to the questions that the report deals with more explicitly than these articles.

Resolution on the international situation

The acceleration of history, already identified by the ICC at the beginning of the 1980s, has considerably accentuated since the last congress. Never, since the constitution of our organization, and even since the Second World War, have events of such historic importance unfolded - and in less than two years. In a few months the configuration of the world since the Second World War has been overthrown. In fact, the collapse of the imperialist bloc of the east, which closed the eighties, opens the door to an end-of-the- millennium domi­nated by an instability and chaos that humanity has never known before. It's up to revolutionaries, if they want to be at the level of their role as the avant-garde of the world prole­tariat, to fully understand the significance of the convulsions opening up, in order to draw out the resulting perspective for the whole of society and, in the first place, for the working class. In particular, it's up to them to show that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Gulf War are the signs of the en­try of the capitalist system into the final phase of its period of decadence: that of the general decomposition of society.

1) As shown in several other texts of the organization, the phase of decomposition:

- "constitutes the final point of convergence for all the fantastic convulsions which have shaken society and the dif­ferent classes within it since the beginning of the century, in an infernal cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction-new crisis (...); it appears [to the extent that the contradictions and manifes­tations of the decadence of capitalism...haven't disappeared with time, but have continued and even deepened] as the re­sult of the accumulation of all the characteristics of a mori­bund system, completing the 75-year death agony of a his­torically condemned mode of production. Concretely, not only do the imperialist nature of all states, the menace of the world war, the absorption of civil society by the state Moloch, and the permanent crisis of the capitalist economy all continue in the phase of decomposition, but they reach a synthesis and an ultimate conclusion within it."

- "is fundamentally determined by unforeseen and un­precedented historic conditions: the situation of momentary impasse of society, of 'blockage', as a result of the mutual 'neutralization' of its two fundamental classes which prevents either of them from making a decisive response to the open crisis of the capitalist economy...; the incapacity of the bourgeoisie to offer the least perspective for the whole of so­ciety and the incapacity of the proletariat to openly affirm it­self at the present time." ('Decomposition, Final Phase of the Decadence of Capitalism', International Review 62)

This incapacity of the capitalist mode of production to offer the least perspective to society, outside of a day-to-day resistance to the inevitable advance of its economic convul­sions, leads necessarily to the growing tendencies toward generalized chaos, toward a headlong flight of the different components of the social body to "each for himself".

Besides, this phase of decomposition didn't begin with its most spectacular manifestation: the collapse of Stalinism and the Eastern Bloc in the second half of l989. Throughout the eighties the phenomenon of the general decomposition of society bloomed and impregnated in a growing way all the aspects of social life.

2) An event as considerable and unforeseen as the collapse of a whole imperialist bloc outside of a world war or proletarian revolution, such as one saw in l989, cannot be explained fully without taking into consideration the entrance of deca­dent capitalism into a new phase of its existence: the phase of decomposition. However, the particularities of decomposi­tion alone do not permit an understanding of such an event. The latter finds its origins in the existence of a phenomenon, Stalinism, which can only be analyzed within the general framework of the decadence of the capitalist mode of pro­duction and the history of this decadence throughout the 20th Century:

a) Stalinism constitutes a particular manifestation of the general tendency of state capitalism, which is precisely a characteristic of decadent capitalism.

b) However, contrary to the manifestations of this ten­dency in the majority of other countries (particularly the most advanced), it does not develop in a progressive and or­ganic way within the bowels of capitalist society, but results from specific and 'accidental' circumstances (from the point of view of the bourgeoisie) but which could only be pro­duced in decadence: the temporarily victorious proletarian revolution in a country where the counter revolution was taken in hand by the apparatus of the post-revolutionary state and not by the classical sectors of the dominant class.

c) This same 'accidental' character is found in the con­stitution of the bloc led by the state which saw the birth of Stalinism. In effect, it's the specific circumstances of the sec­ond World War (the most salient manifestation to this day of capitalist decadence) which allowed this backward state to establish its domination over a part of the world with the sole instrument of the same brute force which it utilized within its frontiers. It led to the formation of a particularly rickety im­perialist bloc.

The aberrant characteristics of the Stalinist form of state capitalism (total centralization of the economy, absence of the market sanction, elimination of unprofitable enterprises, se­lection of personnel to manage the national capital on uniquely political criteria), linked to its historical origins, was compatible with the circumstances of world war. But, in revenge, they imposed radical limits on this type of regime with the prolongation of the open crisis of capitalism, when the latter didn't end up in a new generalized holocaust. With the aggravation of the commercial war between nations, these characteristics, in depriving the Stalinist economy of all competivity and of any motivation by its agents, could only end up in its implosion.

In this sense, the economic collapse of the USSR and its 'satellites', which is at the origin of the dislocation of the eastern bloc, finds its roots in the same historic conditions which permitted the entry of capitalism into its phase of de­composition: the prolongation of the open crisis to which neither of the two fundamental classes of society could affirm their own perspective. Thus, it confirms that the collapse of the eastern bloc, the most important historical fact since the worldwide resurgence of the class struggle at the end of the 60s, is a clear manifestation, beyond the particularities of this bloc and the USSR, of the entry of decadent capitalism into its final stage, that of its decomposition.

3) If there's a domain where the tendency to growing chaos is immediately confirmed, of which the break-up of the east­ern bloc constitutes the first great manifestation on the world scene, it's that of imperialist antagonisms.

The end of the Russian bloc was presented by the west­ern bourgeoisie as the dawn of a 'new world order' supposed to promote peace and prosperity. In less than a year, the Gulf War has dealt a resounding blow to this lie. It has shown the reality of a phenomenon which, as the ICC immediately brought to light, would necessarily flow from the disappear­ance of the eastern bloc: the dissolution of its imperialist ri­val, the western bloc.

This phenomenon was already behind the Iraqi 'hold-up' of Kuwait in August 90. It's because the world had ceased to be carved up by two imperialist constellations that a country like Iraq thought it possible to grab an ex-ally of the same bloc. This same phenomenon was revealed in a clear way during October 90, with the diverse attempts of European countries (notably France and Germany) and of Japan to tor­pedo American policy in the Gulf, through separate negotia­tions led in the name of the liberation of hostages. This American policy was to punish Iraq and was supposed to dis­courage all future attempts to imitate the behavior of this country (and it was to create the conditions for this example that the US did everything, before the 2 August, to provoke and encourage Iraq's adventure).

Washington's policy applies to the countries of the pe­riphery where the level of convulsions are a powerful factor giving rise to this type of adventure. But it is far from lim­ited to this objective. In reality, its fundamental aim was much more general: faced with a world more and more dominated by chaos and 'each for himself', it was a question of imposing a minimum of order and discipline, in the first place, on the most important countries of the western ex-bloc. It's for this reason that these countries (with the excep­tion of Great Britain which chose long ago to make an un­breakable alliance with Uncle Sam) did more than simply drag their feet in aligning with the position of the US and the war effort.

If they needed American power as the world cop, they dreaded a too important show of its power, (inevitable during a direct armed intervention), which would put their own power in the shade. And indeed the military operations at the beginning of the year have clearly shown that only one su­perpower exists today - other countries can only dream of be­coming effective military rivals of the US.

4) In fact, here is the essential key to the Gulf War and the whole world perspective. In a world where the total eco­nomic impasse of the capitalist mode of production can only fan the flames of military conflict between nations, the dis­appearance of the two blocs coming out of the Second World War has put on the agenda the tendency to the reconstitution of two new military blocs. The latter is the classical structure given to the principal states, in the period of decadence, to 'organize' their armed confrontations. Even before the Gulf War, it was clear that neither of the two possible pretenders to the leadership of an eventual new rival bloc to one which would be directed by the US - Japan and above all Germany - was for the moment capable of fulfilling such a role as a re­sult of its extreme military weakness. But taking account of the economic power and dynamism of these countries, which already make them formidable commercial competitors for the United States, it is important for Washington to take the initiative faced with any evolution of international relations that could orientate toward such a redistribution of imperial­ist forces. That's why the Gulf War could not be reduced to a 'war for oil' or a 'North-South' war. Such a vision, (notably defended by the leftists who used it to justify their support for Iraqi imperialism) only lessens its importance and signifi­cance. In the same way all the manifestations of decadent capitalism (militarism, state capitalism, open crisis, etc), all the fundamental antagonisms which are ripping the world apart, find their origin at the heart of capitalism and neces­sarily set the most important powers on the world scene against each other.

From this point of view, the Gulf War, imposed by the United States on its allies, has delivered the intended results: it has given glaring proof of the immense gap between America and its potential rivals. Notably, it has brought out the total incapacity of the European countries to put forward a common, independent, external policy which in time could have politically prefigured a 'European bloc' led by Ger­many.

5) However, this immediate success of American policy is not a durable factor stabilizing the world situation to the extent that it could arrest the very causes of the chaos into which society is sinking. If the other powers have had to reign in their ambitions, their basic antagonism with the United States has not disappeared: that's what is shown by the latent hostility that countries like France and Germany express vis-a-vis the American projects for the re-utilization of the structures of NATO in the framework of a 'rapid reac­tion force' commanded, as if by chance, by the only reliable ally of the US: Great Britain.

Besides, in the Middle East itself, the consequences of the Gulf War (chaos in 'free' Kuwait, revolts of the Kurds and Shiites) have shown that the means employed by the US to impose its 'new world order' are factors in the aggravation of disorder. In this sense, capitalism has no perspective of moderating, still less eliminating, military confrontations. On the contrary, the general chaos which characterizes the final phase of capitalist decadence, that of decomposition, can only be marked by an unleashing of the dominant character­istic of the period of decadence: imperialist conflicts and militarism.

In this situation, contrary to the past, (and here is a ma­jor indicator of the qualitative step taken by capitalism in putrefaction) it will no longer be those powers with the smallest share of the imperialist booty which will play the role of 'firelighter', but the power which retains the domi­nant position, the United States. The preservation by the US of this position will necessarily lead it to increasingly watch out for, and take the initiative in, military confrontations, since it's on this terrain in particular where it can affirm its superiority. In this situation, and even if the conditions for the establishment of a new division of the world into two im­perialist blocs - that is, the indispensable premise for military confrontations to end up in a third world war - never exist again, these confrontations, which can only amplify, risk provoking considerable devastation, including, in combina­tion with other calamities specific to decomposition (pollution, famines, epidemics. etc), the destruction of hu­manity.

6) The end of the 'cold war' and the disappearance of the blocs has thus only exacerbated the unleashing of the imperi­alist antagonisms specific to decadent capitalism and aggra­vated in a qualitative new way the bloody chaos into which the whole of society is sinking. But, if it is necessary to un­derline the extreme gravity of the present situation on the world level, and not just in this or that part of the globe, it is also important to say that these antagonisms don't manifest themselves everywhere in an identical and immediate way. This can be seen in the way the new world configuration un­folded, and in particular in the demise of the eastern bloc and the western bloc. These were not two identical phenomena: in particular, there has not been a parallel process of weak­ening of each of the two imperialist blocs leading to their si­multaneous disappearance. One of the blocs collapsed bru­tally under the pressure of the total economic bankruptcy of its dominant power while the leader of the other bloc still conserved the core of its capacities. It's the disappearance of the first which has provoked that of the second, not as the re­sult of an internal collapse, but simply because it had lost its essential reason to exist. This difference allows a full com­prehension of the present characteristics of imperialist con­flicts: like Japan and Germany after the Second World War, the USSR can no longer play a leading role in the world im­perialist arena. Henceforth, the fundamental antagonisms will be played out between the 'victors' of the 'cold war'. That's why it's up to the dominant power of the victorious camp to play, for itself, but also for the whole of capitalism, the role of 'world cop'

7) On the other hand, this difference in the process of the disappearance of the two blocs is also mirrored in their inter­nal evolution. Globally, the states of the ex-western bloc are still capable of controlling the political and even economic situation inside their frontiers. But it's by no means the same for the states of the ex-eastern bloc or other Stalinist regimes. From now on, these countries will show in a caricatural way what the phase of decomposition brings - economic chaos will deepen the wounds of rotting capitalism at a stunning pace: massive unemployment provoking the lumpenisation of important sectors of the working class; explosion of drug abuse; criminality, corruption.

The economic and political chaos which is spreading through the countries of the east hits primarily the country that found itself at their head less than two years ago, the USSR. In fact, this country has practically ceased to exist as such since the organs of central power are more and more in­capable of exercising control over less and less parts of its territory. The only perspective left for what was the second world power is that of an unrelieved dislocation. A disloca­tion which the reaction of 'conservative' forces, and particu­larly the security forces such as those which were mobilized in the Baltic countries and in the Transcaucases, can hold back only a little. In time an even more considerable chaos will be unleashed and with it' bloodbaths.

As for the ex-'people's democracies', while they won't degenerate to the same degree as the USSR, they too can only plunge toward growing chaos as revealed by the catas­trophic figures of production (falling 40% in certain coun­tries) and political instability which has manifested itself these last months in practically all the countries of the region (Bulgaria, Rumania, Albania) and particularly in Yugoslavia which is beginning to crack up.

8) The crisis of capitalism which, in the final analysis, is at the origin of all the convulsions of the world at the present time, is itself aggravated by these convulsions:

- the war in the Middle East, the resulting growth of military expenses, the necessary credits for the reconstruction of a part of the destruction (basically a country like Iraq will never overcome the enormous damage suffered during the war) can only affect the economic situation in a negative way (contrary to the Vietnam War which at the end of the l960s delayed the entry of the American and world economy into recession), to the extent that the war economy and generalized indebtedness, have already been primary factors in ag­gravating the crisis for some time;

- the dislocation of the Western bloc can only give a mortal blow to the coordination of economic policies at the level of the bloc, which in the past could slow the rhythm of the collapse of the capitalist economy. The perspective is a merciless commercial war, in which all countries will lose their feathers;

- the convulsions in the zone of the ex-eastern bloc will increasingly aggravate the world crisis by helping to amplify general chaos. In particular, it will force the western coun­tries to devote important credits to limit this chaos (for ex­ample the sending of 'humanitarian aid' designed to delay massive emigration to the west).

9) That said, it's important that revolutionaries put forward what constitutes the ultimate factors aggravating the crisis:

- generalized overproduction specific to a mode of pro­duction which cannot create enough outlets to absorb all the commodities produced, and of which the new open recession, today hitting most of the advanced countries, along with the first world power, constitutes a flagrant illustration;

- the unbroken flight into external and internal debt, public and private, of this same power throughout the l980s, which, if it has allowed the momentary relaunching of pro­duction in a certain number of countries, has made the United States by far the biggest debtor in the world;

- the impossibility of pursuing this course eternally - buying without paying, selling against promises which more and more evidently will never be kept. It can only make the contradictions still more explosive, notably by a growing weakening of the international financial system.

Underlining this reality is all the more important in that it constitutes a primary factor in the coming to consciousness of the proletariat against the ideological campaigns which have been unleashed these last months, pretending to 'show' that only 'liberal' capitalism can offer prosperity to the pop­ulation. The causes of economic difficulties are put down to the ambitions of the 'megalomanic and bloody dictator' Sad­dam Hussein. It is thus indispensable that revolutionaries clearly underline that the present recession, no more than those of l974-75 and l980-82, didn't result from political or military convulsions in the Middle East, but had begun be­fore the Gulf Crisis and that it reveals the fundamental con­tradictions of the capitalist mode of production.

10) More generally, it is important that revolutionaries bring out, from the present reality, the most essential elements favorable to the coming to consciousness of the proletariat.

Today, this coming to consciousness continues to be hindered by the repercussions of Stalinism's collapse and that of the eastern bloc. The set-back this process has suffered for a year and a half, particularly under the weight of a gigantic campaign of lies discrediting the very idea of socialism and proletarian revolution, is still far from having been over­come.

Besides, the threatened massive influx of immigrants from a chaotic eastern Europe can only create additional dis­array in the working class from both sides of the 'iron cur­tain': among the workers imagining that they will be able to escape intolerable misery by fleeing to the western 'Eldorado' and among those who will think that this immi­gration risks depriving them of the meager 'benefits' which remain and who will therefore be more vulnerable to nation­alist mystifications. Such a danger will be particularly strong in countries like Germany, which are on in the front line against a flood of immigrants.

However the growing evidence of the irreversible bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, including and above all in its 'liberal' form, plus the irremediable mil­itarism of this system, is going to constitute, for the central sectors of the proletariat, a powerful factor in the exhaustion of illusions coming from the events of the end of l989. In particular, the promise of a 'peaceful new world' made to us after the disappearance of the Russian bloc, has suffered a decisive blow in less than a year.

11) In fact, the militarist barbarism into which decom­posing capitalism is more and more sinking is going to make its mark in a growing way on the development in the class of the consciousness of the stakes and perspectives of its com­bat. War is not in itself, and automatically, a factor of clari­fication of the consciousness of the proletariat. Thus, the Second World War ended with the reinforcement of the ideo­logical grip of the counter-revolution. Likewise, the crisis and war in the Gulf, if they've had the merit of silencing all the prattle about 'eternal peace', have also engendered, in the first instance, a feeling of impotence and an indisputable paralysis in the great masses of workers in the advanced countries. But the present conditions of the development of the struggle of the working class mean such a disarray won't last:

- because the proletariat of today, contrary to that of the 30s and 40s, has emerged from the counter-revolution, and has not been mobilized, at least not in its decisive sectors, behind bourgeois banners (nationalism, defense of the 'socialist fatherland', democracy against fascism);

- because the working class of the central countries is not directly mobilized in the war, or gagged by military author­ity, it has more latitude to develop a profound reflection on the significance of the militarist barbarism which it has to support through redoubled austerity and poverty;

- because the considerable and more and more evident aggravation of the capitalist crisis, of which the workers will evidently be the principal victims and against which they will be constrained to develop their class combativity, will in a growing way develop the conditions that will allow them to make the link between the capitalist crisis and the war, be­tween the fight against the latter and the struggles of resis­tance against economic attacks, strengthening their capacity to protect themselves against the traps of pacifism and inter-classist ideologies.

12) In reality, if the disarray provoked by the events in the Gulf may superficially resemble that resulting from the collapse of the eastern bloc, it obeys a different dynamic: while what came from the East (elimination of the remains of Stalinism, nationalist confrontations, immigration, etc) can only for a good while yet have an essentially negative impact on the consciousness of the proletariat, the more and more permanent presence of war in the life of the society is tend­ing, by contrast, to reawaken this consciousness. Likewise, if the collapse of Stalinism has had only a limited impact on the combativity of the working class, already shown by a trend toward the revival of struggles in spring 90, the crisis and the war in the Gulf, through the feeling of impotence that it has created amongst the workers of the principal advanced coun­tries (which were practically all implicated in the 'coalition') have provoked an important ebb of combativity - the longest since the winter of 89-90. However, this pause in the work­ers combativity, far from constituting in itself an obstacle on the road to the historic development of class combats, is above all a moment of decantation, of profound reflection in the whole of the proletariat.

It's for this reason that the apparatus of the left of the bourgeoisie has already for several months been attempting to launch movements of premature struggle in order to short-circuit this reflection and sow more confusion in the workers ranks

13) If despite a temporary disarray, the world proletariat still holds the keys to the future in its hands, it is important to underline that all its sectors are not at the same level in the capacity to open a perspective for humanity. In particular, the economic and political situation which developed in the countries of the ex-eastern bloc testifies to the extreme politi­cal weakness of the working class in this part of the world. Crushed by the most brutal and pernicious form of the counter-revolution, Stalinism; hammered by democratic and trade unionist illusions; ripped apart by nationalist con­frontations and conflict between bourgeois cliques, the Rus­sian proletariat, of the Ukraine, of the Baltics, Poland, Hun­gary, etc, find themselves confronted by the worst difficulties in developing their class consciousness. The struggles un­dertaken by workers of these countries, faced with unprece­dented economic attacks, will collide, when they aren't di­rectly derailed onto a bourgeois terrain such as nationalism (which was partly the case for the miners' strike in the USSR last spring), with developing social and political decomposi­tion, stifling their capacity to germinate consciousness. This will continue as long as the proletariat of the great capitalist metropoles, and particularly those of Western Europe, is not up to putting forward, even in an embryonic way, a general perspective of struggle.

14) In reality, today's considerable difficulties of the workers in the eastern countries caused by rampant social de­composition in this part of the world, reveals the impact that the decomposition of capitalism exercises on the development of the struggle and consciousness of the world proletariat.

The confusion and a-classist illusions that a certain num­ber of aspects of decomposition (such as ecological disasters, 'natural' catastrophes, rise of criminality, etc) provoke within it, through the attack on its self-confidence and its vi­sion of the future through the atmosphere of despair which pervades society, through the obstacle to solidarity and the unification of struggles from the ideology of 'each for him­self' which is omnipresent today, the growing decomposition of society, the 'rotting on its feet' of capitalism - all this is fundamentally a supplementary difficulty that confronts the proletariat on the road to its emancipation. But the fact that:

-  the proletariat of the central countries of capitalism, which will be at the heart of the decisive battles with the bourgeoisie, will be less affected by the most extreme and brutal forms of decomposition than other sectors of the world proletariat;

- that the proletariat for the most part of the eighties de­veloped its struggles and its consciousness when the effects of decomposition were already felt...

These two elements illustrate that the working class still holds the key to the future. And it's particularly true to the extent that the two major manifestations of the life of capi­talism with which it will be confronted, the capitalist mode of production's economic crisis and the imperialist war (which are not typical manifestations of the phase of decom­position, but belong to capitalist decadence), will force it to develop its struggles on its class terrain, become conscious of the bankruptcy of this system and the necessity to overturn it.

15) The new level in the maturation of consciousness in the proletariat, which the present situation of capitalism de­termines, is for the moment only at its beginnings. In partic­ular, the class must travel a difficult road in order to disen­gage itself from the sequels to the blow of the implosion of Stalinism and the use made of it by the bourgeoisie. Like­wise, it's not in an immediate way that the whole of the pro­letariat will be up to drawing out from the growing military barbarism the historic perspective of its struggles.

In this process, revolutionaries will have a growing re­sponsibility:

- to warn against all the dangers that decomposition rep­resents, and particularly the unleashing of military barbarism which it brings;

- in the denunciation of all bourgeois maneuvers. One of the essential aspects of the latter will be to disguise or dena­ture, the fundamental link between the struggle against the economic attacks and the more general combat against the greater and greater presence of imperialist war in the life of society;

- in the struggle against the campaigns to sap the self-confidence of the proletariat in itself and in its future;

- in putting forward, against all the pacifist or inter-clas­sist mystifications, and more generally, against the whole ideology of the bourgeoisie, the only perspective which can oppose the aggravation of war: the development and generalization of class combat against capitalism as a whole in or­der to overthrow it and replace it with a communist society. 

ICC