What can the world expect from the new Trump Administration in the USA? Whereas the traditional political elites across the globe are full of anxiety, the Russian government and the right-wing populists in America and throughout Europe see history on their side. And while big world-wide operating companies (such as in the car industry) fear reprisals now if they do not produce in the United States, the stock exchanges and economic institutes were initially confident, expecting increased growth for the US and even the world economy under Trump. As for Mr. President himself, he regularly contradicts not only his own new administration, but also himself. Thus NATO, free trade or the European Union can in one sentence be “essential” and in the next “obsolete”.

Instead of joining in with this crystal ball gazing about the near future of American state policy, we will try here first of all to analyse why Trump was elected president, although the traditional established political elites did not want him. Out of this contradiction between what Trump represents, and the interests of the US ruling class as a whole, we hope to win firmer ground for giving some first indications of what can be expected from his presidency, without falling into too much speculation.

The dilemma of the Republican Party

It is no secret that Donald Trump is looked on as a foreign body in the Republican Party which nominated him for election to the White House. He is neither religious nor conservative enough for the Christian fundamentalists who play such an important role in that party. His economic policy proposals, such as a state organised infrastructural programme, protectionism, or the replacement of “Obamacare” by a state-backed social insurance for everyone – are anathema to the neo-liberals who still play a central role in Republican circles, as they do in the Democratic Pparty. His plans for a rapprochement with Putin's Russia pit him against the military and intelligence lobby which is so strong both in the Republican and Democratic parties.

The presidential candidature of Trump was made possible by an unprecedented revolt of the Republican membership and supporters against their leaders. The other candidates, whether they came from the Bush clan, the Christian evangelists, the neo-libs or the Tea Party movement, had all been discredited by their participation in or support for the George W Bush administration which preceded that of Obama. The fact that, in the face of the economic and financial crisis of 2007/08, a Republican president had done nothing to help millions of small property owners and aspiring small property owners – who in many cases lost job, home and savings at one go – while bailing out banks with government money, was unforgivable to traditional Republican voters. Moreover, none of the other candidates had anything else to propose, at the economic level, than more of the same of what had not prevented the 2008 disaster.

Indeed, the rebellion of the traditional Republican voters directed itself not only against their leadership, but against some of the traditional “values” of the party. In this way, the candidature of Trump was not only made possible, it was virtually imposed on the party leadership. Of course, the latter could have prevented it – but only at the risk of estranging themselves from their mass basis and even of dividing the party. This explains why the attempts to foil Trump were but half-hearted and ineffective. In the end the “Grand Old Party” was obliged to try and make a “deal” with the intruder from the East Coast.

The dilemma of the Democratic Party

A similar revolt took place within the Democratic Party. After eight years of Obama, belief in the famous “yes we can” (“yes we can” improve the lives of the population at large) had seriously waned. The leader of this rebellion was Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed “socialist”. Like Trump on the Republican side, Sanders was a new phenomenon in the modern history of the Democrats. Not that “socialists” as such are a foreign body within that party. But they belong to it as one minority among many, who underline the claim to multi-cultural plurality within that party. They are considered a foreign element when they stake a claim for candidature to the Oval Office. Whether under Bill Clinton or Barak Obama, contemporary Democratic presidents combine a social welfare touch with fundamentally neo-liberal economic policies. A direct interventionist state economic policy of a strong “Keynesian” character (such as that of FD Roosevelt before and during World War II) is as much anathema to the Democratic as to the Republican leadership today. This explains why Sanders never made a secret of the fact that on some issues his policies are closer to those of Trump than they are to those of Hillary Clinton. After the Trump election, Sanders immediately offered him his support in the implementation of his “insurance for all” scheme.

However, as opposed to what happened to the Republicans, the revolt in the Democratic Party was successfully crushed, and Clinton safely nominated instead of Sanders. This succeeded, not only because the DP is the better organised and controlled of the two parties, but also because the elite of this party had been less discredited than its Republican counterpart.

But paradoxically, this success of the party leadership only paved the way for its defeat at the presidential elections. By eliminating Sanders, the Democrats set aside the only candidate who had a good chance of defeating Trump. The DP realised too late that Trump would be the adversary, and that they were underestimating his electoral potential. They also underestimated the degree to which Hillary Clinton herself was discredited. This was above all due to her image as representative of “Wall Street”, of the “East Coast financial oligarchies” - popularly seen as a major “culprit” and at the same time major beneficiary of the financial crisis. In fact, she had become almost as much identified with the catastrophe of 2008 as the Republican leadership itself. The arrogant complacency of the Democratic elite and their blindness towards mounting popular fury and resentment was to characterise the whole of Clinton's electoral campaign. One example of this was her one-sided reliance on the more traditional mass media, whereas Trump's campaign team was using the possibilities of the new media to the hilt.

Because they did not want Sanders, they got Trump instead. Even for those within the US bourgeoisie with a strong dislike for a phase of neo-Keynesian economic experimentation, Sanders would undoubtedly have been the lesser evil. Sanders, not unlike Trump, wanted to slow down the process of what is called “globalisation”. But he would have done so moderately and with a much greater sense of responsibility. With Trump, the ruling class of the world's leading power cannot even be sure what it is getting.

The dilemma of the established political parties

The United States is a country founded by settlers and populated by waves of immigration. The integration of the different ethnic and religious groups and interests into a single nation is the historically evolving task of the existing constitutional and political system. A particular challenge for this system is the involvement of the leaders of the different immigrant communities in government, since each new immigrant wave begins at the bottom of the social ladder and has to “work its way up”. The alleged American melting pot is in reality a highly complicated system of (not always) peaceful co-existence between different groups.

Historically, alongside institutions such as the religious organisations, the formation of criminal organisations has been a proven means for excluded groups to gain access to power. The American bourgeoisie has a long experience with the integration of the best rackets from the underworld into the upper echelons. This is an oft-repeated family saga: the father a gangster, the son a lawyer or a politician, the grandson or granddaughter a philanthropist and patron of the arts. The advantage of this system was that the violence it relied on was not overtly political. This made them compatible with the existing two party state system. To which side the Italian, Irish or Jewish vote went depended on the given constellation and what Trump would call the “deals” Republicans and Democrats were offering the different communities and vested interests. In America, these constellations between communities constantly have to be dealt with, not only those between different industries or branches of the economy for instance.

But this essentially non-party political integration process, compatible with the stability of the party apparatus, began to fail for the first time in the face of the demands of the black Americans. The latter had come to America originally, not as settlers, but as slaves. They had from the onset to bear the full brunt of modern capitalist racism. To gain access to bourgeois equality before the law, and to power and privileges for a black elite, overtly political movements had to be created. Without Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Movement, but also a violence of a new kind – the riots in the black ghettoes in the 1960s and the Black Panthers – there could not have been the Obama presidency. The established ruling elite succeeded in meeting this challenge by attaching the Civil Rights Movement to the Democratic Party. But in this manner, the existing distinction between the different ethnic groups and the political parties was put in question. The black vote goes regularly to the Democratic Party. At first, the Republicans were able to develop a counterweight to this by gaining a more or less stable part of the Latino vote (first and foremost the Cuban exile community). As for the “white” vote, that continued to go to one side or other depending on what was on offer.

Until the 2016 elections. One of the factors which brought Trump into the White House was the electoral alliance he made with different groups of “white supremacists”. Unlike the old-style racism of the Klu Klux Klan with its nostalgia for the slave system which reigned in the southern states until the American Civil War, the hatred of these new currents directs itself against the urban and rural black but also Latino poor, condemned as criminals and social parasites. Although Trump himself may not be a racist of this type, these modern white supremacists created a kind of voting bloc in his favour. For the first time, millions of white voters cast their vote, not according to the recommendation of “their” different communities, and not for one or the other party, but for someone they saw as the representative of a larger “white” community. The underlying process is one of increasing “communitarisation” of American bourgeois politics. A further step in the segregation of the so-called melting pot.

The dilemma of the American ruling class and Trump’s “Make America Great Again”

The problem of all the Republican candidates who tried to oppose Trump, and then of Hillary Clinton, was not only that they were not convincing, but also that they did seem convinced themselves. All they could propose were different varieties of “business as usual”. Above all, they had no alternatives to Trump's “making America great again”. Behind this slogan there is not just a new version of the old nationalism. Trump's Americanism is of a new kind. It contains the clear admission that America is no longer as “great” as it used to be. Economically it has been unable to prevent the rise of China. Militarily it has suffered a series of more or less humiliating reversals: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. America is a power in decline, even if it remains economically and above all militarily and technologically by far the leading country. But not only this. America is not an exception in an otherwise flourishing world. Its decline has come to symbolise that of capitalism as a whole. The vacuum created by the absence of any alternatives coming from the established elites has helped to give Trump his chance.

Not that America has not already attempted to react in the face of its historical decline. Some of the changes announced by Trump already began beforehand, in particular under Obama. They include a greater priority for the Pacific zone, economically and above all militarily, so that the European NATO “partners” are asked to bear a heavier brunt than before; or at the economic level a more state-directed economic policy in dealing with the 2008 crisis and its aftermath. But this can only slow down the present decline, whereas Trump claims to be able to reverse it.

In the face of this decline, and also of growing class, racial, religious and ethnic divisions, Trump wants to unite the capitalist nation behind its ruling class in the name of a new Americanism. The United States, according to Trump, has become the main victim of the rest of the world. He claims that, while the US has been exhausting itself and its resources maintaining world order, all the rest have been profiting from this order at the expense of “God’s own country”. The Trumpistas are thinking here not only of the Europeans or the East Asians who have been flooding the American market with their products. One of the main “exploiters” of the United States, according to Trump, is Mexico, which he accuses of exporting its surplus population into the American social welfare system, while at the same time developing its own industry to such an extent that its automobile production is overtaking that of its northern neighbour.

This amounts to a new and virulent form of nationalism, reminiscent of “underdog” German nationalism after World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. The orientation of this form of nationalism is no longer to justify the imposing of a world order by America. Its orientation is to itself put in question the existing world order.

Trump’s Russian roulette

But the question the world is asking itself is whether Trump has a real political offer in response to America's decline. If not, if his alternative is purely ideological, he is not likely to last for very long. Certainly Trump has no coherent programme for his national capital. Nobody is clearer about this than Trump himself. His policy, he repeatedly declares, is to make “great deals” for America (and for himself) whenever the opportunity presents itself. The new programme for American capital is, it would seem, Trump himself: a risk-loving, several times bankrupt businessman as head of state.

But this does not necessarily mean that Trump has no chance of at least slowing down the decline of America. He MIGHT at least partly succeed – but only if he is lucky. Here we are approaching the crux of Trumpism. The new president, who wants to run the world's leading state as if it were a capitalist enterprise, is ready, in the pursuit of his goals, to take incalculable risks – risks which no “conventional” bourgeois politician in his position would want to take. If they work, they can turn out to be to the benefit of American capitalism at the expense of its rivals, but without too much damage to the system as a whole. But if they go wrong, the consequences can be catastrophic for American and for world capitalism.

We can already give three examples of the kind of Va Banque policies Trump wants to launch into. One of them is his protectionist blackmailing policy. His goal is not to put an end to the present world economic order (“globalisation”) but to get a better deal for America within that order. The USA is the only country whose internal market is so big that it can threaten its rivals with protectionist measures on such a scale. The summit of the rationality of the policy of Trump is his calculation that the political leaders of his main rivals are less crazy than he is, i.e. that they will not risk a protectionist trade war. But should his measures unleash a chain reaction that gets out of control, the result can be a fragmentation of the world market comparable to what happened during the Great Depression.

The second example is NATO. Already the Obama administration had begun to pressure the European “partners” to bear a greater brunt of the alliance in Europe and beyond. The difference now is that Trump is ready to threaten the discarding or side-lining of NATO if Washington's will is not followed. Here again, Trump is playing with fire, since NATO is first and foremost an instrument to secure the presence of US imperialism in Europe.

Our last example here is Trump's project of a “great deal” with Putin's Russia. One of the main problems of the Russian economy today is that it has not really completed the transformation from a Stalinist command regime to a properly functioning capitalist order. This transformation was, during a first phase, hampered by the priority of the Putin regime of preventing strategically important raw materials or the armaments industry being bought up by foreign capital. The necessary process of privatisation was done half-heartedly, so that a large part of Russian industry still functions on the basis of an administrative allocation of resources. During a second phase, the plan of Putin was to tackle the privatisation and modernisation of the economy in collaboration with the European bourgeoisie, first and foremost with Germany. But this plan was successfully foiled by Washington, essentially through its policy of economic sanctions against Russia. Although the occasion of these sanctions was Moscow's annexation policy towards the Ukraine, it additionally aimed at preventing a strengthening of the economies both of Russia and of Germany.

But this success – perhaps the main achievement of the Obama presidency towards Europe – has negative consequences for the world economy as a whole. The establishment of more classical private property in Russia would create a cluster of new credit-worthy economic players who can vouch for the loans they take with land, raw materials etc. In view of the economic difficulties of the world economy today, where even in Chin growth is slowing down, can capitalism afford to renounce such “deals”?

No, according to Trump. His idea is that not Germany and Europe, but America itself should become Putin's “partner in transformation”. According to Trump (who of course also hopes for lucrative deals for himself), the Russian bourgeoisie, which is obviously unable to tackle its modernisation on its own, can choose between three possible partners, the third being the Chinese. Since the latter are the biggest threat to America, it is vital that Washington and not Peking assume this role.

However, none of Trump's projects have provoked such bitter resistance within the US ruling class as this one. The whole phase between the election of Trump and his arrival in office was dominated by the joint attempts of the “intelligence community”, the mainstream media and the Obama administration to sabotage the envisaged rapprochement with Moscow. Here they all think that the risks Trump wants to take are too high. Even if it is true that the main challenger today is China, a modernised Russia would constitute a considerable additional danger to the USA. After all, Russia is (also) a European power, and Europe still the heart of the world economy. And Russia still has the second largest nuclear arsenal after the US. Another possible problem is that, if the economic sanctions against Russia were lifted, the sphinx in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, is considered perfectly capable of outwitting Trump by re-introducing the Europeans into his plans (in order to limit his dependence on America). The French bourgeoisie, for instance, is already getting ready for this eventuality: two of the main candidates for the coming presidential elections there (Fillon and Le Pen) have made no secret of their sympathies for Russia.

For the moment, the outcome of this latter conflict within the American bourgeoisie remains open. Meanwhile, Trump’s argument remains one-sidedly economic (although it is not at all excluded that he can extend his adventurism to a policy of military provocation against Peking). But what is true is that an effective long term response to the Chinese challenge must have a strong economic component, and cannot take place solely at the military level. There are two areas in particular where the US economy has to bear a much heavier burden than China does, and which Trump would have to try to “rationalise”. One of them is the enormous military budget. Concerning this aspect, the policy towards Russia also has an ideological dimension, since, in recent years, the idea that Putin wants to re-establish the Soviet Union has been one of the main justifications given for the persistence of astronomic “defence” spending.

The other budget Trump wants to significantly reduce is the social welfare budget. Here, in attacking the working class, he can however count on the support of the ruling class as a whole.

Trump’s promise of violence

Alongside an attitude of irresponsible adventurism, the other major feature of Trumpism is the threat of violence. One of his specialities is to threaten internationally operating companies with reprisals if they do not do what he wants. What he wants, he says, are “jobs for American workers”. His way of harassing big business by tweet is also aimed at impressing all those who live in constant fear because their existences depend on the whims of such giant companies. These workers are invited to identify with his strength, which is allegedly at their service because they are good obedient honest Americans who want to work hard for their country.

During his electoral campaign, Trump told his challenger Hillary Clinton he wanted to “lock her up”. Later he declared we would show clemency towards her – as if the question of when other politicians land in prison depended on his own personal whims. No such clemency is foreseen for illegal immigrants. Already Obama deported more of them than any American president before him. Trump wants to jail them for two years before evicting them. The promise of bloodshed is the aura through which he attracts the growing multitude of those in this society whoare unable to defend themselves but who thirst for revenge. People who come to his meetings to protest he has beaten up under the eyes of the TV nation. Women, outsiders, so-called misfits are made to understand that they should count themselves lucky if it is only his verbal violence they are exposed to. Not only does he want to have a wall built to keep the Mexicans out – he promises to make them pay for it themselves. To exclusion is added humiliation.

These threats have obviously been a calculated part of Trump’s demagogic election campaign, but on assuming office he lost no time pushing through a number of ‘accomplished facts’ aimed at proving that he, unlike other politicians, is going to do what he says. The most spectacular expression of this - one which has caused enormous conflict both within the bourgeoisie and within the population as a whole – has been his “Muslim ban”, suspending the right of travellers from a selected number of Muslim-majority countries to enter or re-enter the US. This is above all a statement of intent, a sign of his willingness to target minorities and associate Islam in general with terrorism, however much he denies that this measure is aimed specifically at Muslims.

What America needs, Trump tells the world, is more guns and more torture. Our modern bourgeois civilisation produces no shortage of such bragging thugs and bullies, just as it admires and acclaims those who take for themselves whatever they can get at the expense of others. What’s new is that millions of people in one of the world's most modern countries want such a thug as head of state. Trump, like his model and would-be friend Putin, are popular not in spite of but because of their thuggery.

In capitalism there are always two possible alternatives, either equivalent exchange or non-equivalent exchange (robbery). You can either give someone else an equivalent for what you get, or you don't. In order for the market to function, its subjects have to renounce violence in economic life. They do so under threat of reprisals, such as prison, but also on the promise that their renunciation will pay off for them in the long run in terms of securing their existence. However, it remains the case that the basis of economic life in capitalism is indeed robbery: the surplus value the capitalists gain from the unpaid surplus labour of the wage workers. This robbery has been legalised in the form of capitalist private property of the means of production; it is enforced every day by the state, which is the state apparatus of the ruling class. Capitalist economy requires a taboo on violence at the market place. Buying and selling are supposed to be peaceful actions – including the buying and selling of labour power: workers are not slaves. Under “normal” circumstances, working people are ready to live more or less peacefully under such conditions, despite realising that there is a minority which refuses to do the same. This minority is composed of the criminal milieu, which lives from robbery, and the state, which is the biggest robber of all, both in relation to its “own” population (taxation), and in relation to other states (war). And although the state represses the criminals in defence of private property, at the upper echelons the top gangsters and the robber state tend to collaborate rather than oppose each other. But when capitalism can no longer credibly offer even the illusion of a possible improvement of the living conditions for society as a whole, the compliance of society to be revoked.

Today we have entered a period (not unlike that of the 1930s) where large sectors of society feel cheated and no longer believe their renunciation of violence pays off. But they remain intimidated by the threat of repression, by the illegal status of the criminal world. This is when the longing to be part of those who can rob without fear becomes political. The essence of their “populism” is the demand that violence against certain groups be legalised, or at least unofficially tolerated. In Hitler-Germany, for example, the course towards world war was a “normal” manifestation of the “robber state” which it shared with Stalin-Russia, Roosevelt-America etc. What was new in National Socialism was the systematic robbery, organised by the state, against part of its own population. Scapegoating and pogroms were legalised. The Holocaust was not first and foremost the product of the history of anti-Semitism or of Nazism. It was a product of modern capitalism. Robbery becomes the alternative economic perspective for sectors of the population sinking into barbarism. But this barbarism is that of the capitalist system itself. Criminality is as much part of bourgeois society as the stock exchange. Robbery and buying-selling are the two poles of advanced modern society based on private property. The profession of the robber can only be abolished by abolishing class society. When robbery starts to replace buying and selling, this is at once the self-realisation and self-destruction of bourgeois civilisation. In the absence of an alternative, of a revolutionary communist perspective, the longing to exercise violence against others grows.

The fish stinks from the head downwards

What happens when parts of the ruling class itself, followed by some of the intermediary layers of society, start to lose confidence in the possibility of sustained growth for the world economy? Or when they start to lose hope that they themselves can benefit from whatever growth still takes place? On no account will they want to give uptheir aspirations to a (greater) share of wealth and power. Should the wealth available no longer increase, they can still fight for a bigger share at the expense of the rest. Here lies the connection between the economic situation and the growing thirst for violence. The perspective of growth starts to be replaced by the perspective of robbery and pillage. If millions of illegal workers were to be expelled, so the calculation goes, there would be more jobs, housing, social care for those who remain. The same goes for all those who live from the system of social benefits without paying into it. As for ethnic minorities, some of them have businesses which could pass into the hands of others. This kind of thinking seeps up from the very depths of bourgeois “civil society”.

However, according to an old expression, the fish begins to stink from the head downwards. It is first and foremost the state and economic apparatus of the ruling class itself which produces this putrefaction. The diagnosis made by the capitalist media is that the Trump presidency, the victory of the Brexiteers in Britain, the rise of right wing “populism” in Europe, are the result of a protest against “globalisation”. But this is only true if violence is understood as the essence of this protest, and if globalisation is understood, not only as an economic option among others, but as a label for the extremely violent means through which a declining capitalism has, in recent decades, kept itself alive. The result of this gigantic economic and political offensive of the bourgeoisie (a kind of war of the capitalist class against the rest of humanity and against nature) was the production of millions of victims, not only among the working populations of the whole planet, but even within the apparatus of the ruling class itself. It is this not least this latter aspect which, in its dimensions, is absolutely unprecedented in modern history. Unprecedented also is the degree to which parts of the American bourgeoisie and its state apparatus itself fell victim to this devastation. And this is true even though the United States was the main instigator of that policy. It is as if the ruling class was obliged to lop off parts of its own body in order to save the rest. Whole sectors of the national industry were closed down because their products could be produced more cheaply elsewhere. Not only these industries themselves had to shut down – whole parts of the country were laid waste in the process: regions and administrations, local consumer, retail and credit branches, providers of parts, the local building industry etc. were all shattered. Not only workers, but big and small businesses, civil servants and local dignitaries were among its victims. Unlike the workers, who lost their livelihoods, these bourgeois and petty bourgeois victims lost their power, privileges and social status.

This process took place, more or less radically, in all the old industrial countries over the past three decades. But in the US there has been, in addition, a kind of earthquake within the military and so-called intelligence apparatus. Under Bush Jr. and Rumsfeld, parts of the armed and security forces and even of the intelligence services were “privatised” - measures which cost many high-ranking leaders their jobs. In addition, intelligence had to face the competition of modern media concerns such as Google or Facebook which in some ways are as well informed, and as important for the state, as the CIA or FBI. In the course of this process, the balance of forces within the ruling class itself has shifted, including at the economic level, where the credit and finance sectors (“Wall Street”) and the new technologies (“Silicon Valley”) are not only among the main beneficiaries of “globalisation” but also among its main protagonists.

As opposed to these sectors, who supported the candidature of Hillary Clinton, the supporters of Donald Trump are not to be located within specific economic fractions, although his strongest supporters are to be found among the captains of the old industries which have declined so much in recent decades. Rather, they are to be found here and there throughout the state and economic apparatus of power. These were the snipers producing the crossfire from behind the scenes against Clinton as the alleged candidate of “Wall Street”. They included business tycoons, frustrated publicists and leaders of the FBI. For those among them who have lost hope of making themselves “great again”, their support for Trump was above all a kind of political vandalism, blind revenge on the ruling elite.

This vandalism can also be seen in the willingness of important factions of the ruling class – above all those linked to the oil, coal and gas industries – to back Trump’s wholesale rejection of the science explaining climate change, which he has famously dismissed as a hoax invented by the Chinese. This is a further manifestation of the fact that significant parts of the bourgeoisie have so lost any vision of any future for humanity that they are openly prepared to put their (“national”) profit margins above any considerations for the natural world, and thus risk undermining the fundamental basis for all human social life. The war against nature which was vastly intensified by the “neo-liberal” world order will be waged even more ruthlessly by Trump and his fellow vandals.

What has happened is very grave. Whereas the leading fractions of the American bourgeoisie still adhere to the existing economic world order, and want to engage in its maintenance, the consensus about this within the ruling class as a whole has started to crumble. This is firstly because a growing part of it no longer seems to care about this world order. It is secondly because the ruling fractions were unable to prevent the arrival of a candidate of these desperadoes into the White House. The erosion both of the cohesion of the ruling class, and of its control over its own political apparatus, could hardly have manifested itself more clearly. Ever since, with its victory in World War II, the American bourgeoisie took over from its British counterpart the leading role in the running of the world economy as a whole, it has continuously assumed this responsibility. In general the bourgeoisie of the leading national capital is best placed to assume this role. All the more so when, like the United States, it disposes of the military might to lend its leadership additional authority. It is remarkable that today neither the USA nor its predecessor Britain are able to assume this role – and basically for the same reason. This is the weight of political populism, which is taking London outside the European economic institutions. It was a sign of something close to desperation when, at the beginning of the new year the Financial Times, one of the important voices of the City of London, called on the German chancellor Angela Merkel to assume world leadership. Trump, at all events, seems unwilling and unable to assume this role, and there is no other world leader for the moment who could replace him. A dangerous phase lies ahead for the capitalist system and for humanity.

The weakening of working class resistance

The weakening of the principle of solidarity clearly indicates that the victory of Trump is not only result of a loss of perspective by the capitalist class, but also by the working class. As a result, many more workers than otherwise would be the case are negatively influenced by what is called populism. It is significant, for instance, that along with millions of white workers, many Latinos also seem to have voted for Trump, despite his diatribes against them. Many among those who were among the last to gain access to “God’s own country” - precisely because they are afraid of being among the first to be evicted - were lured into thinking that they would be safer if the gate were closed firmly behind them.

What has happened to the working class, to its revolutionary perspective, to its class identity and its traditions of solidarity? Over half a century ago, there was a comeback of the working class on the stage of history, above all in Europe (May 1968 in France, Autumn 1969 in Italy, 1970 in Poland etc.) but also more globally. In the “New World” this renaissance of the class struggle manifested itself in Latin America (above all 1969 in Argentina), but also in North America, in particular in the United States. There were two main expressions of this resurgence. One was a whole development of often large scale wildcat strikes and other, often radical struggles on an economic terrain, for working class demands. The other was the reappearance of politicised minorities among the new generation, attracted towards revolutionary proletarian politics. Particularly important was the tendency to develop a communist perspective against Stalinism, which was more or less clearly recognised as counter-revolutionary. The return to centre stage of the workers’ struggles, class identity and solidarity, and a proletarian revolutionary perspective, went hand in hand. During the 1960s and 70s probably several million young people in the old industrial countries were politicised in this manner – a hope and strength of humanity.

Apart from the suffering of the working class, the two most burning issues at the time in the United States were the Vietnam War (the American government, moreover, had introduced universal conscription) and the racist exclusion of and violence against black people. Originally, these issues were at least partly additional factors of politicisation and radicalisation. However, lacking any political experience of their own, lacking the guidance of an older generation politicised in any proletarian sense, the new activists harboured enormous illusions about the possibilities of a rapid social transformation. In particular, the class movements of the time were still much too weak either to oblige the government to end the Vietnam War, or to protect blacks and other minorities against racism and discrimination (unlike the 1905 revolutionary movement in Russia, for instance, which included the revolt against the Japanese-Russian war as well as the protection of the Jews in Russia against pogroms). Since fractions developed within the American bourgeoisie which, in its own class interest, wanted to end its engagement in Vietnam, and to allow a black American bourgeoisie to share in power, many of these young militants got drawn into bourgeois politics, turning their backs on the working class. Others, while wanting to remain committed to the cause of the workers, because they were overwhelmed by impatience, stood as left candidates for state elections, or engaged themselves in the trade unions in the hope of achieving something immediate and tangible for those they claimed to represent. Hopes which were invariably disappointed. The workers developed a more and more open hostility towards these leftists, who moreover often discredited themselves and the reputation of the revolution by their identification with brutal, counter-revolutionary, essentially Stalinist regimes, and by their bourgeois manipulative approach to politics. As for these militants themselves, they in turn developed a hostility towards the working class, which refused to follow them – a hostility which often turned into hatred. All of this amounted to a large-scale destruction of political revolutionary class energy. It was a tragedy of almost a whole generation of the working class which had begun so promisingly. What followed was the collapse of Stalinism 1989 (misunderstood and misrepresented as the collapse of communism and of marxism) and the closing down of whole traditional industries in the old capitalist countries (misunderstood and misrepresented as the disappearance of the working class in that part of the world). In this context (as for instance the French sociologist Didier Eribon has pointed out) the political left (which, according to the ICC, is the left of capital, part of the ruling apparatus) were among the first to declare the disappearance of the working class. It is revealing that, during the recent electoral campaign in the USA, the candidate of the Democrats (who used to claim to represent “organised labour”) never referred to anything like a working class, whereas the multi-millionaire Donald Trump constantly did. In fact, one of his main electoral promises was to prevent the disappearance of the American working class (understood only as blue collar workers) from “extinction”. His working class is an essential part of the American nation, and is the one capitalists dream of: patriotic, hard-working, obedient.

The disappearance, for the moment, of working class identity and solidarity from the forefront of the scene is a catastrophe for the proletariat and for humanity. In face of the present incapacity of either of the two main classes of modern society to put forward a credible perspective of their own, the very essence of bourgeois society comes more clearly to the light of day: de-solidarisation. The principle of solidarity which was the safety net, more or less, of all pre-capitalist societies based on natural rather than “market” economy, is replaced by the safety net of private property – for those who have it. In bourgeois society, you have to be able to help yourself, and the means to this end are not solidarity, but credit-worthiness and insurance. For many decades, in the main industrial countries, the welfare state – although an integral part of the credit and insurance economy – was used to hide this elimination of solidarity from the social “agenda”. Today the rejection of solidarity is not only not hidden, but gaining ground.

The challenge to the working class

The demonstration of millions of people, mainly women, all over the United States, against the new president the day after his inauguration, made it clear that large parts of the working population of America support neither Trump nor the tendency he stands for. However, far from succeeding in opposing Trump's nationalism, these demonstrations tended to answer Trump on his own ground by claiming: “We are the true America”.

These demonstrations show in fact that the populist policy of exclusion and scapegoating is not the only danger for the working class. This young generation which is expressing its protest, while not falling for Trump, is in danger of falling for the trap of defending “democratic” and “liberal” bourgeois society instead. The ruling fractions of the bourgeoisie would be delighted to enlist the support of the most intelligent and generous sectors of the working class in the defence of the present version of an exploitation system which – even without “populism” - has long become a menace to the existence of our species, and which moreover is itself the producer of the “populism” it wants to keep in check. It is undeniable that today, to many workers, in the absence of a revolutionary alternative they can have confidence in, an Obama, Sanders or Angela Merkel can appear as a lesser evil compared to a Trump, Farage, Le Pen or the “Alternative für Deutschland”. But at the same time, these workers also feel indignant about what “liberal society” has done to humanity in the past decades. The class antagonism remains.

It should also be pointed out that the resistance within the working class to populism is not in itself a proof that these workers follow the bourgeois liberals and are ready to sacrifice their own class interests. Millions of workers at the heart of the globalised system of production are above all very much aware that their material existence depends on a world-wide system of production and exchange, and that there can be no reverting to a more local division of labour. They are also aware that what Marx called the “socialisation” of production (the replacement of individual by associated labour) teaches them to collaborate with each other on a world scale, and that only on such a scale can the present problems of humanity be surmounted. In the present historical situation, in the absence of class identity and a perspective of a struggle for a classless society, the revolutionary potential of contemporary society takes refuge, for the moment, in the “objective” conditions: the persistence of the class antagonisms; the irreconcilable nature of class interests; the world wide collaboration of the proletarians in the production and reproduction of social life. Only the proletariat has an objective interest in and capacity to resolve the contradiction between world-wide production and private and nation-state appropriation of wealth. Since humanity cannot go back to local market production, it can only go forward by abolishing private property, by putting the international production process at the disposal of the whole of humanity.

On this objective basis, the subjective conditions for revolution can still recover, in particular through the return of the economic struggle of the proletariat on an important scale, and through the development of a new generation of revolutionary political minorities with the necessary daring to take up now more than ever the cause of the working class, and to do so with the profundity needed to convince the proletariat of its own revolutionary mission.

Steinklopfer Late January, 2017

For all those who still consider that mankind’s last best hope is the revolutionary overthrow of world capitalism, it is impossible to greet the beginning of the year 2017 without recalling that it is the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution. And we also know that all those who insist that there is no alternative to the present social system will recall it in their own way.

Many of them will ignore it of course, or downplay its significance by telling us that this is just ancient history. Everything has changed since then – and what is the point of talking about a working class revolution when the working class no longer exists, or has been so degraded that the term ‘working class revolution’ can even be assimilated to protest votes in favour of Brexit or Trump in old industrial centres decimated by globalisation?

Or if the upheaval which shook the world in 1917 is brought to mind, in the majority of cases it is painted as a kind of horror story, but one with a very definite ‘moral’: behold, this is what happens when you challenge the present system, if you fall for the delusion that a higher form of social life is possible. You get something much worse. You get terror, Gulags, the omnipresent totalitarian state. It began with Lenin and his fanatical band of Bolsheviks whose coup d’Etat in October 1917 killed off Russia’s fledgling democracy, and it ended up with Stalin, with the whole of society transformed into a forced labour camp. And then it all collapsed, which demonstrated once and for all that it is impossible to organise modern society other than by the methods of capitalism.

We are under no illusion that, in 2017, explaining what the Russian revolution really meant is going to be easy. This is a period of extreme difficulty for the working class and its small revolutionary minorities, a period which is dominated by feelings of hopelessness and loss of any perspective for the future, by the sinister growth of nationalism and racism which serves to divide the working class against itself, by the hate-filled demagogy of the populists on the right, and on the left by clamorous appeals to defend ‘democracy’ against this new authoritarianism.

But this is also a moment for us to recall the work of our political ancestors, the left communist fractions who survived the terrible defeats of the revolutionary movements sparked off by the events in Russia 1917 and tried to make sense of the resulting degeneration and demise of the very communist parties which had been formed to lead the way to revolution. Resisting both the open terror of the counter-revolution in its Stalinist and fascist forms, and the more veiled deceptions of democracy, the most lucid left communist currents, such as those grouped around the reviews Bilan in the 1930s and Internationalisme in the 40s, began the enormous task of drawing the ‘balance sheet’ of the revolution. First and foremost, against all its denigrators, they reaffirmed what had been essential and positive about the Russian revolution. In particular, they insisted

• That the “Russian” revolution only had a meaning as the first victory of the world revolution, and that its only hope had been the extension of proletarian power to the rest of the globe;

• That it had confirmed the capacity of the working class to dismantle the bourgeois state and create new organs of political power (most notably the soviets or councils of workers’ delegates);

• That it demonstrated the necessity for a revolutionary political organisation defending the principles of internationalism and working class autonomy.

At the same time, the revolutionaries of the 1930s and 40s also began the painful analysis of the costly errors made by the Bolsheviks in the teeth of an unprecedented situation for any workers’ party, in particular:

• The growing tendency for the party to substitute itself for the soviets, and the fusion of the party with the post-October state, which undermined not only the power of the soviets but also the capacity of the party to defend the class interests of the workers, even in opposition to the new state;

• The recourse to the ‘Red Terror’ in response to the White Terror of the counter-revolution – a process which led to the Bolsheviks implicating themselves in the suppression of proletarian movements and organisations

• The tendency to see state capitalism as a transitional stage towards socialism, and even as being identical with it.

The ICC, from its inception, has attempted to carry on with this work of drawing the lessons of the Russian revolution and the international revolutionary wave of 1917-23. We have over the years developed quite a library of articles and pamphlets dealing with this absolutely vital era in the history of our class. In the coming year, and beyond, we will be making sure that these texts are more accessible to our readers, by compiling an updated dossier of our most important articles on the Russian revolution and the international revolutionary wave. Each month or so we will headline articles which most directly correspond either to the chronological development of the revolutionary process or which contain responses to the most important questions posed by the attacks of bourgeois propaganda or by discussions in and around the proletarian political milieu. So this month we will be ‘promoting’ to the front page of our website an article on the February revolution first written in 1997. It will be followed by articles on Lenin’s April Theses, the July days, the October insurrection, and so on; and we intend to keep this process going over a long period, precisely because the drama of the revolution and counter-revolution lasted for a number of years and was by no means limited to Russia, but had its echoes all across the globe, from Berlin to Shanghai, from Turin to Patagonia, and from the Clydeside to Seattle.

At the same time, we will be seeking to add to this collection with new articles which deal with issues that we have not yet examined in depth (such as the onslaught against the revolution by the ruling class at the time, the problem of ‘Red Terror’, and so on); articles which respond to the current campaigns of capitalism aimed against the revolutionary memory of the working class; and articles which will look at the conditions for the proletarian revolution today – at what they have in common with the time of the Russian revolution, but also and above all at what significant changes have intervened over the past 100 years.

The aim of this publishing venture is not simply to “celebrate” or “commemorate” long-past historical events. It is to defend the view that the proletarian revolution is even more of a necessity today than it was in 1917. Faced with the horrors of the first imperialist world war, the revolutionaries of the time concluded that capitalism had entered its epoch of decline, posing humanity with the alternative between socialism and barbarism; and the even greater horrors – symbolised in place-names like Auschwitz and Hiroshima - that followed the defeat of the first attempts to make the socialist revolution starkly confirmed their diagnosis. A century later, capitalism’s continued existence poses a mortal threat to the very survival of humanity.

Writing from her prison cell in 1918, and on the eve of the revolution in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg expressed her fundamental solidarity with the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik party [6], despite all her very serious criticisms of the errors of the Bolsheviks, in particular the policy of the Red Terror. Her words are as relevant to our own future as they were to the future she herself confronted:

“What is in order is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the kernel from the accidental excrescencies in the politics of the Bolsheviks. In the present period, when we face decisive final struggles in all the world, the most important problem of socialism was and is the burning question of our time. It is not a matter of this or that secondary question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such. In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: “I have dared!”

This is the essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realization of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labour in the entire world. In Russia, the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism’.

ICC

Prior to our excursion into the attempts of Spanish anarchism to establish ‘libertarian communism’ during the war in Spain of 1936-39, we had published the contribution of the Gauche Communiste de France on the state in the period of transition1, a text based on the theoretical advances of the Italian and Belgian left fractions in the 1930s, while already advancing beyond their conceptions in several respects. The GCF was part of a certain resurgence of proletarian political organisations in the wake of the Second World War, but by the early 1950s, the proletarian milieu was facing a serious crisis as it became increasingly evident that the profound defeat suffered by the working class had not been dispersed by the war – on the contrary, the victory of democracy over fascism had further exacerbated the disorientation of the proletariat. The end of the counter-revolution which had begun in the 1920s was still a long way ahead.

In our book The Dutch and German Left, particularly chapter 11, “The Communistenbond Spartacus and the ‘councilist current’ (1942-50)” we looked at the significant developments that took place in a part of the Dutch communist left: the attempt by the Communistenbond Spartacus to open up to discussions with other currents (such as the GCF) and to re-appropriate some of the old positions of the KAPD – this was a turn away from the anti-party ideas developed in the 30s. However, these advances were fragile and the basically anarchist ideas which had been adopted by the majority of the Dutch-German left in reaction to the degeneration of Bolshevism soon returned in force, contributing to a long-drawn out process of dispersal into mainly local groups focused on the immediate struggles of the workers.

In 1952, the GCF broke up: partly the result of a mistaken diagnosis of the historic course, leading to the conclusion that a third world war was imminent and to the departure of Marc Chirik, the most influential member of the GCF, to Venezuela; and partly due to a combination of personal tensions and unexpressed political differences. Marc fought against these difficulties in a series of ‘letters from afar’, in which he also tried to outline the tasks of revolutionary organisations in the historic conditions they now encountered, but he was unable to halt the disintegration of the group. Some of its former members joined the Socialisme ou Barbarie group around Cornelius Castoriadis, of which more in a later article.

In the same year, a major split took place between the two major tendencies within the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy – tendencies which had existed more or less from the beginning but which had been able to establish a kind of Modus Vivendi when the party was going through a euphoric phase of growth. As the retreat in the class struggle became increasingly obvious, the organisation, faced with the demoralisation of many of the workers who had joined it on a superficial activist basis at the beginning, was inevitably compelled to reflect on its future tasks and direction.

The 1950s and early 60s was thus another dark period for the communist movement, which faced a real prolongation of the deep counter-revolution that had descended on the working class in the 30s and 40s, but this time dominated by the image of a triumphant capitalism which appeared to have recovered – perhaps definitively – from the catastrophic crisis of the 30s. It was the triumph, in particular, of US capital, of democracy, of an economy which passed relatively quickly from post-war austerity to the consumer boom of the late 50s and early 60s. Certainly this ‘glorious’ period had its shadow side, above all the relentless confrontation between the two imperialist giants with its proliferation of local wars and the overarching threat of a nuclear holocaust. Along with this, in the ‘democratic’ bloc, there was a real surge in paranoia about communism and subversion, exemplified by the McCarthyite witch-hunts in the USA. In this atmosphere, revolutionary organisations, where they existed at all, were even more reduced in scale, even more isolated than they had been in the 1930s.

This period thus marked a profound rupture in continuity with the movement that had shaken the world in the aftermath of the First World War, and even with the courageous minorities which had resisted the advancing counter-revolution. As the economic boom continued, the very idea that capitalism was a transient system, doomed by its own inner contradictions, appeared far less evident than it had done in the years 1914-1945, when the system seemed to be caught up in one gigantic catastrophe after another. Perhaps marxism itself had failed? This was certainly the message being pushed by any number of sociologists and other professional bourgeois thinkers, and such ideas would soon penetrate the revolutionary movement itself, as we saw in our recent series on decadence2 .

All the same, the generation of militants who had been steeled by the revolution or by the fight against the degeneration of the political organisations it had created had not altogether vanished. Some of the key figures of the communist left remained active after the war and into the period of retreat in the 50s and 60s, and for them, despite everything, the perspective of communism was by no means dead and buried. Pannekoek, though no longer linked to an organisation, published his book on workers’ councils and their role in the construction of a new society3; and right into his old age he remained in contact with a number of the groups that appeared after the war, such as Socialisme ou Barbarie. Militants who had broken with Trotskyism during the war, such as Castoriadis and Munis, maintained a political activity and tried to outline a vision of what lay beyond the capitalist horizon. And Marc Chirik, though ‘unorganised’ for over a decade, certainly did not abandon revolutionary thought and inquiry; when he returned to organised militant life in the mid-60s, he would have clarified his views on a number of questions, not least on the problems of the transition period.

We will return to the writings of Castoriadis, Munis and Chirik in subsequent articles. We think it is valid to talk about their individual contributions even though the work they carried out was nearly always done in the context of a political organisation. A revolutionary militant does not exist as a mere individual, but as part of a collective organism which, in the final analysis, is engendered by the working class and its struggle to become conscious of its historical role. A militant is by definition an individual who has committed him or herself to the construction and defence of a political organisation, and who is thus motivated by a profound loyalty to the organisation and its needs. But – and here, as we shall see below, we part company with the conceptions developed by Bordiga – the revolutionary organisation is not an anonymous collective, in which the individual sacrifices his personality and thus abandons his critical faculties; a healthy political organisation is an association in which the individuality of different comrades is harnessed rather than suppressed. In such an association, there is room for the particular theoretical contributions of different comrades and, of course, for debate around the differences raised by individual militants. Thus, as we have found throughout this series, the history of the communist programme is not only a history of the struggles of the working class, not only a history of the organisations and currents that have drawn the lessons from these struggles and elaborated them into a coherent programme, but also of the individual militants who have led the way in this process of elaboration.

Damen and Bordiga as revolutionary militants

In this article, we return to the work of the Italian communist left, which before the war, in the shape of the Fraction in exile, had made such an irreplaceable contribution to our understanding of the problems of the transition from capitalism to communism. This contribution had also been constructed on the marxist foundations laid down by the left current in Italy during the preceding phase, the phase of imperialist world war and of the post-war revolutionary wave; and after the second imperialist war, the theoretical legacy of the Italian left did not disappear in spite of the errors and schisms that afflicted the Internationalist Communist Party. And throughout this whole period, whether we are examining the question of the transition period or other issues, it is impossible to ignore the inter-action, and often the opposition, of two leading militants of this current – Onorato Damen and Amadeo Bordiga.

During the stormy days of war and revolution from 1914 to 1926, Damen and Bordiga demonstrated very clearly a capacity to stand against the dominant order that is the hallmark of a communist militant. Damen was jailed for agitating against the war; Bordiga fought tirelessly to develop the work of his fraction inside the Socialist Party and then to push for a split with the right wing and the centrists and the formation of a communist party on solid principles. When the new Communist International itself embarked upon an opportunist course in the early 1920s, Bordiga was again in the front line of opposition to the tactics of the United Front and the ‘Bolshevisation’ of the CPs; he had the immense courage to stand up at the meeting of the CI’s Executive Committee in Moscow in 1926 and denounce Stalin, to his face, as the gravedigger of the revolution. That same year, Bordiga himself was arrested and exiled to the island of Ustica4. Damen meanwhile was also active in resisting the attempts of the CI to impose its opportunist policies on the Italian party, which had initially been dominated by the left. Along with Forticiari, Repossi and others he formed the Comitato di Intesa in 19265. During the fascist period he went through more than one episode of confinement and exile, but he was not silenced, leading a prisoners’ revolt in Pianosa.

At this juncture, however, there was a difference in the reaction of the two militants which was to have very long term consequences. Bordiga, placed under house arrest and obliged to abjure all political activity (how mild the fascists seemed then!), avoided all contacts with his comrades and concentrated entirely on his work as an engineer. He recognised that the working class had suffered a historic defeat, but did not draw the same conclusion from this as the comrades who formed the Fraction in exile. The latter understood that it was as necessary as ever to maintain an organised political activity, even if it could no longer be in the form of a party. Thus at the time of the formation of the Italian Fraction, and all through the extremely fertile decade that followed, Bordiga was entirely cut off from these theoretical developments6. Damen on the other hand maintained contacts and regrouped a number of comrades from the Fraction on their return to Italy with the idea of contributing to the formation of the party. These included militants like Stefanini, Danielis and Lecci, who had remained faithful to the essential positions of the Fraction throughout the 30s and the war. In 1943, the Partito Comunisa Internazionalista (PCInt) was proclaimed in the north of Italy ; the party was then ‘re-founded’ in 1945 following a somewhat hasty regroupment with elements around Bordiga in the south of Italy7.

As a result, the unified party, formed around a platform written by Bordiga, was from the very beginning a compromise between two tendencies. The one around Damen was much clearer on many basic class positions and these were to no small extent connected to the developments undertaken by the Fraction – for example, the explicit adoption of the theory of the decadence of capitalism and the rejection of Lenin’s position on national self-determination.

In this sense – and we have never hidden our criticism of the profound opportunism involved in the formation of the party from the very beginning - the ‘Damen’ tendency showed a capacity to assimilate some of the most important programmatic gains made by the Italian Fraction in exile, and even to take on some of the key questions raised within the Italian Fraction and advance towards a more worked out position. This was the case with the union question: within the Fraction, this had been an unresolved debate, in which Stefanini had been the first to defend the idea that the unions had already been integrated into the capitalist state. Although it cannot be said that the position of the Damen tendency has ever been totally consistent on the union question, it was certainly clearer than what became the dominant ‘Bordigist’ view after the 1952 split.

This process of clarification also extended to the tasks of the communist party in the proletarian revolution. As we have seen in previous articles in his series8, the Fraction had, despite some lingering notions about the party exercising the dictatorship of the proletariat, essentially gone beyond this position by insisting that a key lesson of the Russian revolution was that the party should not become entangled with the transitional state. The Damen tendency went even further and made it clear that the task of the party was not to exercise power. Its 1952 platform, for example states that “no time and for no reason should the proletariat surrender its role in the struggle. It should not delegate its historical mission to others or transfer its power to other – not even its own political party”.

As we show in our book The Italian Communist Left, these insights, quite logically, were linked to certain developments on the question of the state:

“Much bolder was the position that the PCInt took up on the question of the state in the period of transition, where it was visibly influenced by Bilan and Octobre. Damen and his comrades rejected the assimilation of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the rule of the party, and in the face of the proletarian state called for the widest democracy in the councils. They did not rule out the hypothesis, verified at Kronstadt, of confrontations between the workers’ state and the proletariat, in the which case the communist party should be on the site of the latter: ‘The dictatorship of the proletariat can in no sense be reduced to the dictatorship of this party, even if this is the party of the proletariat, the intelligence and guide of the proletarian state. The state and the party in power, as organs of such a dictatorship, bear the seeds of the tendency towards compromise with the old world, a tendency which as the Russian experience shows develops and strengthens through the momentary inability of the revolution in a given country to spread, by linking itself to the insurrectionary movement in other countries Our party a)would have to avoid becoming the instrument of the workers’ state and its would have to defend the interests of the revolution even b) in confrontations with the workers’ state; c) would have to avoid becoming bureaucratised, by making its directive centre or its more peripheral centres a field of manoeuvres for the careerism of functionaries; d)would have to prevent class politics being thought out or carried out through formalist and administrative criteria’”9.

However, the most crucial insight of the Fraction – the notion of the fraction itself, the form and function that the revolutionary organisation must take on in a period of defeat in the class struggle – was entirely lost on the Damen tendency, as was the closely connected notion of the historic course, the necessity to understand the global balance of forces between the classes that can undergo profound alterations within the epoch of decadence. Unable to make a real critique of the momentous error made in 43 – the constitution of a ‘party’ in one single country in a period of profound counter-revolution – the Damenists compounded the mistake by theorising the party as a permanent necessity and even as a permanent reality. Hence, despite quickly shrinking to a ‘mini-party’, the original emphasis of the regroupment of 43-45 on building up a presence within the working class and giving a decisive lead in its struggles remained, at the cost of what was really needed: a focus on theoretical clarification about the necessities and possibilities of the period.

The opposing tendency around figures like Bordiga and Maffi was, in general, much more confused about the most important class positions. Bordiga more or less ignored the acquisitions of the Fraction and advocated a return to the positions of the first two congresses of the Third International, which for him were based on Lenin’s ‘restoration’ of the communist programme. An extreme suspicion of opportunist ‘innovations’ to marxism (which, it’s true, were beginning to flourish in the soil of the counter-revolution) led him to the notion of the “invariant” programme which had been fixed in stone in 1848 and only needed to be disinterred when it was periodically buried by the opportunists and traitors10. As we have often pointed out, this notion of invariance is based on a highly “variant” geometry, so that for example Bordiga and his followers could both affirm that capitalism had entered its epoch of wars and revolutions (a fundamental position of the Third International) and yet polemicise against the notion of decline as being founded on a pacifist and gradualist ideology11.

This questioning of decadence had important repercussions when it came to analysing the nature of the Russian revolution (defined as a dual revolution, not unlike the councilist vision), and in particular when to came to characterising the struggles for national independence which were proliferating in the former colonies. Mao, instead of being seen for what he was, an expression of the Stalinist counter-revolution and a real product of capitalist decay, was hailed as a great bourgeois revolutionary in the mould of Cromwell. Later on the Bordigists were to come out with the same appreciation of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and this deep incomprehension of the national question was to cause havoc in the Bordigist party in the later 1970s, with a sizeable element abandoning internationalism altogether.

On the party question, on the errors of the Bolsheviks in the running of the Soviet state, it was as if the Fraction had never existed. The party takes power, wields the state machine, imposes the Red Terror without mercy…even the important nuances of Lenin on the need for the working class to be wary of the bureaucratisation and autonomisation of the transitional state seem to have been forgotten. As we argue in a previous article in this series12, Bordiga’s most important contribution on the lessons of the Russian revolution in the post World War Two period, ‘Force, violence and dictatorship in the class struggle’ (1946), certainly contains some insights on the problem of degeneration, but its rather dogmatic anti-democratism didn’t enable it to recognise the problem of the party and state substituting for the proletariat (see final note below).

However: even though the Bordiga tendency also never openly put into question the formation of the party in 1943, it was able to understand that the organisation had entered into a far more difficult period and that different tasks were on the order of the day. Bordiga had been sceptical about the formation of the party in the first instance. Without showing the slightest understanding of the notion of the fraction – indeed, he rather buried his own experience of fraction work prior to the First World War under his subsequent theorisations about the formal and the historic party13 - there was a certain understanding that simply maintaining a routine of intervention in the immediate struggle was not the way forward, and that it was essential to return to the theoretical foundations of marxism. Having rejected the contribution of the Fraction and other expressions of the communist left, this work was not completed , or even attempted, with regard to the key programmatic positions. But when it came to certain more general theoretical questions, and particularly those relating to the nature of the future communist society, it seems to us that during this period it was Bordiga, rather than the ‘Damenists’, who has left us with the most important legacy.

The passion for communism: Bordiga’s defence of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

The book Bordiga et la passion du communisme, a collection of writings put together by Jacques Camatte in 1972, is the best testimony to the profundity of Bordiga’s reflections about communism, in particular two major presentations given at party meetings in 1959-60, which are dedicated to Marx’s 1844 Economic and Political Manuscripts: ‘Commentaries on he 1844 manuscripts(1959-60), and ‘Immutable tables (?) of the communist theory of the party’‘ (page references are to the first text unless indicated).

This is how Bordiga places the 1844 MS within the corpus of Marx’s writings

“Another very vulgar commonplace is that Marx was a Hegelian in his youthful writings, that it was only afterwards that he became the theoretician of historical materialism, and that, when he was older, he became a vulgar opportunist. It is a task of the revolutionary marxist school to make it clear to all its enemies (who have the choice to accept everything or reject everything) the monolithism of the whole system from its birth to the death of Marx and even after him (the fundamental concept of invariance, the fundamental rejection the ‘enriching’ evolution of the party doctrine” (p120)

Here we have both the strengths and weaknesses of Bordiga’s approach in one paragraph. One the one hand: the intransigent defence of the continuity of Marx’s thought and the repudiation of the notion that the 1844 MS are the product of a Marx who was still essentially idealist and Hegelian (or at least Feuerbachian), a notion that has been associated in particular with the Stalinist intellectual Althusser and which we have already criticised in earlier articles in this series.14

For Bordiga, the 1844 MS, with their profound exposé of capitalist alienation, and their inspiring description of the communist society that will overcome it, already indicate that Marx had made a qualitative break with the most advanced forms of bourgeois thought. In particular, the 1844 MS, which contain a large section devoted to the critique of the Hegelian philosophy, demonstrate that whatever Marx had assimilated from Hegel in matters of the dialectic, his rupture with Hegel - which meant overturning him, “turning him on his head” - and the adoption of a communist world outlook, take place at exactly the same moment. Bordiga emphasises in particular Marx’s rejection of the very starting point of the Hegelian system: the individual ‘I’. “What is clear is that for Marx Hegel’s error is to build his whole colossal speculative edifice, with its rigorous formalism, on an abstract basis, ‘consciousness’. As Marx would say many times, you have to begin from being, and not from the consciousness it has of itself…Hegel is shut in on himself, from the beginning, in the vain eternal dialogue between subject and object. His subject is the ‘me’ extended in an absolute sense…” (p119).

At the same time, it is evident that for Bordiga, the 1844 MS provide evidence for his theory of the invariance of marxism, an idea which we think is contradicted by the real development of the communist programme which we have traced throughout this series. But we will return to this question later on. What we share with Bordiga’s view of the 1844 MS is, above all: the centrality of Marx’s conception of alienation, not only to the MS, but to the whole of his work; a number of fundamental elements in Bordiga’s conception of the dialectic of history; and the exalted vision of communism which, again, Marx never repudiated in his later work (although he did, in our view, enrich it).

The dialectic of history

Bordiga’s references to the concept of alienation in the 1844 MS inform his whole view of history, since he insists that “the highest degree of man’s alienation has been reached in the current capitalist epoch” (p124). Without abandoning the understanding that the emergence and development of capitalism, and the destruction of the old feudal mode of exploitation, is a precondition for the communist revolution, he pours scorn on the facile progressivism of the bourgeoisie which vaunts its superiority over previous modes of production and ways of experiencing the world. He even suggests that bourgeois thinking is in certain senses empty in comparison with the much derided pre-capitalist viewpoints. For Bordiga, marxism has demonstrated that “your affirmations are empty and inconsistent lies, much more clearly so than the most ancient opinions of human thought which, you, bourgeois, believe you have buried once and for all under the fatuousness of your illuminist rhetoric”(p168). Consequently even when both bourgeoisie and proletariat formulate their critique of religion, there is again a rupture between the two class standpoints: “even in the cases (not general) where the ideologues of the bourgeoisie dared to break openly with the principles of the Christian church, we marxists do not define this superstructure, atheism, as a platform common to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat” (p 117).

With such affirmations, Bordiga seems to connect his thought with some of the ‘philosophical’ critics of the marxism of the Second International (and, by extension, of the official philosophy of the Third) such as Pannekoek, Lukacs and Korsch, who rejected the idea that, just as socialism is the logical next step in historical evolution and only requires the ‘taking over’ of the capitalist state and economy, so historical materialism is simply the next step in the advance of classical bourgeois materialism. Such views are based on a profound underestimation of the antagonism between the bourgeois and proletarian world outlooks, the unavoidable necessity for a revolutionary rupture with the old forms. There is continuity, of course, but it is anything but gradual and peaceful. This way of approaching the problem is entirely consistent with the idea that the bourgeoisie can only see the social and natural world through the distorting lens of alienation, which under its reign has reached its ‘supreme’ phase.

The slogan ‘Against immediatism’ features more than once in the sub-headings of these contributions. For Bordiga it was essential to avoid any narrowing of focus to the present moment of history, and to look beyond capitalism backwards as well as forwards. In the current epoch, bourgeois thought is perhaps more immediatist than ever, more than ever fixated on the particular, the here and now, the short term, since it lives in mortal fear that regarding present-day society with the eye of history will enable us to discern its transient nature. But Bordiga also develops a polemic against the classical “grand narratives” of the bourgeoisie in its more optimistic age: not because it was grand, but because the bourgeoisie’s narrative deformed the real story. Just as the transition from bourgeois to proletarian thinking is not merely another forward step, so history in general is not a straight line going from darkness to light, but is an expression of the dialectic in movement: “The progress of humanity and of knowledge in the much tormented homo sapiens is not continuous, but moves through great isolated leaps punctuated by sinister and obscure plunges into social forms degenerating to the point of putrefaction” (p168). This is no accidental formulation: elsewhere in the same text he says “the banal conceptions of the dominant ideologies see this path (of human history) as a continuous and constant ascent; marxism does not share this vision, and defines a series alternating between rises and descents, interlaced by violent crises” (p152). A clear answer, one would think, to those who reject the concept of the ascendance and decadence of successive modes of production….

The dialectical vision of history sees movement as resulting from the clash – often violent – of contradictions. But it also contains the notion of the spiral and the “return at a higher level”. Thus the communism of the future is, in an important sense, a return of man to himself, as Marx puts it in the 1844 manuscripts, since it is not only a rupture with the past, but a synthesis of everything that was human within it: “man returns to himself not as he began at the origin of his long history, but finally having at his disposal all the perfections of an immense development, acquired in the form of all the successive techniques, customs, religions, philosophies whose useful sides were – if we can be permitted to express ourselves in this way – imprisoned in the zone of alienation” (p125).

A more concrete example of this: in a short article about the inhabitants of the island of Janitzio in Mexico15, written in 1961, and included in Camatte’s collection, Bordiga develops the idea that “in natural and primitive communism” the individual, still linked to his fellow human beings in a real community, does not experience the same fear of death that emerged with the social atomisation engendered by private property and class society; and that this provides us with an indication that in the communism of the future, where the individual’s destiny will be linked to that of the species, the fear of personal death and “any cult of the living and the dead” will be overcome. Bordiga thereby confirms his continuity with that central strand of the marxist tradition which affirms that in a certain sense “the members of primitive societies were closer to the human essence” (p175) – that the communism of the distant past can also be understood as a pre-figuration of the communism of the future16.

What communism is not

Bordiga’s defence of the 1844 MS is, to a large extent, a long diatribe against the fraud of ‘really existing socialism’ in the countries of the eastern bloc, which had gained a new lease of life in the wake of the ‘anti-fascist war’ of 1939-45. His attack was mounted at two levels: negation and affirmation. Negation of the claims that what existed in the USSR and similar regimes had anything whatever to do with Marx’s conception of communism, first and foremost at the economic level; affirmation of the fundamental characteristics of communist relations of production.

According to one version of a ubiquitous joke from the old USSR, an instructor in the party school is lecturing Young Comsomol members on the key question: will there be money in communism?

“historically, comrades, there are three positions on this question. There is the right wing, Proudhonist-Bukharinite deviation: under communism, everyone will have money. Then there is the ultra-left, infantile deviation: under communism, no one will have money. So what then is the dialectical position of Marxism-Leninism? It is clearly this: under communism, some people will have money, and others won’t have any money”.

Whether Bordiga was acquainted with this joke or not, his response to the Stalinists in his Commentaires goes in a similar direction. A preface to one of the Stalinist editions to the 1844 MS points out that Marx’s text contains a polemic against Proudhon’s theory of equal wages, the implication being that for the authentic marxism practised in the USSR, under socialism there must be unequal wages. But, in the ensuing section headed ‘Either wage labour or socialism’, Bordiga points out that in the 1844 MS as well as in other works such as The Poverty of Philosophy and Capital, Marx actually “refutes the Proudhonist vacuity which conceives of a socialism where wages have been conserved, as they are conserved in Russia. Marx is not hitting out at the theory of equality, but on the existence of wages. Even if you could level them, wages are the negation of socialism. Even more so, not levelled, not equal, they are even more evidently the negation of socialism” (p129)

And the following section is headed ‘Either money or socialism’: just as wage labour persists in the USSR, so must its corollary: the domination of human relations by exchange value, and thus by money. Returning, to the deep critique of money as an expression of alienation between human beings, which Marx, citing Shakespeare and Goethe, developed in the 1844 manuscripts and returned to in Capital, Bordiga insisted that “the societies where money circulates are societies of private property; they remain inside the barbaric prehistory of the human species” (p137).

Bordiga in fact demonstrates that the Stalinists have more in common with the father of anarchism than they would like to admit. Proudhon, in the tradition of a ‘crude communism’ which Marx already recognises as reactionary at the point that he himself embraced communism, envisages a society in which “annual revenue is socially divided in equal parts among all members of society, who have all become waged workers”. In other words, this notion of communism or socialism was one in which the misery of the proletarian condition was generalised rather than abolished, and in which “society” itself becomes the capitalist. And in response to those – not only the Stalinists, but also their leftwing apologists, the Trotskyists - who denied that the USSR could be a form of capitalism because it had (more or less) got rid of individual owners of capital, Bordiga replies: “The question where are the capitalists has no meaning. The response has been there since 1844: society is an abstract capitalist”(p132).

The polemical target of these essays is not restricted to the overt defenders of the USSR. If communism abolishes exchange value, it is because it has abolished all forms of property17 – not only state property as in the programme of Stalinism, but also the classical anarcho-syndicalist version (which Bordiga also attributes to the contemporary Socialisme ou Barbarie group with its definition of socialism as workers’ management of production): “land to the peasants and the factories to the workers and similar pitiful parodies of the magnificent programme of the revolutionary communist party”(p178, ‘I’). In communism the individual enterprise must be abolished as such. If it continues to be the property of those who work in it, or even of the local community around it, it has not been truly socialised, and the relations between the different self-managed enterprises must necessarily be founded on the exchange of commodities. We will return to this question when we look at the vision of socialism developed by Castoriadis and the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.

Like Trotsky in the visionary concluding passages of Literature and Revolution18 – who, in 1924, is unlikely to have had knowledge of the 1844 MS – Bordiga then ascends from the sphere of the negation of capitalism and its alienation, from an insistence on what socialism is not, to the positive affirmation of what humanity will be like in the higher stages of communist society. The 1844 MS, as we pointed out in an early article in this series19, are full of passages describing how relations between human beings and between humanity and nature will be transformed under communism, and Bordiga quotes extensively from the most significant of these passages in his two texts, most notably where they deal with the transformation of relations between men and women, and where they insist that communist society will permit the emergence of a higher stage of conscious life.

The transformation of relations between the sexes

Throughout the 1844 MS Marx repudiates the ‘crude communism’ which, while attacking the bourgeois family, still regards woman as an object and speculates about a coming ‘community of women’. On the contrary: Bordiga quotes Marx the degree to which the relationship between man and woman has become humanised is a measurement of the real advance of the species. But at the same time, under capitalism, woman, and the relation between the sexes, will remain a prisoner of commodity relations.

After resuming Marx’s thinking on these questions, Bordiga digresses for a moment on the problem of terminology, of language.

“In citing these passages, it is necessary to alternate between the word man and the word male to the extent that the first word indicates all the members of the species... When a half century ago the estimable marxist Filippo Turati made an enquiry into feminism, that miserable bourgeois deviation founded on the atrocious submission of woman in societies of property, he responded with these simple words: woman… is man. That means: she will be in communism, but for your bourgeois society she is an animal, an object”. (p150)

Feminism a bourgeois deviation? This is a position strongly rejected by those who argue that there can be a ‘socialist feminism’ or an ‘anarcha-feminism’. But from Bordiga’s standpoint, feminism has a bourgeois starting point because it aims at ‘equality’ of the sexes inside the existing social relationships; and this leads logically to the demand that women should be ‘equally’ able to fight in imperialist armies or rise to becoming company directors and prime ministers.

Communism did not need the addition of feminism or even ‘socialist feminism’ to have been, from the beginning, an advocate of the solidarity of men and women in the here and now, but this can only be realised in the class struggle, in the fight against capitalist oppression and exploitation and for the creation of a society in which the ‘original form of exploitation’ – that of woman by man - will no longer be possible. More than this: marxism has also recognised that the female of the species - because of her double oppression and her more advanced moral sense (linked in particular to her historic role in the rearing of children) - is often in the vanguard of the struggle, for example in the revolution in1917 in Russia, which began with demonstrations of women against bread shortages, or more recently in the massive strikes in Egypt in 2007. Indeed according to the anthropological school of Chris Knight, Camilla Power and others, which identifies with the marxist tradition in anthropology, female morality and solidarity played a crucial role in the very emergence of human culture, in the primal “human revolution”20. Bordiga is in accord with this way of looking at things in the section of the Commentaries headed ‘Love, a universal need’, when he argues that the passive function assigned to women is purely a product of property relations, and that in fact “in nature, love being the basis of reproduction, women is the active sex, and the monetary forms of love are revealed to be against nature” (p156). And he continues with a summary of how the abolition of commodity relations will transform this relationship: "In communism without money, love will, as a need, have the same weight for both sexes and the act which consecrates it will realise the social formula that the other's human need is my human need, to the extent that the need of one sex is realised as the need of the other”.

Bordiga then explains that this transformation will be based on the material and social changes introduced by the communist revolution: “This cannot be proposed simply as a moral relationship founded on a certain physical connection, because the passage to a higher form of society is effected in the economic domain: the care of children is no longer just the concern of the two parents but of the community". It is from this starting point that future humanity will be able to break through the limitations imposed by the bourgeois family.

Conscious life at another level

In an earlier article in this series21, we argued that certain passages in the 1844 MS only make sense if we see them as anticipations of a transformation of consciousness, of a new mode of being, which communist social relations will make possible. The article looked at some length at the passage from the chapter ‘Private Property and communism’ where Marx talks about the way in which private property (understood in its broadest sense) has served to restrict the human senses, to obstruct – or, to use a more accurate term from psychoanalysis, repress – human sensual experience; consequently communism will bring with it the “emancipation of the senses”, a new bodily and mental rapport with the world which can be compared with the “inspired” state experienced by artists at their most creative moments.

Towards the end of Bordiga’s text ‘Tablets of stone’ there is a section headed ‘’Down with the personality, that is the key!’ We will take up this question of ‘personality’ later on, but we want first to look at the way Bordiga, in his interpretation of the 1844 manuscripts, envisages the alteration of human consciousness in the communist future.

He begins by affirming that in communism we will “have left behind the millennia-old deception of the lone individual facing the natural world, stupidly called ‘external’ by the philosophers. External to what? External to the ‘I’, this supreme deficiency; but we can no longer say external to the human species, because the species man is internal to nature, part of the physical world.” And he goes on to say that “in this powerful text, object and subject becomes, like man and nature, one and the same thing. We can even say that everything becomes object: man as a subject ‘against nature’ disappears, along with the illusion of a singular me.”(p190)

This can only be a reference to the passage in the ‘Private property and communism’ chapter where Marx says

“it is only when objective reality universally becomes for man in society the reality of man's essential powers, becomes human reality, and thus the reality of his own essential powers, that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, objects that confirm and realize his individuality, his objects, i.e. he himself becomes the object".

Bordiga continues:

“We have seen that when you pass from the individual to the species, the spirit, this absolute unfortunate, is dissolved into objective nature. The individual brain as a poor passive machine is replaced by the social brain. What’s more, Marx points to a collective human sense that has gone beyond the isolated corporal sense”. And he goes on to quote the 1844 Manuscripts on the emancipation of the senses, insisting that this also indicates the emergence of a kind of collective awareness – what we might term a passage from the ‘common sense’ of the isolated ego to the communising of the senses.

What do we make of these conceptions? Before dismissing them as science fiction, we should remember that while, in bourgeois society above all, we often take the ego to be the absolute centre of our being (“I think, therefore I am” ), there is also a long tradition of thought that insists that the ego is only a relative reality, at best a particular fraction of our being. This view is certainly central to psychoanalytical theory, for which the adult ego only emerges through a long process of repression and division between the conscious and unconscious part of ourselves – and is, furthermore, the “sole seat of anxiety”22 because, caught as it is between the demands of external reality and the unfulfilled urges buried in the unconscious, it is constantly preoccupied with its own overthrow or extinction.

It is also a view that has been put forward in a number of the ‘mystical’ traditions east and west, although it was probably most coherently developed by Indian philosophy, and above all by Buddhism with its doctrine of ‘anatta’ – the impermanence of the separate self. But all these traditions tend to concur that it is possible, through directly penetrating the unconscious mind, to surpass the everyday ego-consciousness – and thus the torment of perpetual anxiety. Shorn of the ideological distortions that inevitably accompanied these traditions, their most lucid insights do raise the possibility that human beings are capable of attaining another kind of consciousness in which the world around us is no longer seen as a hostile other, and the focus of awareness shifts, not merely intellectually, but through a direct and very bodily experience, from the isolated atom to the standpoint of the species – indeed, the standpoint of something even more than the species: of nature, of an evolving universe, becoming conscious of itself

It is difficult to read the above passages by Bordiga and conclude that he is talking about something entirely different. And it is important to note that Freud, in the opening sections of Civilisation and its Discontents, acknowledged the reality of the “oceanic feeling”, this experience of erotic unity with the world, although he could only see it as a regression to the infantile state prior to the emergence of the ego. However, in the same section of the book, he also accepts the possibility that the mental techniques of yoga can open the door to “primordial states of mind which have long been overlaid”. The question for us to raise theoretically - and perhaps for future generations to investigate more practically – is whether the age-old techniques of meditation can lead only to regression, a collapse back into the undifferentiated unity of the animal or the infant; or whether they can be part of a dialectical “return become conscious”, a self-aware exploration of our own minds. In which case the instances of the “oceanic feeling” point not only to the infantile past, but towards the horizon of a more advanced and more universal human consciousness. This was certainly the view adopted by Erich Fromm in his study Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism, for example when he writes about what he calls the “state of non-repressedness”, defined as “a state in which one acquires again the immediate, undistorted grasp of reality, the simpleness and spontaneity of the child; yet, after having gone through the process of alienation, of development of one’s intellect, non-repressedness is return to innocence on a higher level; this return to innocence is only possible after one has lost one’s innocence.”23

Against the destruction of the environment

But Bordiga’s theoretical writings during this period did not only pose the question of man’s relationship with nature at this very ‘philosophical’ level. He also raised it in his far-sighted reflections on the question of capitalist catastrophes and the problem of the environment. Writing on contemporary disasters like the flooding of the Po valley in 1957 and the sinking of the liner Andrea Doria in the year before, Bordiga again brings to bear his specialist knowledge as an engineer and above all his deep rejection of bourgeois ‘progress’ to show how its drive to accumulate contains the seeds of such catastrophes, and ultimately of the destruction of the natural world itself24. Bordiga is particularly vehement in his articles about the frenzy of urbanisation which he could already discern in the post-war reconstruction period, denouncing the cramming of human beings into ever more limited urban spaces and the accompanying philosophy of ‘verticalism’ in construction. He argues that this reduction of human beings to the level of ants is a direct product of the needs of accumulation and will be reversed in the communist future, reaffirming Marx and Engels’ demand for overcoming the separation between town and country: "When, after the forcible crushing of this ever-more obscene dictatorship, it will be possible to subordinate every solution and every plan to the amelioration of the conditions of living labour , to fashion with this aim everything that has come from dead labour, from constant capital, from the infrastructure that the human species has built up over the centuries and continues to build up on the earth’s crust, then the brutal verticalism of the cement monsters will be made ridiculous and will be suppressed, and in the immense expanses of horizontal space, once the giant cities have been deflated, the strength and intelligence of the human animal will progressively tend to render uniform the density of life and labour over the habitable parts of the earth; and these forces will henceforth be in harmony, and no longer ferocious enemies as they are in the deformed civilisation of today, where they are only brought together by the spectre of servitude and hunger" (published in ‘Space against cement’ in The Human Species and the Earth’s Crust (Espèce Humaine et Croûte Terrestre, Petite Bibilotheque Payot, p168). It is also worth noting that when Bordiga, in 1952, formulated a kind of “immediate revolutionary programme”, it included demands for halting what he already saw as the inhuman congestion and pace of life brought about by capitalist urbanisation (a process that has reached much greater levels of irrationality since then). Thus the seventh point out of nine calls for “halting construction of houses and workplaces in the big cities and even the smaller ones, as a starting point for the uniform distribution of the population in the countryside. Reduction of the speed and volume of traffic and forbidding it when it is useless” (in a future article we intend to come back to the other demands in this “programme”, because they contain a number of formulations which can, in our view, be strongly criticised) .

It is interesting to note that, when it comes to demonstrating why all this so-called progress of the capitalist city was nothing of the kind, Bordiga had recourse to a concept of decadence which he tends to throw out of window in other polemics – for example in the title ‘Weird and wonderful tales of modern social decadence’25. Such a term is on the other hand entirely consistent with the general view of history we noted above, where societies can “degenerate to the point of putrefaction” and go through phases of ascent and descent. It is as if Bordiga, once removed from the ‘narrow’ world of contending political positions, and obliged to return to the basics of marxist theory, had no choice but to recognise that capitalism, like all previous modes of production, must also enter an epoch of decline – and that this epoch has long been upon us, regardless of the marvels of capitalism’s “growth in decay” which are smothering humanity and threatening its future.

The problem with “invariance”

We must now return to Bordiga’s notion that the 1844 MS provide evidence for his theory of the “invariance of marxism”. We have argued on various occasions that this is a religious conception. In a stinging polemic with the Bordigist group that publishes Programma Comunista, Mark Chirik noted the real similarity between the Bordigist concept of invariance and the Muslim attitude of submission to an immutable doctrine26.

The target of this article was, it’s true, mainly the epigones of Bordiga, but what did Bordiga himself say about the relationship between marxism and the sources of “invariant” doctrine in the past? In a seminal text titled precisely ‘The historical invariance of marxism’27, he writes:

“Consequently, despite the fact that the ideological legacy of the revolutionary working class, unlike that of the classes that preceded it, does not assume the form of revelation, myth or idealism, but of “positive” science, it nonetheless needs a stable formulation of its principles, and even of its rules for action, that performs the role and possesses the efficacy that dogmas, catechisms, tablets of law, constitutions and guide-books such as the Vedas, the Talmud, the Bible, the Koran or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights once performed and possessed. The profound errors with regard to form and substance in those compilations did not deprive them of their enormous organizational and social power (at first a revolutionary power, then a counterrevolutionary power, in dialectical succession); what is more, in many cases these ‘deviations’ contributed precisely to the creation of this power.”

In his Commentaries, Bordiga was already aware of the accusation that such ideas led him back to the religious world-view:

“When, at a certain point, our banal contradictor ... says that we are building our mystique, himself posing as a mind who which has gone beyond all fideism and mysticism, when he holds us in derision for kneeling down to the Mosaic or talmudic tablets of the Bible or the Koran, to gospels and catechisms, we reply to him .... that we do not consider as an offense the assertion that we can indeed attribute to our movement - as long as it has not triumphed in reality (which in our method precedes any ulterior conquest of human consciousness) - the character of a mystique, or, if you want, a myth.

Myth, in its innumerable forms, was not a delirium of minds whose physical eyes were closed to reality…but was an irreplaceable step in the single road to the real conquest of consciousness”(p169).

Bordiga is right to consider that mythical thought was indeed an “irreplaceable step” in the evolution of human consciousness, and that the Bible, the Koran, or the Declaration of Human Rights were, at a certain stage of history, authentically revolutionary products. He is also right to recognise that adherence to such “tablets of the law” became, at another stage in history, counter-revolutionary. But the mechanism through which they became counter-revolutionary in new historical circumstances was precisely the notion that they were unchanging and unchangeable. Islam, for example, considers its revelation purer than that of the Jewish Torah because it is argued that while the latter had been subject to subsequent revision and editing, not a single word of the Koran had been altered from the moment the angel Gabriel dictated it to Mohammed. The difference between the marxist view of the communist programme and myth or religious dogma is that marxism sees its concepts as the historical product of human beings and thus subject to confirmation or refutation by succeeding historical growth or experience, and not as a once and for all revelation from a superhuman source. Indeed, it insists that mythical or religious revelations are themselves products of human history, and thus limited in their scope and clarity even at their highest points of achievement. In accepting the idea that marxism is itself a kind of myth, Bordiga loses sight of the historical method that he is able to use so well elsewhere.

Of course it is true that the communist programme itself is not infinitely malleable and does have an unchanging core of general principles such as the class struggle, the transient nature of class society, the necessity for the proletarian dictatorship and communism. Furthermore, there is a sense in which this general outline can appear like a sudden flash of inspiration. Hence Bordiga can write:

“A new doctrine cannot appear at just any historical moment, but there are certain quite characteristic—and even extremely rare—eras in history in which a new doctrine can appear like a blinding flash of light; if one has not recognized the crucial moment and fixed one’s gaze on this terrible light, in vain would one have resort to the candle stubs with which the academic pedant or the combatant of little faith attempts to illuminate the way forward” (‘Historical invariance of marxism’)

Quite possibly Bordiga has in mind the incredibly rich phase of Marx’s work which gave rise to the 1844 MS and other fundamental texts. But Marx for one did not regard these texts as his final words on capitalism, the class struggle, or communism. Even though, in our view, he never abandoned the essential content of these writings, he regarded them as ‘first drafts’ which had to be developed and given a more solid grounding by further research, itself closely connected to the practical/ theoretical experimentation carried out by the real movement of the proletariat.

Bordiga, in the Commentaries (p 161) also points to a specific passage in the 1844 MS as proof of invariance. This is where Marx writes that “The entire movement of history, just as its [communism’s] actual act of genesis – the birth act of its empirical existence – is, therefore, for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming”.

And Bordiga adds that the subject of this consciousness cannot be the individual philosopher: it can only be class party of the world proletariat. But if communism is, as Marx says, the product of the entire movement of history, then it must have begun to emerge long before the appearance of the working class and its political organisations, so that the source of this consciousness must be older than both – just as, within capitalist society, it is also wider than the political organisations of the class, even if they are generally its most advanced expression. Moreover, since communism can only become clear to itself, “comprehended and known” when it becomes proletarian communism, surely this is further evidence that communism and communist consciousness is something that evolves, that it is not static, but is a process of becoming – and thus cannot be invariant.

Individual and species

The critique of individualism has a long history in marxism, going back to Marx’s criticisms of Hegel and in particular his assault on Max Stirner; and in arguing against the philosophical standpoint of the isolated thinker, Bordiga is on solid ground, citing the The German Ideology’s cutting remark on Saint Max that “philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love”. And as we have seen, the idea that the ego is in some sense an illusory construct also has a long pedigree. But Bordiga goes further than this. As already noted, the section of ‘Tablets of Stone’ (Tables immuables) which we cited earlier, where Bordiga predicts that communist humanity will be able to access a kind of species or cosmic consciousness, is headed ‘Down with the personality, that is the key!’. It is as if Bordiga wants the individual human being to be subsumed in the species rather than realised through it.

The experience of a state of awareness which goes beyond the ego tends to be a peak experience rather than a permanent state, but at any rate, it does not necessarily abolish the personality. Personality as a mask, perhaps, personality as a kind of private property, personality as the outward face of the illusion of an absolute ego – one could argue that this form of personality will be transcended in the future. But nature itself has a need for diversity if it is to move forward, and this is no less true for human society. Even the Buddhists did not argue that enlightenment made the individual vanish. There is a Zen story which recounts how a student approached his teacher after hearing that the latter had achieved satori, the lightening flash of illumination. The student asks the master “how does it feel to be enlightened?” To which the master replies: “As miserable as ever”.

And in the same section of ‘Tablets of Stone’ (Tables immuables), Bordiga cites the “splendid expression” from the 1844 MS: that mankind is a being who suffers, and that if he does not suffer, he cannot know joy. This fleshly, mortal, individual human being will still exist in communism, which for Marx is “the only society in which the original and free development of individuals ceases to be a mere phrase” (German Ideology, ‘The free development of individuals’)

These are of course questions for the far future. But Bordiga’s suspicion of the individual personality has far more immediate implications for the question of the revolutionary organisation.

We know that Bordiga made a trenchant critique of the bourgeois fetish of democracy, based as it is on the false notion of the isolated citizen and on the real foundation of a society atomised by commodity exchange. The insights he developed in The Democratic Principle and elsewhere enable us to expose the essential vacuity of the most democratic structures of the capitalist order. But there comes a point in Bordiga’s thinking where he loses sight of what was authentically ‘progressive’ in the victory of commodity exchange over all the older forms of community: the possibility of critical, individual thought without which “positive science” – which Bordiga still reclaims as the standpoint of the proletariat – would not have emerged. Applied to Bordiga’s conception of the party, this line of thought leads to the concept of the “monolithic”, “anonymous” and even “totalitarian” organisation – all which terms have been used approvingly in the Bordigist canon. It leads to theorising the negation of individual thought and thus of internal differences and debates. And as with all totalitarian regimes, there is always at least one individual who becomes anything but anonymous – who becomes the object of a personality cult. And this is precisely what was justified within the post-war Internationalist Communist Party by those who saw in Bordiga the “brilliant leader”, the genius who could (even when he was not actually a member of the party!) come up with answers to all the theoretical problems posed to the organisation. This was the aberrant way of thinking attacked in the GCF’s article ‘Against the concept of the brilliant leader’28

Bordiga’s contribution

We have sometimes criticised Bordiga’s idea that a revolutionary is someone for whom the revolution has already happened. In so far as it implies the inevitability of communism, those criticisms are valid. But there is also a truth in Bordiga’s dictum. Communists are those who represent the future in the present, as the Communist Manifesto puts it, and in this sense they measure the present – and the past – in the light of the possibility of communism. Bordiga’s ‘passion for communism’ – his insistence on demonstrating the superiority of communism over anything that class society and capitalism had engendered – enabled him to resist the false visions of capitalist and ‘socialist’ progress that were being drummed into the working class in the 1950s and 60s and, perhaps most importantly, to demonstrate in practice that marxism is not in fact an invariant dogma but a living theory, since there is no doubt that Bordiga’s contributions on communism enrich our understanding of it.

Earlier in this article we referred to Damen’s obituary of 1970, which sought to assess Bordiga’s overall political contribution29. Damen begins by listing all the things “we owe to Bordiga”, above all the immense contribution he made in his ‘classic’ period on the theory of abstentionism and the relationship between party and class. But, as we have seen, he quite rightly does not spare Bordiga from criticism over his withdrawal from political activity from the late 20s to the early 40s, his refusal to comment on all the economic and political dramas that fill this period. Examining his return to political life at the end of the war, Damen is also scathing about Bordiga’s ambiguities about the capitalist nature of the USSR. He could have gone further and showed how Bordiga’s refusal to recognise the acquisitions of the Fraction led to a clear political regression on key issues such as the national question, the unions, and the role of the party in the proletarian dictatorship. But what is missing from Damen’s text is an appraisal of the real contribution to our understanding of communism which Bordiga undertook in his later years – a contribution which the communist left still needs to assimilate, not least because it has subsequently been taken up by others with dubious agendas, such as the ‘communisation’ current (of which Camatte was one of the founding fathers), who have used it to produce results which Bordiga himself would certainly have disowned. But that will require a further article, and before we get there, we want to look at the other ‘theories of proletarian revolution’ which were being developed in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

C D Ward

Post-scriptum (final note): p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; line-height: 120%; text-align: left; }a:link { color: rgb(0, 0, 255); }

As pointed out in a recent article by C Derrick Varn on the blog Symptomatic Commentary [33], ‘The brain of society: notes on Bordiga, organic centralism, and the limitations of the party form’ , Bordiga seemed reluctant to abandon the notion of the party not only persisting but even acting as the incarnated ‘social brain’ during the higher phase of communism.

In the previous article on the workers’ movement in South Africa (in International Review n° 155) we highlighted the effectiveness of the apartheid system combined with the action of the trade unions and parties up until the late 1960s when, faced with an unprecedented development of the class struggle, the bourgeoisie had to “modernise” its political apparatus in order to preserve its system. It was forced to do this faced with a South African proletariat whose mass movements showed that it was part of the global waves of struggle in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In this introduction we want to draw the reader’s attention to the importance of these questions. Although, in the face of new social movements, the South African bourgeoisie relied on its most barbaric traditional weapons, the police and military forces, the dynamic of class confrontation was unprecedented: the working class had never before shown such combativity and development of consciousness, faced with a bourgeoisie that had never had to develop such sophisticated manoeuvres, including extensive use of the weapon of rank and file unionism animated by the extreme left of capital. In this clash between the two real historic classes, the determination of the proletariat would go so far as to provoke the dismantling of the system of apartheid, resulting in the unification of all fractions of the bourgeoisie with the aim of confronting the surge in the struggle of the working class.

Before that, in 1976, following the wave of struggles that marked the 1973-74 period,1 we witnessed a vigorous continuation of this episode of struggle: the uprising of the school pupils. In June of that year some ten thousand young people took to the streets to protest against compulsory education in Afrikaans and more generally against the bad living conditions imposed by the apartheid system. A movement of young people was immediately followed by the mobilisation of thousands of adults, active and unemployed workers. Shaken by this formidable proletarian explosion, the regime responded in its customary way by unleashing its guard dogs – the forces of repression – on the protesters and killing hundreds of demonstrators including children:

“Since the great strikes of 1973-74, another front of struggle opened in South Africa: that of black schoolchildren and students whose anger exploded in June 1976 in Soweto. Thereafter, the popular insurrection hardly knew a lull. The violent police repression (about 500 deaths in the city of Soweto alone, hundreds of others across the country, thousands wounded) united the entire black population in this common fight.

Many of the young people behind the popular movement were shot by police during non-violent protests or during civilian militia raids in black neighbourhoods. Adults, struck by the courage and determination of the younger generation, joined them, and followed the slogans raised by their spokespeople: workers’ strikes and transport were organised several times in the black areas of Johannesburg and Cape Town. They were massively followed, including by the Coloured populations of the Cape Province. The destruction of school buildings, drinking places, administration buildings and means of transport which marked the beginning of the popular revolt were followed by more orchestrated but equally successful campaigns. Boycotts of classes and exams until the release of imprisoned youths, general mourning in memory of the victims of repression, boycott of drinking establishments, department stores, Christmas celebrations.”2

We are in the presence here of a great proletarian insurrectional movement against the general misery imposed by one of the most brutal forms of capitalism: apartheid. An uprising of indignation by youth echoed the resurgence of international class struggle marked by huge workers’ strikes in the early 1970s in countries around the world. A movement that eventually spread to the major industrial areas of the country, leading to and mixing into a single struggle of workers and people of all ages. Faced with a struggle of this magnitude, with a surge of proletarian anger threatening to undermine the system, the barbaric regime could not hide its panic and responded with a bloody terror, even though this aroused widespread outrage in the country and amplified the anger and mobilisation of the whole population of Soweto and beyond. Workers, the unemployed and families with children joined the school students’ fight. Police batons and bullets left thousands dead and injured.

But the savagery of the killings only served to radicalise the movement, which continued until 1977 with massive strikes and demonstrations and tended to politicise itself by generating countless struggle committees called “civics”3, consisting mainly of workers (unionised or not), the unemployed, young people and their parents.

“The civics developed rapidly in the Cape at the end of the 1970s. They extended in a certain way the forms of organisation within the townships which had arisen during the movements of June 1976 in the Transvaal. There were practically as many specific histories as there were organisations, since these were very often born out of the particular needs of a township or neighbourhood. Many appeared in the form of struggle committees either for the boycott of public transport against an increase in fares or for a boycott of rents against their rise. Some took the form of political committees dealing with all the problems of the community. The movement was infinitely diverse: cultural, religious associations, youth, students or high school students, students’ parents, were gradually assimilated to the concept of ‘civics’. Also, there was not just one committee per ward or township but a complex web of activist memberships and areas of intervention.”4

Here was a powerful social movement that crystallised at a high level some of the characteristics of the wave of struggles on an international scale. We can see that the strong combativity of the working class which lay behind the massive strikes also expressed itself in a strong will for self-organisation, and this explains the extraordinary proliferation of civics. To our knowledge this is the first time we have witnessed, on this scale, in South Africa (and on the African continent), such forms of self-organisation, where for several years the social life of neighbourhoods was literally in the hands of the inhabitants themselves who debated every subject and took charge of all the problems concerning them. This was the most worrying aspect for the bourgeoisie, which saw its authority slipping away. Certainly one can note that some committees took, here and there, an inter-classist character or religious connotation, especially to the extent that bourgeois forces (unions, parties, churches, etc.) infiltrated them. However, it should be clear that the civics, despite their ideological heterogeneity, were fundamentally the product of a genuine proletarian class struggle. Moreover, the aspect of self-organisation in the Soweto uprising shows a further step in relation to the politicisation that had characterised the South African proletariat in the powerful movement of struggle in the years 1973-1974, particularly in terms of solidarity and unity in the class struggle. Therefore a clear link can be established in the continuity between the two movements of struggle, the second taking over from the first to go further in the development of class consciousness, as illustrated by the following evaluation of the preceding wave of struggles:

“The development of solidarity of black workers in action and growing consciousness of their class unity were stressed by many observers. This achievement of the struggles, though unquantifiable, was considered by them as the most positive for the progress of the organisation of the black workers’ movement. (...) These strikes were also political: the fact that the workers demanded the doubling of their wages is not a sign of the naivety or stupidity of Africans. Rather, it expresses the rejection of their situation and their desire for a totally different society. The workers returned to work with some modest achievements, but they were less satisfied now than they were before the strikes.”5

From this fact, we can deduce that many of the actors in the 1973-74 strikes joined the insurrectional movement in Soweto, and that thanks to their previous experience, they could play a decisive role in its radicalisation and politicisation. Such potentialities for the development of militancy and consciousness could only shake the bourgeoisie which, moreover, was forced to become fully aware of it at the inter-imperialist level.

The great imperialist powers get involved

The Soweto movement was prolonged by strikes and demonstrations until 1977 when police repression still claimed many victims, notably the teenager Steve Biko, a militant of the “Black Consciousness” movement. The murder of this young man in a local police station refuelled the struggles and amplified the protests, the victim thus becoming a martyr of apartheid, especially in the eyes of all the defenders of the “black cause” around the world. Thus, in Africa, as in America and especially in Europe, where there were numerous demonstrations against the apartheid regime, led mainly by trade unions and leftist parties, one could read (in France) slogans such as: “Against Franco-South African friendly relations (tourism, sport, culture); against French emigration in South Africa; against deliveries of weapons and technology to South Africa; against imports of South African products, etc.”6

Conscious of the intensification of the movement, in particular with the radicalisation of the proletarian youth of Soweto, the NATO imperialist bloc increased the pressure on its South African ally (including at the economic level by boycotting South African products) to prevent the political destabilisation that threatened its future, but above all to deal with the ideological exploitation of events by the Russian bloc which, not content with arming and funding the ANC, also began openly to manipulate the various demonstrations around the world against the apartheid regime. It is in this context that South African officials finally accepted the “advice” of their Western sponsors to face up to the risks their system posed. Thus even among the most extreme South African leaders there was a change of tone or tactics towards the strikers:

“Unless we succeed in creating a strong middle class among the blacks, we will have serious problems” (Botha, minister of defence). “We must give enough to the blacks for them to believe in separate development (a euphemism for the apartheid system) so that they will carefully protect what they have from the agitators. Nothing will happen to us if we give these people enough to be afraid of losing what they have (...) A happy person cannot become a communist.” (Kruger, minister of police and justice).

The Pretoria government therefore decided to make a number of concessions in line with the demands of the young people in struggle, for example by withdrawing its law imposing education in Afrikaans on African students and by lifting the ban on the inhabitants of Soweto owning or building their own homes, while recognising the right to association implied by the existence of trade union and political organisations.

In truth, South African capital (at least its most “enlightened” sector) had not waited for the Soweto movement to start implementing plans to relax the apartheid regime the better to thwart the workers’ struggles:

“Society had shifted. The system was no longer safe from destabilisation. The government and the South African employers would therefore make some adjustments, in order to keep these socio-political changes in as bureaucratic a framework as possible. The Bantu Labour Regulation Act of 1973 thus completed the arsenal of labour regulations. It established two types of factory committees: works committees composed only of workers’ representatives; liaison committees made up of employer and employee representatives in equal numbers (...) And the Urban Training Project played the game and tried to use these factory committees to stabilise the trade unions it coordinated.”7

The implementation of this device well before the outbreak of the Soweto revolt clearly expressed the intent of the South African bourgeoisie to take into account the evolution of a situation which threatened to escape its control. Indeed, in drawing the lessons from the first wave of struggles in the years 1972-74, it had been forced to take a number of bold steps, the principal ones being to give more “power” to the African trade unions by greatly increasing their number and expanding their “rights” with the aim of avoiding “political turmoil”.8 It found, however, that this was not enough to prevent the development of struggles, as shown by the Soweto movement.

The proletarian class struggle shakes the apartheid system

In an apparent effort to counter the proletarian class struggle, the South African regime undertook a major new political direction towards nothing less than the progressive dismantling of the apartheid system, which meant the dissolution of racial barriers and the integration of black nationalist movements into the democratic political circus. But to get to this point, the apartheid regime had to be shaken to its foundations. Everything changed in the mid-1970s due to the eruption of the class struggle, but up until then the bourgeoisie had not really been disturbed by the social question:

“The events of Soweto in June 1976 were to confirm the political change underway in the country. The youth revolt in the Transvaal combined with the rebirth of the black workers’ movement to unleash the major social and political movements of the 1980s. After the strikes of 1973, the clashes of 1976 ended the period of defeat.”9

This represented a real reversal of the situation, given that apartheid was designed above all against the class struggle with the aim of avoiding the development of a multiracial working class10 through segregation and the attribution of “rights and privileges” to fractions of the working class. In other words, the theory of the so-called “supremacy” of whites over blacks concretely translated into (skilled) jobs and other benefits reserved exclusively for workers of European origin, while their fellow Africans, Indians and Coloureds had to be content with unfavourable conditions of work, wages and existence.11 In so doing, the apartheid regime succeeded in corrupting a large part of the working class of European origin by making it voluntarily or passively adhere to its segregationist system. And all this succeeded over a long period (between 1940 and 1980) in dividing the South African proletariat, hampering its capacity to develop struggles that might obstruct the smooth running of capitalism.

A historic turning point in the apartheid system

This reversal of the situation was also reflected in a rapprochement between the two factions of the bourgeoisie from the two former colonial powers, namely the British and Dutch. Faced with the rise of the proletariat, and a tendency towards the unity of all its ethnic components, they decided to forget their ancestral ideological hatred and divergences in order to unite behind the national capital of South Africa as a whole.

This marked a truly historic turning point in the life of the South African bourgeoisie in general and within the Afrikaner faction in particular. Since the terrible “Boer Wars” of 1899-190212, when the British crushed the Afrikaners, hatred between the descendants of English and Dutch settlers remained visible until the eve of the end of apartheid, even though they had to govern the country together on several occasions. A significant faction of Afrikaners had long dreamed of taking revenge on the British Empire, as shown by the fact that during the Second World War a good part of the Afrikaner leaders (including the military) openly showed their support for the Hitler regime which was their ideological reference point, and by the decision of the Afrikaner regime to leave the Commonwealth and change the name of the country from the Union of South Africa to the Republic of South Africa).

To address this major historical turning point in the dismantling of apartheid, South African capital found a sizable strategic ally, namely trade unionism, but of a new kind, in this case a “radical”, “rank and file” unionism (discussed below), as the only one capable, in its eyes, of stemming a tide of struggle that threatened to become more and more dangerous. And this time, given the importance of the stakes of the epoch, all the decisive principal actors of the South African bourgeoisie clearly assumed this new orientation, including the most reactionary, not to say fascist, apartheid supporters like Botha, Kruger, etc. Similarly, as will be seen later, it was the latter, together with De Klerk (former president), who directly steered the negotiation process with Mandela’s ANC with a view to dismantling the apartheid system.

To save its system of production the bourgeoisie gives birth to new unions

Faced with the collapse of the old union apparatus provoked by the explosion of struggles in the 1970s, and this despite the reinforcement by the state of the means at their disposal, the bourgeoisie decided to resort outright to what could be called “rank and file unionism” or “shop stewards”, taking the form of new “fighting” trade unions that wanted to be independent of the large union centres:

“(…) During the 1970s, several union currents developed and differentiated themselves amid the resurgence of social conflicts. Their stories intertwine to the rhythm of splits and unifications. Three union projects thus developed on the basis of some distinct political and ideological assumptions.

The first was constituted (or reconstituted) around the union tradition of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) and its link to the African National Congress (ANC). The second was formed from the new Black Consciousness Movement, forming in particular the Council of Unions of South Africa (CUSA). The last, finally, appeared in an original way, with no apparent link to a known political current. It was founded in 1979 as the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU).”13

This was a radical reorganisation of the trade union system with the function of neutralising the workers’ struggles if they could not be prevented. But what this shows first is that the leadership of the South African regime was fully aware of the danger of the development of the class struggle from 1973 up to the Soweto movement in 1976 and beyond. It realised that the apartheid system in all its forms was no longer adapted to the rise of the workers’ growing militancy and consciousness. Clearly, the bourgeois regime had to take note of the fact that the system of unionisation based on the division of workers according to their ethnic origins was no longer appropriate and that the apparatus of the large unions, such as TUCSA (Trade Union Council of South Africa) were no longer credible among the combative workers, especially the younger generation. Hence the emergence of these new unions to play the role of a “fighting”, “base” unionism, “independent” of the union apparatus.

The following passage relating to FOSATU (Federation of South African Trade Unions) speaks volumes as to the reality of these new unions:

“(…) Our study is particularly devoted to this union current (FOSATU), which was formed from networks of intellectuals and students, themselves the products of a specific phase of the socio-economic evolution of the country.

(…) Thus, in barely ten years, a group of intellectuals (mainly white) and black workers would create a new form of union organisation. It would initially present itself as a point of reference independent of the ANC and radically opposed to the Communist Party. It would lead a large part of the strike movements of the 1980s.”14

This was a very “radical” and “critical” trade union group vis-à-vis the union and political apparatus, but it was an unprecedented development in the period of apartheid in that it was able to join together black and white workers and intellectuals, radical political opponents of various kinds. In short, it was a new union apparatus called to play a major role in South African political life.As was the case for the bourgeoisie of the large European industries, faced with the radicalisation of the workers’ struggle, South African capital was forced to use “base unionism”.15 Similarly, as in Europe, in these “radical unions” was usually found a large number of leftists; this was the case with FOSATU, which was led more or less openly by elements close to the “Unity Movement”, that is to say, Trotskyists. We will come back to this later. How would the new base unions, once formed, accomplish their dirty work at the head or inside of the movements of the Soweto struggle?

The struggles of Soweto poisoned by the trade unions and the ideological confusions of the proletariat

As might be expected, the regime’s concessions could not really calm the Soweto movement; on the contrary they merely served to radicalise it, but also to divide its participants, both in the schools and among the workers. For example, some organisations more or less satisfied themselves with the government’s concessions while others with a more radical appearance demanded more. In fact there was a division of labour in the work of the unions. Besides FOSATU (among the new radical unions), the Black Allied Workers’ Union (BAWU) played an important role. Created in 1973 in the wake of the major strikes in Johannesburg, it campaigned for the exclusive regrouping of black workers of all categories and industrial sectors:

“(…) Its aims were primarily: “To organise and unify the black workers in a powerful workers’ movement, able to gain the respect and recognition of the employers and the government; to improve the workers’ knowledge through general and specialised educational programmes, in order to promote their qualification; to represent black workers and their interests in the workplace.”16

This was a union created exclusively by and for black workers, hence its opposition to all other unions (even those that were 99% black). But this orientation was particularly pernicious because it gave the impression of creating “positive segregation” by claiming to fulfil legitimate objectives such as improving the knowledge of black workers, or promoting their qualification. And in doing so it was able to “seduce” a large number of class conscious workers. In other words, it acted as an obstacle to unity in the struggle between workers of all ethnic origins. Besides this, to drive the point home, the BAWU immediately approached the “Black Consciousness Movement”:

“This position reflects the general attitude of the various organisations that made up the black consciousness movement, in particular of black students (South African Students’ Organisation – SASO – which was separate from the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) in order, according to its militants, to escape the paternalism shown by all whites vis-à-vis blacks.”17

Thus the groups in the student milieu adopted openly and without difficulty the orientation of the BAWU union; that is, becoming openly racist and playing the same role of division of the workers’ ranks as the most racist white unions. In short, it was far from defending the common interests of the South African proletariat, and even those of the black fraction of the working class. And indeed, behind this regroupment or alliance between workers and students we can see the harmfulness of the race question, especially when it is couched in terms of “black consciousness” as opposed to “white consciousness” , rather than the consciousness of the proletarian class. And this even as the conditions were largely met for unity in the struggle as shown by the strike movements taking place in the country where many sectors of workers were fighting for class and not racial demands, which were in fact often successful. Moreover, to the difficulties of the alliance between workers and students linked to racial and trade union divisions was added the corporatism and petty bourgeois spirit of the intellectuals who were strongly present in this struggle movement. As a result, despite the strong momentum created by the general resurgence of the struggle in the early 1970s, the combativity of the workers and youth of Soweto was diverted into a dead end:; the movement was diverted and divided by ethnic rivalries between ethnic, corporatist and petty bourgeois cliques, which ultimately stifled every purely proletarian attempt at giving the struggle a direction:

“(…) One of the most important and surprising aspects of the creation of African trade unions in Natal is the role played by groups of academics, students or white teachers. The importance of the role of the handful of intellectuals who made a deep commitment to the African workers does not mean that the South African university was the vanguard of protest and combat for the liberation of the black masses. Far from it. The conservatism and racism of Afrikaner youth, the recklessness of Anglophone students and the corporatism of professional intellectuals were the general rule. As for black students, having voluntarily left the white student organisations (in 1972), it seems that their struggle for their own survival as a group and their participation in the Black Consciousness Movement captured their entire militant energy.”18

Clearly, in these conditions the real proletarian vanguard could hardly put itself forward because it was tied down and corralled by the nationalist or racist trade unions, and sometimes by the corporatist factions of the intellectual petty bourgeoisie, manipulated by various political groups like the CP, ANC and leftist elements. From this point on, we can see more clearly the limits of the development of class consciousness, especially among the young people of Soweto, whose struggle was their first experience as members of the proletarian class.

The ANC diverts the youth struggle of Soweto towards the imperialist armed struggle

Having infiltrated the various organs of the working class youth of Soweto, the ANC extended its control over a large number of radical youths coming from the “civics” and managed to enrol them in the armed struggle by sending them to military training camps in neighbouring countries. The ANC especially targeted the most active elements of the Soweto movement, those who were seeking to escape the police repression of the South African regime, promising them “training” to better fight against the apartheid regime. And once there, many critical youths were systematically punished by imprisonment or even death:

“Those ANC soldiers unhappy with this policy did not have the right to discuss it, under the pretext of discipline. In 1983, the ANC participated in the Angolan civil war, sending protesting soldiers there to get rid of them. And when hundreds of returned survivors mutinied the following year, they were suppressed. For this there was an ANC prison camp in Mozambique, the Quatro, where torture was used against recalcitrant internal opponents.”19

Clearly, even before coming to power, the ANC already conducted itself as an executioner of the working class. But what the Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvrière, which we have just cited, does not say is that the party of Mandela was involved in the war in Angola in the 1980s on behalf of the Russian imperialist bloc, where it received support from neighbouring countries (opponents of the NATO bloc): Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, etc. This was the period when the ANC and CP articulated their struggle for “national liberation” with confrontations between the imperialist powers of the east/west blocs, clearly relying on the support of Moscow. Similarly, while internally the struggle was being broken militarily, externally South Africa was playing the role of “deputy gendarme” of the western imperialist bloc in southern Africa, hence its military involvement, like all its rivals, in the war in Angola and other neighbouring countries.

From FOSATU to COSATU, South African trade unionism at the service of the national capital

Since the entry of capitalism into decadence (marked by the first imperialist world conflict in 1914), trade unionism has ceased to be a real organ of struggle for the working class, and even worse, has become a counter-revolutionary instrument in the service of the capitalist state. This is illustrated by the history of the class struggle in South Africa.20 But the study of the history of trade unionism in the case of the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) and COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) shows us the power of a new unionism capable of simultaneously exerting influence on a highly combative proletariat and on the archaic apartheid regime. FOSATU made use of its “genius” for organising, to the point of being simultaneously heard by both the exploited and the exploiter in order to astutely “manage” the conflicts between the two antagonists – which meant, in the final analysis, serving the bourgeoisie. Similarly, it played the role of “facilitator” in the “peaceful transition” between the “white power” and the “black power” resulting in the establishment of a “national unity” government.

Birth and characteristics of FOSATU: Founded in 1979, it was the result of a trade union re-organisation following the disappearance or self-dissolution of the main former trade unions in the aftermath of the vigorous strike action of 1973, which shook the entire country.

This new union current gave birth to the most important unions in industry (except the mines): automobiles, metallurgy, chemicals, textiles, etc. The same year that FOSATU was founded, the South African state facilitated its role by deciding to grant the title of “employee” 21 to all blacks including those in the Bantustans, followed soon after by African workers from neighbouring countries. This hugely promoted the unionisation of workers in all sectors of the country, amply benefitting FOSATU by allowing it to create its own “development project”:

“In the early 1980s (this union movement) developed an original trade union project, based on a conception explicitly independent of the main political forces, formed from networks of intellectuals and students, themselves produced from a specific phase of the socio-economic evolution of the country; it corresponded to a real social and economic change in the country and accompanied the gradual transformation of the organisation of the labour market.”22

It was, therefore, in this context that this trade union movement was propelled by its desire to be both a “trade union left” and a “political left”, and that many of its leaders were influenced by Trotskyist and Stalinist ideology:

“Towards the end of the 1920s, militants adhering to Trotskyist critiques split from the Communist Party. Some of them were leaders of a broad movement in the 1940s called the Unity Movement. Furthermore, a renowned trade unionist in the thirties and forties, Max Gordon, was a Trotskyist.

This current fragmented and greatly weakened in the late fifties. But there still existed in Cape Town, in the seventies, a strong presence of these groups, mainly among Coloured teachers”.

“(...) In interviews done in Cape Town in 1982 and 1983, we were able to verify that the leader of the municipal workers’ union, John Erentzen, had been a member of the Unity Movement. Marcel Golding, before entering the miners’ union leadership, was part of a study group of Trotskyist orientation.”

“(...)Alec Elwin (First Secretary of FOSATU) said he was influenced initially by the French Althusser and Poulantzas. He mentioned the importance for people like him of the debate that existed in Britain in the seventies on the question of shop stewards, that is to say, workshop delegates and rank and file organisation. Another important factor for this generation of radical intellectuals was the contribution of a renewed Marxist analysis of apartheid (by people like Martin Legassick) regarding capitalist relations of production. Thus there gradually emerged an alternative theory to that of the Communist Party.”

From these quotes we can see clearly the role played historically23 by the Trotskyist current or its “nebula” in the unions in general and in base unionism in particular. We have seen previously that the Trotskyist current was involved in the formation of new radical unions in the wake of the struggles of the 1970s. In this context it is worth noting a specific facet of the contribution of Trotskyism to the counter-revolution, namely “entryism”24 into the social democratic parties (and trade unions); that is, joining (clandestinely) these bourgeois organisations supposedly to seize (in due course) their leadership (for the revolution). In fact, this practice is anti-proletarian and expresses a clear contempt for the working class in whose name its (hidden) practitioners claim to act.25 Another consequence of this practice is that it is impossible to positively identify “entrists”, to know, even approximately, the number of FOSATU leaders who were under Trotskyist influence at one time or another during their stay in the South African Trade unions.

Here we can put forward the idea that the leaders of the "trade union left" embodied by FOSATU/COSATU were marked by various bourgeois ideological influences: ranging from Trotskyism to Social-Democracy through Stalinism, “Solidarnosc” trade unionism (Poland), Lula’s “Workers’ Party” (Brazil):

“In October 1983 the newspaper “FOSATU Work News” published a double page centrefold article on Solidarity and Poland. The thread is pretty similar to what the leaders of the FOSATU thought about the South African process: industrial growth, little improvement of the workers’ status, repression, control of demand, internal differentiation in the union and the evolution of the Walesa group ... And the article ends: “the struggle of Polish workers is an inspiration to all other workers in struggle”. (...) In 1985, issues 39 and 40 published a long article reporting on the Workers’ Party of Brazil (PT).”26

Here we can clearly see the similarities in the approach of unions like FOSATU and those of Walesa and Lula, especially in terms of their preparations to accede to the highest levels of the state.

Thus armed with its experience of politico-trade union maneuvering in the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, FOSATU could openly enter the service of South African national capital by taking advantage of its “aura” to work for the constitution of a new trade unionism rid of the archaic apartheid trade union apparatus, making its hazy union doctrine prevail by relying essentially on the industrial workers, as indicated in the text of its first congress:

“The federation will essentially consist of unions of industrial branches to the extent that this is, within the framework of existing industrial structures, the best way to promote workers’ unity and the interests of workers, and as far as this is also the best way for it to concentrate on the areas of workers’ concerns. This, however, does not reflect support for current industrial relations”.

“(...) The absence of racial divisions (non-racialism), workers’ control, trade union branches, grassroots organising, international workers’ solidarity, trade union unity.”27

If we situate FOSATU’s politico-union manoeuvring in the context of apartheid, we can understand the relative ease with which the Federation was able to attract a number of workers struggling or conscious of the necessity of the need for unity in the struggle across ethnic boundaries. Besides its status as the first union in the industrial sector, it made particular use of its combative image in the eyes of many workers from the struggles in the 1970s-80s to earn their trust. With its well-organised apparatus of “fighting unionism” it entered into discussions with all the other unions which had retained some influence, with a view to federating them, although not without great difficulties, especially with those under control of the ANC/CP. It also had to contend with the hostility or reluctance of other trade union movements before convincing or marginalising them, like the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) or some unions close to the “Black Consciousness” Movement.

FOSATU prepares to integrate itself into the political apparatus

At its origin in 1979, FOSATU consisted of three registered (legal) trade unions and nine unregistered unions,28 which meant that the latter were dominant and their weight was reflected in the Federation’s ideological and strategic choices. This was until the moment when FOSATU decided to initiate a shift towards its institutional integration, that is to say, by becoming more and more involved in power, albeit remaining “radical”:

“The debate on registration took the form of a sharp polemic against the unions of FOSATU that were registered. The attack came from the GWU (pro-Black Consciousness) and, in a much more virulent way, from the SAAWU (pro-ANC). The arguments were roughly similar: loss of independence vis-à-vis the state and obstructing a true democratic functioning of the trade unions which had to comply with the constraints of official control, etc.”

(...) Other debates were conducted during negotiations. And it was the shape of the future confederation which most troubled the FOSATU leadership. It was convinced that the model of FOSATU was best suited to its company union sections, its industrial branch unions, regional structures (inter-professional, in the terminology of French unionism), its grassroots democracy based on shop stewards, etc.”

(...) The leadership of FOSATU finally convinced the majority of its partners on these union issues. But it is important to note here that the unification process towards the foundation of COSATU was finally clarified when the SAAWU changed position, in our opinion, after the leaders in exile of the ANC and the Communist Party themselves decided to change their attitude. And also when the NUM, the mining union member of CUSA and by far its biggest affiliate, decided in December 1984 to break with its federation and participate fully in the launch of COSATU.”29

By integrating the mining union (NUM), FOSATU definitively imposed itself in the decisive sectors of the national economy and became from that moment the obligatory partner of the regime. It thus reinforced its control over the most combative sectors of the working class and successfully took the initiative in uniting the main trade unions. This was a remarkable journey for FOSATU, which managed to bring together the major influential trade unions in a great confederation throughout the country, leading to the creation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

Once again, FOSATU showed its “political genius” and organisational expertise by evolving from a radical opposition of the left to a union alongside the great nationalist bureaucratic apparatus with the aim of acceding to bourgeois power; and this without any openly hostile working class reaction. It is notable that these “pimps” of the working class for the left bourgeois apparatus had to proceed methodically step by step. First: by opting for a left political and union “radicalism” to better seduce the combative workers; second: by unifying the union apparatus, and third: by promoting the constitution of a broad trade union and political front in order to “wisely” govern the post-apartheid country.

In its quest for trade union and political unity, COSATU was unable to integrate two currents close to the “Black Consciousness” movement and the PAC. Both of them preferred to remain in opposition with their own unitary federation, the National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU). There were also other small white or corporatist unions. However, they had no decisive influence on the organisation of struggles compared to COSATU.

It is through this that the ex-FOSATU leaders would continue to pursue their “trade union mission”, to the point that many are now playing their role of managers in charge of South African capital, as ministers or big business owners.

Control of the civics at stake in the bitter struggles of the union/political apparatus

By becoming widespread and taking over the whole of social life in the main districts of the industrial cities over a period of time (generally between 1976 and 1985), the civics eventually became the central prize for all the organs of power in South Africa and the struggle for control over them provoked bitter clashes between union/political gangsters:

“One of the major problems facing the new union movement was the development of another form of organisation of the black population, the civics, or community associations. This term was often used to group all associative forms emerging in the townships.

Considerable work remains to be done on these movements because they have not received the same attention as the trade unions from researchers.

(...) It seems that the development of the civics started mainly in the Cape under the impact of two competing political currents at the time in this region: one of the independent political left (nebulous political heir to the “Unity Movement”) and the other related to or influenced by the ANC. Networks of associations were divided according to political sympathies. Thus, in the Cape, militants of the Unity Movement formed with the associations they controlled the Federation of Cape Civic Associations and militants of the ANC and the Communist Party formed their own Cape Area Housing Action Committee (CAHAC). This cartelisation then developed at the national level with, in addition, the activity of the AZAPO party (heir to the Black Consciousness Movement) and of militants and supporters of the PAC (Pan Africanist Congress). In the mid-eighties the majority of the political currents appeared publicly under the banner of the groupings of the civics they controlled”. 30

We can only share the opinion of the author of the quote that the “civics” have not received the same attention from researchers as the unions and that much work remains to be done on these movements. This being said, the other major point to emphasise is the relentlessness with which the union and political vultures attempted to neutralise the organisations resulting from the insurrectionary struggles of Soweto. In order to catch up with the movement they had not initiated, all these bourgeois forces proceeded by infiltration and sordid maneuvers to sabotage the various committees under the name of civics and finally managed to control them and use them as instruments in their struggle for influence in order to gain power. In 1983, we saw a series of demonstrations and strikes mobilising more and more people, especially in Soweto but also in other regions. This was the moment chosen by the ANC to intensify its control over the social movements by creating an organisation called the “United Democratic Front”, a kind of “forum” or simple “net” in which Mandela’s party managed to catch many of the civics. And the ANC’s rivals were not slow to respond by chasing the same autonomous groups, accompanied by criminal violence on both sides:

“(...) More and more violent polemics developed at the rhythm of major social conflicts: a general strike, a local or regional stay-away, or even a boycott of white-owned businesses, indiscriminately aimed at factory employees and the population of the townships; and in these areas, such as Port Elizabeth or East London, where at least 50% of the unemployed were already at that time, it was not possible to organise movements of this magnitude without relying on the complementarity of the civics and the trade unions. Each party obviously had such a unitary conviction. But the political stakes were such that each sought to exert hegemonic pressure on the other. There were all sorts of conflicts including between associations controlled by AZAPO (the People's Organisation of Azania) and certain unions.

(...) Examples abound of cases of physical violence. FOSATU leaders complained that, because there was no real centralization, groups of young people linked to the civics sometimes attacked workers carrying out their normal work. Bus drivers could be attacked or even killed by young people who did not understand or simply ignored the trade union opposition to this or that appeal.” 31.

In short, this is how the “civics” were scuttled by the various trade union, nationalist and democratic forces vying for control. In other words, we see that the ANC and its rivals did not hesitate to train many young people to kill each other or to attack and kill active workers like bus drivers. And this for the greater good of the common enemy, namely the national capital. Certainly, the ANC reached the pinnacle of crimes committed against the youth of Soweto for having enlisted a large number of former civic members into an imperialist camp and sending them to the slaughter for so-called “national liberation” (see previous section).

The strikes return in the midst of an economic recession

In 1982/83, strikes broke out in many areas against government austerity measures, particularly in the mines and automobile industry, mobilising tens of thousands of workers and seriously hitting the factories of General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen, etc. Like many other countries at this time, South Africa was hit by the economic crisis that plunged it deep into recession.

“In the recession that opened in 1981-82, the whole system was running out of steam, including at the institutional level. Between 1980 and 1985, corporate bankruptcies rose by 500%. The interest rate went from 9.5% to 17% in 1981; it reached 18% in 1982 and 25% in August 1985. In 1982, the country still enjoyed a net inflow of 662 million rand;; in 1983, it had a deficit of 93 million rand. The rand which was worth $1.09 in 1982 was worth less than $0.37 at the end of 1985. The total of investments went from 2.346 million rand in 1981 to 1.408 in 1984. That same year, the external debt reached $24.8 billion, including $13 billion in short term debt. The volume of manufacturing output and exports fell, labour costs increased, and unemployment rose.”32

Faced with the scale of the recession, the South African government had to take drastic measures against the living conditions of the working class - mass lay-offs and wage cuts, etc. For its part, despite being weakened by the struggles for control waged between the ANC and rival cliques, the working class could not remain arms crossed and therefore had to go into struggle, showing once again that its combativeness remained intact. In this respect, as an illustrative example, one can take the year 1982 when most of the conflicts concerned wage claims (170), followed by problems of lay-offs and downsizing (56), whereas conflicts for trade union recognition resulted in only 12 strikes. This last aspect is important because it means that the workers clearly did not feel the need to unionise to enter into struggle.

In the period 1982-83 South Africa was marked by an uninterrupted growth of strikes. In this context, once again the anti-working class role of radical trade unionism was notable:

“It was the unions of FOSATU which were responsible for the most strikes, including those in metalworking and automobiles. It was therefore the regions where these industries were particularly present which recorded the most conflicts. The Eastern Cape region, notably the cities of Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage, experienced the highest strike rates: 55,150 strikers in 1982, of whom 51,740 were in the automobile industry. It was in the East Rand that there were the most movements in metalworking: 40 with a total of 13,884 strikers. These figures can be compared with 30,773 strikers throughout the Johannesburg region, all sectors combined (...) Such comparisons allow us to measure, at this time, the relative weight of FOSATU in the whole independent trade union movement ...”33

Even when corralled, the working class remained combative and struggled on a class terrain by refusing to submit without responding to the economic attacks of the bourgeoisie. Of course, it was clearly noticeable that the workers in struggle were strongly under the control of unionism, particularly base unionism, which took the lead in the movement in order to take control of it, eventually scuttling the strikes before they compromised the interests of South African national capital. In this sense, it is remarkable that during the strike movements in 1982, no role was assigned to the “civics”, on the contrary everything was the work of the trade unions, in particular of FOSATU, which could rely on its radicalised base organisations to ensure the supremacy of its version of militancy, and deter any attempt at autonomous organisation outside the apparatus constituted as the negotiator with the state.

In 1984-85, important strikes broke out in the Transvaal/Port Elizabeth, mobilising tens of thousands of workers and involving the population by combining multiple demands (wages, education, housing, right to vote, etc.). In parallel to the miners’ strikes and those of other employees, businesses owned by whites and public transport were actively boycotted, and thousands of young people refused to serve in the military.

Faced with the protest movements, the South African regime responded by offering a “small carrot” in one hand and a “big stick” in the other. It decided, on the one hand, to grant citizens of colour (Indians and Coloureds) and blacks the right to elect their own MPs or municipal representatives from their communities. On the other hand, its only response to demands for higher wages and better living conditions from the protesters was the declaration of a state of emergency, and it used the opportunity to go after the strikers it accused of conducting “political strikes” to help justify a barbaric repression that led to the dismissal of 20,000 miners, the murder of a large number of workers and the imprisonment of thousands of others.

1986-90, strikes against the backdrop of political manoeuvering within the bourgeoisie

Between 1982 and 1987 the country experienced an uninterrupted growth of strikes, protests and deadly clashes with the forces of order:

“On 9 August 1987, the NUM unleashed a strike in the mines. 95% of the unions consulted by law voted in favour of the strike. This affected all the mines where the NUM was implanted, 28 gold mines and 18 coal mines. The conflict was by far the longest strike in the South African mines, lasting 21 days (the 1946 conflict lasted 5 days) and representing 5.25 million days lost. (...) The NUM threw all its strength into this battle which was its biggest challenge since its creation in 1982. It demanded a 30% wage increase, a risk premium, 5 years’ salary given to families of miners killed in accidents instead of two years’, 30 days paid leave and June 16, the anniversary of the uprisings in Soweto, designated as a paid holiday.

Mining companies lost 17 million rand in this conflict but yielded on almost nothing. The coordination of the Chamber of Mines proved effective. Their leaders remained extremely firm, led by those of Anglo-America.”34

Once again the working class demonstrated its will to fight, even if this was clearly not enough to force back the bourgeoisie, which refused to yield on the main demands of the strikers. Moreover, employers and the state knew they could count on the unions to keep control of the workers, that the unions might have been “radical” but were very “responsible” when it came to protecting the interests of the national capital. Yet despite this, the working class refused to give up, returning to the fight massively in the following year (1988), when there were almost 3 million workers on strike, from 6 to 8 June.

But at the political level, the most significant event of this period took place in 1986. This was the year that saw the real political change that marked the end of the apartheid regime, embodied chiefly by the Afrikaners who had made it their mode of government. After definitively settling the “union question” by integrating the main unions into the bosom of the state (cf. the case of FOSATU/COSATU), those in power decided to implement the policy of constitutional reform. In this context, meetings were held (in secret) between the white South African leaders35 and ANC officials, including Mandela who, from prison, between 1986 and 1990 regularly received emissaries of the Afrikaner government with a view to the reconstruction of the country on a new non-racial basis and in accordance with the interests of the national capital. The negotiations between the African nationalists and the South African government continued until 1990, the year of Mandela’s release and the end of apartheid, the lifting of the ban on the South African CP and ANC. It goes without saying that the international context had something to do with this.

On the one hand, the fall of the Berlin Wall heralded the sudden and brutal collapse of the main ally of the ANC/CP, the Soviet bloc, and a loss of prestige for the “Soviet model” that the ANC had adopted up until then; this forced the ANC to reconsider its previous “anti-imperialist” stance. On the other hand, the disappearance of the Soviet bloc meant that the prospect of the ANC’s arrival in power was no longer a threat, on the imperialist level, for the pro-Western South African bourgeoisie. And this sheds light on the announcement by the South African president, Frederick de Klerk, in February 1990, before Parliament, of his decision to legalise the ANC, the CP and all the banned organisations, in a perspective of global negotiation. The following are the reasons for his decision:

“The current dynamic in international politics has also created new opportunities for South Africa. Significant progress has been made, among other things, in our external contacts, particularly where there were previously limitations of an ideological order. (...) the collapse of the economic system in Eastern Europe is also a signal (...) Those who seek to impose on South Africa such a bankrupt system should engage in a full revision of their point of view.”

And indeed, “those who sought to impose on South Africa such a bankrupt system” (the coalition that governs South Africa today) then decided to engage in a full revision of their point of view by entering definitively into the ranks of the managers of the national capital, starting with COSATU:

“In early 1990 the debate on the working charter in COSATU finally turns to the development of a set of basic rights (...) accompanying the constitutional proposals of the ANC. It is no longer a question of a “political programme”(...);

• In 1990, nationalist figures of NUMSA (unions affiliated to COSATU) join the Communist Party. Among others, Moses Mayekiso is elected member of the provisional leadership of the newly legal party;
• In July 1991 the fourth congress of COSATU confirms an alliance between the union of the miners (NUM) and that of the automobile-metalworkers (NUMSA). They together account for 2,000 delegates of the 2,500 present;

(...) One of the resolutions adopted at the union congress says: ‘We are in favour of training our members and encourage them to join the ANC and the Communist Party’.”36

From then on, the whole of the South African bourgeoisie was united in a new so-called “democratic” era and of course the whole population, including the working class, was invited to unite behind the new leaders in the construction of the democratic multiracial state, and the “party” could begin…

“Co-option has only just begun, but already there is not a single big company that is not looking for a certain number of ANC managers to integrate into its leadership. A veritable ‘Mandela generation’ has been absorbed into public or private structures quickly losing their fidelity to the old doctrines. The call for ‘civil society’ has become the keystone of all discourse in order to bridge the gap between the still strong social movement and the arrangements at the top. But for those who remember the political themes of the eighties there is no doubt that the terminological shift is not a mere form.” 37

Ultimately, by virtue of its bourgeois class nature, the political-trade union left could absolutely not go against the capitalist system, despite its ultra-radical and anti-capitalist, workers’ verbiage allegedly for the “defence of the working class”. In the end, the trade union left proved to be a simple and formidable pimp for the left of the capital. But its main contribution was undoubtedly the fact of having succeeded in knowingly constructing the “democratic/national unity” trap in which the bourgeoisie was able to imprison the working class. Moreover, taking advantage of this climate of “democratic euphoria”, largely as a result of the liberation of Mandela and company in 1990, the central power could rely on its “new union wall” consisting of COSATU and its “left wing” to systematically divert the struggle movements into demands for “democracy”, “civil rights”, “racial equality “, etc. And this even when workers went on strike for wage demands or seeking to improve their living conditions. Indeed, between 1990 and 1993, when a transitional government of “national unity” was formed, strikes and demonstrations became scarce or had no effect on the new government. The poison of democratic illusions was compounded by a terrible tragedy in the black working class when, in 1990, the troops of Mandela and those of the Zulu chief Buthelezi clashed militarily for the control of the populations of the townships. This conflict lasted four years and caused more than 14,000 deaths and massive destruction of workers’ dwellings. For revolutionary marxists this bloody struggle between the black nationalist cliques merely confirmed once more the bourgeois (and backward) nature of these gangsters, who thus expressed their readiness to comply with the state’s orders to prove their ability to manage the best interests of South African capital. Besides, this was the central objective of the bourgeoisie’s project when it decided the process which led to the dismantling of apartheid and to the “national reconciliation” of all the bourgeois factions that had been killing each other under apartheid.

This project would be implemented faithfully by Mandela and the ANC between 1994 and 2014, including the massacre of workers resisting their exploitation and repression.

Lassou

The Russian Revolution is the mightiest event of the World War. Its outbreak, its unexampled radicalism, its enduring consequences, constitute the clearest condemnation of the lying phrases which official Social-Democracy so zealously supplied at the beginning of the war as an ideological cover for German imperialism’s campaign of conquest. I refer to the phrases concerning the mission of German bayonets, which were to overthrow Russian Czarism and free its oppressed peoples.

The mighty sweep of the revolution in Russia, the profound results which have transformed all class relationships, raised all social and economic problems, and, with the fatality of their own inner logic developed consistently from the first phase of the bourgeois republic to ever more advanced stages, finally reducing the fall of Czarism to the status of a mere minor episode – all these things show as plain as day that the freeing of Russia was not an achievement of the war and the military defeat of Czarism, not some service of “German bayonets in German fists,” as the Neue Zeit under Kautsky’s [43] editorship once promised in an editorial. They show, on the contrary, that the freeing of Russia had its roots deep in the soil of its own land and was fully matured internally. The military adventure of German imperialism under the ideological blessing of German Social-Democracy did not bring about the revolution in Russia but only served to interrupt it at first, to postpone it for a while after its first stormy rising tide in the years 1911-13, and then, after its outbreak, created for it the most difficult and abnormal conditions.

Moreover, for every thinking observer, these developments are a decisive refutation of the doctrinaire theory which Kautsky shared with the Government Social-Democrats according to which Russia, as an economically backward and predominantly agrarian land, was supposed not to be ripe for social revolution and proletarian dictatorship [44]. This theory, which regards only a bourgeois revolution as feasible in Russia, is also the theory of the opportunist wing of the Russian labor movement, of the so-called Mensheviks [45], under the experienced leadership of Axelrod and Dan. And from this conception follow the tactics of the coalition of socialists in Russia with bourgeois liberalism. On this basic conception of the Russian Revolution [46], from which follow automatically their detailed positions on questions of tactics, both the Russian and the German opportunists find themselves in agreement with the German Government Socialists. According to the opinion of all three, the Russian Revolution should have called a halt at the stage which German imperialism in its conduct of the war had set as its noble task, according to the mythology of the German Social-Democracy, i.e., it should have stopped with the overthrow of Czarism. According to this view, if the revolution has gone beyond that point and has set as its task the dictatorship of the proletariat, this is simply a mistake of the radical wing of the Russian labor movement, the Bolsheviks [47]. And all difficulties which the revolution has met with in its further course, and all disorders it has suffered are pictured as purely a result of this fateful error.

Theoretically, this doctrine (recommended as the fruit of “Marxist thinking” by the Vorwärts of Stampfer and by Kautsky alike) follows from the original “Marxist” discovery that the socialist revolution is a national and, so to speak, a domestic affair in each modern country taken by itself. Of course, in the blue mists of abstract formulae, a Kautsky knows very well how to trace the world-wide connections of capital which make of all modern countries a single integrated organism. The problems of the Russian Revolution, moreover – since it is a product of international developments plus the agrarian question – cannot possibly be solved within the limits of bourgeois society.

Practically, this same doctrine represents an attempt to get rid of any responsibility for the course of the Russian Revolution, so far as that responsibility concerns the international, and especially the German, proletariat, and to deny the international connections of this revolution. It is not Russia’s unripeness which has been proved by the events of the war and the Russian Revolution, but the unripeness of the German proletariat for the fulfillment of its historic tasks. And to make this fully clear is the first task of a critical examination of the Russian Revolution.

The fate of the revolution in Russia depended fully upon international events. That the Bolsheviks have based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian revolution is the clearest proof of their political far-sightedness and firmness of principle and of the bold scope of their policies. In it is visible the mighty advance which capitalist development has made in the last decade. The revolution of 1905-07 roused only a faint echo in Europe. Therefore, it had to remain a mere opening chapter. Continuation and conclusion were tied up with the further development of Europe.

Clearly, not uncritical apologetics but penetrating and thoughtful criticism is alone capable of bringing out treasures of experiences and teachings. Dealing as we are with the very first experiment in proletarian dictatorship in world history (and one taking place at that under the hardest conceivable conditions, in the midst of the world-wide conflagration and chaos of the imperialist mass slaughter, caught in the coils of the most reactionary military power in Europe, and accompanied by the most complete failure on the part of the international working class), it would be a crazy idea to think that every last thing done or left undone in an experiment with the dictatorship of the proletariat under such abnormal conditions represented the very pinnacle of perfection. On the contrary, elementary conceptions of socialist politics and an insight into their historically necessary prerequisites force us to understand that under such fatal conditions even the most gigantic idealism and the most storm-tested revolutionary energy are incapable of realizing democracy and socialism but only distorted attempts at either.

To make this stand out clearly in all its fundamental aspects and consequences is the elementary duty of the socialists of all countries; for only on the background of this bitter knowledge can we measure the enormous magnitude of the responsibility of the international proletariat itself for the fate of the Russian Revolution. Furthermore, it is only on this basis that the decisive importance of the resolute international action of the proletariat can become effective, without which action as its necessary support, even the greatest energy and the greatest sacrifices of the proletariat in a single country must inevitably become tangled in a maze of contradiction and blunders.

There is no doubt either that the wise heads at the helm of the Russian Revolution, that Lenin and Trotsky on their thorny path beset by traps of all kinds, have taken many a decisive step only with the greatest inner hesitation and with the most violent inner opposition. And surely nothing can be farther from their thoughts than to believe that all the things they have done or left undone under the conditions of bitter compulsion and necessity in the midst of the roaring whirlpool of events, should be regarded by the International as a shining example of socialist polity toward which only uncritical admiration and zealous imitation are in order.

It would be no less wrong to fear that a critical examination of the road so far taken by the Russian Revolution would serve to weaken the respect for and the attractive power of the example of the Russian Revolution, which alone can overcome the fatal inertia of the German masses. Nothing is farther from the truth. An awakening of the revolutionary energy of the working class in Germany can never again be called forth in the spirit of the guardianship methods of the German Social-Democracy of late-lamented memory. It can never again be conjured forth by any spotless authority, be it that of our own “higher committees” or that of “the Russian example.” Not by the creation of a revolutionary hurrah-spirit, but quite the contrary: only by an insight into all the fearful seriousness, all the complexity of the tasks involved, only as a result of political maturity and independence of spirit, only as a result of a capacity for critical judgement on the part of the masses, whose capacity was systematically killed by the Social-Democracy for decades under various pretexts, only thus can the genuine capacity for historical action be born in the German proletariat. To concern one’s self with a critical analysis of the Russian Revolution in all its historical connections is the best training for the German and the international working class for the tasks which confront them as an outgrowth of the present situation.

The first period of the Russian Revolution, from its beginning in March to the October Revolution, corresponds exactly in its general outlines to the course of development of both the Great English Revolution and the Great French Revolution. It is the typical course of every first general reckoning of the revolutionary forces begotten within the womb of bourgeois society.

Its development moves naturally in an ascending line: from moderate beginnings to ever-greater radicalization of aims and, parallel with that, from a coalition of classes and parties to the sole rule of the radical party.

At the outset in March 1917, the “Cadets [48]“, that is the liberal bourgeoisie, stood at the head of the revolution. The first general rising of the revolutionary tide swept every one and everything along with it. The Fourth Duma, ultra-reactionary product of the ultra-reactionary four-class right of suffrage and arising out of the coup d’état, was suddenly converted into an organ of the revolution. All bourgeois parties, even those of the nationalistic right, suddenly formed a phalanx against absolutism. The latter fell at the first attack almost without a struggle, like an organ that had died and needed only to be touched to drop off. The brief effort, too, of the liberal bourgeoisie to save at least the throne and the dynasty collapsed within a few hours. The sweeping march of events leaped in days and hours over distances that formerly, in France, took decades to traverse. In this, it became clear that Russia was realizing the result of a century of European development, and above all, that the revolution of 1917 was a direct continuation of that of 1905-07, and not a gift of the German “liberator.” The movement of March 1917 linked itself directly onto the point where, ten years earlier, its work had broken off. The democratic republic was the complete, internally ripened product of the very onset of the revolution.

Now, however, began the second and more difficult task. From the very first moment, the driving force of the revolution was the mass of the urban proletariat. However, its demands did not limit themselves to the realization of political democracy but were concerned with the burning question of international policy – immediate peace. At the same time, the revolution embraced the mass of the army, which raised the same demand for immediate peace, and the mass of the peasants, who pushed the agrarian question into the foreground, that agrarian question which since 1905 had been the very axis of the revolution. Immediate peace and land – from these two aims the internal split in the revolutionary phalanx followed inevitably. The demand for immediate peace was in most irreconcilable opposition to the imperialist tendencies of the liberal bourgeoisie for whom Milyukov was the spokesman. On the other hand, the land question was a terrifying spectre for the other wing of the bourgeoisie, the rural landowners. And, in addition, it represented an attack on the sacred principle of private property in general, a touchy point for the entire propertied class.

Thus, on the very day after the first victories of the revolution, there began an inner struggle within it over the two burning questions – peace and land. The liberal bourgeoisie entered upon the tactics of dragging out things and evading them. The laboring masses, the army, the peasantry, pressed forward ever more impetuously. There can be no doubt that with the questions of peace and land, the fate of the political democracy of the republic was linked up. The bourgeois classes, carried away by the first stormy wave of the revolution, had permitted themselves to be dragged along to the point of republican government. Now they began to seek a base of support in the rear and silently to organize a counter-revolution. The Kaledin [49] Cossack campaign against Petersburg was a clear expression of this tendency. Had the attack been successful, then not only the fate of the peace and land questions would have been sealed, but the fate of the republic as well. Military dictatorship, a reign of terror against the proletariat, and then return to monarchy, would have been the inevitable results.

From this we can judge the utopian and fundamentally reactionary characters of the tactics by which the Russian “Kautskyans” or Mensheviks permitted themselves to be guided. Hardened in their addiction to the myth of the bourgeois character of the Russian Revolution – for the time being, you see, Russia is not supposed to be ripe for the social revolution! – they clung desperately to a coalition with the bourgeois liberals. But this means a union of elements which had been split by the natural internal development of the revolution and had come into the sharpest conflict with each other. The Axelrods and Dans wanted to collaborate at all costs with those classes and parties from which came the greatest threat of danger to the revolution and to its first conquest, democracy.

It is especially astonishing to observe how this industrious man (Kautsky), by his tireless labor of peaceful and methodical writing during the four years of the World War, has torn one hole after another in the fabric of socialism. It is a labor from which socialism emerges riddled like a sieve, without a whole spot left in it. The uncritical indifference with which his followers regarded this industrious labor of their official theoretician and swallow each of his new discoveries without so much as batting an eyelash, finds its only counterpart in the indifference with which the followers of Scheidemann and Co. look on while the latter punch socialism full of holes in practice. Indeed, the two labors completely supplement each other. Since the outbreak of the war, Kautsky, the official guardian of the temple of Marxism, has really only been doing in theory the same things which the Scheidemanns have been doing in practice, namely: (1) the International an instrument of peace; (2) disarmament, the League of Nations and nationalism; and finally (3) democracy not socialism.

In this situation, the Bolshevik tendency performs the historic service of having proclaimed from the very beginning, and having followed with iron consistency, those tactics which alone could save democracy and drive the revolution ahead. All power exclusively in the hands of the worker and peasant masses, in the hands of the soviets – this was indeed the only way out of the difficulty into which the revolution had gotten; this was the sword stroke with which they cut the Gordian knot, freed the revolution from a narrow blind-alley and opened up for it an untrammeled path into the free and open fields.

The party of Lenin was thus the only one in Russia which grasped the true interest of the revolution in that first period. It was the element that drove the revolution forward, and, thus it was the only party which really carried on a socialist policy.

It is this which makes clear, too, why it was that the Bolsheviks, though they were at the beginning of the revolution a persecuted, slandered and hunted minority attacked on all sides, arrived within the shortest time to the head of the revolution and were able to bring under their banner all the genuine masses of the people: the urban proletariat, the army, the peasants, as well as the revolutionary elements of democracy, the left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionaries [50].

The real situation, in which the Russian Revolution found itself, narrowed down in a few months to the alternative: victory of the counter-revolution or dictatorship of the proletariat – Kaledin or Lenin. Such was the objective situation, just as it quickly presents itself in every revolution after the first intoxication is over, and as it presented itself in Russia as a result of the concrete, burning questions of peace and land, for which there was no solution within the framework of bourgeois revolution.

In this, the Russian Revolution has but confirmed the basic lesson of every great revolution, the law of its being, which decrees: either the revolution must advance at a rapid, stormy, resolute tempo, break down all barriers with an iron hand and place its goals ever farther ahead, or it is quite soon thrown backward behind its feeble point of departure and suppressed by counter-revolution. To stand still, to mark time on one spot, to be contented with the first goal it happens to reach, is never possible in revolution. And he who tries to apply the home-made wisdom derived from parliamentary battles between frogs and mice to the field of revolutionary tactics only shows thereby that the very psychology and laws of existence of revolution are alien to him and that all historical experience is to him a book sealed with seven seals.

Take the course of the English Revolution from its onset in 1642. There the logic of things made it necessary that the first feeble vacillations of the Presbyterians, whose leaders deliberately evaded a decisive battle with Charles I and victory over him, should inevitably be replaced by the Independents, who drove them out of Parliament and seized the power for themselves. And in the same way, within the army of the Independents, the lower petty-bourgeois mass of the soldiers, the Lilburnian “Levellers [51]“ constituted the driving force of the entire Independent movement; just as, finally, the proletarian elements within the mass of the soldiers, the elements that went farthest in their aspirations for social revolution and who found their expression in the Digger movement, constituted in their turn the leaven of the democratic party of the “Levellers.”

Without the moral influence of the revolutionary proletarian elements on the general mass of the soldiers, without the pressure of the democratic mass of the soldiers upon the bourgeois upper layers of the party of the Independents, there would have been no “purge” of the Long Parliament of its Presbyterians, nor any victorious ending to the war with the army of the Cavaliers and Scots, or any trial and execution of Charles I, nor any abolition of the House of Lords and proclamation of a republic.

And what happened in the Great French Revolution? Here, after four years of struggle, the seizure of power by the Jacobins proved to be the only means of saving the conquests of the revolution, of achieving a republic, of smashing feudalism, of organizing a revolutionary defense against inner as well as outer foes, of suppressing the conspiracies of counter-revolution and spreading the revolutionary wave from France to all Europe.

Kautsky and his Russian co-religionists who wanted to see the Russian Revolution keep the “bourgeois character” of its first phase, are an exact counterpart of those German and English liberals of the preceding century who distinguished between the two well-known periods of the Great French Revolution: the “good” revolution of the first Girondin phase and the “bad” one after the Jacobin uprising. The Liberal shallowness of this conception of history, to be sure, doesn’t care to understand that, without the uprising of the “immoderate” Jacobins, even the first, timid and half-hearted achievements of the Girondin phase would soon have been buried under the ruins of the revolution, and that the real alternative to Jacobin dictatorship – as the iron course of historical development posed the question in 1793 – was not “moderate” democracy, but ... restoration of the Bourbons! The “golden mean” cannot be maintained in any revolution. The law of its nature demands a quick decision: either the locomotive drives forward full steam ahead to the most extreme point of the historical ascent, or it rolls back of its own weight again to the starting point at the bottom; and those who would keep it with their weak powers half way up the hill, it drags down with it irredeemably into the abyss.

Thus it is clear that in every revolution only that party capable of seizing the leadership and power which has the courage to issue the appropriate watch-words for driving the revolution ahead, and the courage to draw all the necessary conclusions from the situation. This makes clear, too, the miserable role of the Russian Mensheviks, the Dans, Zeretellis, etc., who had enormous influence on the masses at the beginning, but, after their prolonged wavering and after they had fought with both hands and feet against taking over power and responsibility, were driven ignobly off the stage.

The party of Lenin was the only one which grasped the mandate and duty of a truly revolutionary party and which, by the slogan – “All power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry” – insured the continued development of the revolution.

Thereby the Bolsheviks solved the famous problem of “winning a majority of the people,” which problem has ever weighed on the German Social-Democracy like a nightmare. As bred-in-the-bone disciples of parliamentary cretinism these German Social-Democrats have sought to apply to revolutions the home-made wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry anything, you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to a revolution: first let’s become a “majority.” The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority – that’s the way the road runs.

Only a party which knows how to lead, that is, to advance things, wins support in stormy times. The determination with which, at the decisive moment, Lenin and his comrades offered the only solution which could advance things (“all power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry”), transformed them almost overnight from a persecuted, slandered, outlawed minority whose leader had to hid like Marat in cellars, into the absolute master of the situation.

Moreover, the Bolsheviks immediately set as the aim of this seizure of power a complete, far-reaching revolutionary program; not the safeguarding of bourgeois democracy, but a dictatorship of the proletariat for the purpose of realizing socialism. Thereby they won for themselves the imperishable historic distinction of having for the first time proclaimed the final aim of socialism as the direct program of practical politics.

Whatever a party could offer of courage, revolutionary far-sightedness and consistency in an historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and all the other comrades have given in good measure. All the revolutionary honor and capacity which western Social-Democracy lacked was represented by the Bolsheviks. Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution; it was also the salvation of the honor of international socialism.

This is the first chapter of Rosa Luxemburg's work on the Russian Revolution, published on marxists.org [52]

Interview with Marc Chirik, 1985

We are publishing an interview with Marc Chirik in which he talks in some detail about the revolutionary movement during the Second World War1. Marc, a founding member of the ICC, had also been one of that small handful of revolutionaries who stood up to the enormous ideological and physical pressures of the “war against fascism” and who throughout the conflict remained loyal to the fundamental principles of internationalism, defended by Lenin, Luxemburg and others during the “war to end wars” of 1914-18. In 1939, following the defeat of the wave of revolutions and mass strikes which had brought the first imperialist war to a close, revolutionaries were far more isolated than they had been in 1914, and the history of internationalist opposition to the equally imperialist Second World War is not at all well known. And indeed the ruling class would be very happy for it to remain unknown, since it challenges their whole narrative of 1939-45 as the “good war”, the one that had to be fought - a view shared by right and left of the bourgeoisie, with the left in particular contrasting the “futile” and even “imperialist” slaughter of the First World War to the “necessary sacrifice” demanded by the Second. Indeed, the small groups of communists who denounced this fraud at the time were then, and are still, slandered as agents of fascism – a slander that was more than once translated into murderous deeds, such as the assassination by Stalinist hit-squads of Aquaviva and Atti, two militants of the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy; Marc himself had a very close shave with the Stalinist killers in France, after a raid where the Stalinists found internationalist leaflets written in French and German and addressed to the soldiers of both camps. Marc’s memoirs are thus a precious contribution to reconstructing the history of this war from a proletarian standpoint.

This interview was held in 1985 and first printed in the book Marc Laverne et La Gauche Communiste de France, volume 1, 1920-70, a compilation of texts written by Marc between 1931 and 1969. The book was put together and published by Pierre Hempel, who also conducted the interview. At the time Hempel was a member of the ICC, but left the organisation in the 1990s. He publishes a blog called le Proletariat Universel [55] which contains much that we disagree with, not least with regard to the ICC and to Marc himself. But we think that the interview itself provides us with an accurate picture of the real political and personal capacities of Marc Chirik.

Before the war

PH: Let’s try to understand the march to war. Certain phenomena are apparent: the development of the ideologies of the counter-revolution, Stalinism and Nazism. Liberal bourgeois ideology adds to this by saying that the Communist parties at this time – opportunist but not yet bourgeois - with their tactic of “class against class”, which refused an alliance with the degenerated Socialist parties - helped the rise of Nazism. We must debunk this false idea of a liberal united front as the only obstacle to the seizure of power by the Nazis, who are equally capitalist. Regularly the newspaper Le Monde, along with all the Trotskyists, lament the lack of unity of the "labour movement" as the main cause of the victory of Nazism.

MC: It’s the question of the united front, which dates back to the Third Congress of the Communist International. The Bolsheviks, and the Comintern in general - contrary to what they had announced at the First Congress, which considered that the Socialist parties after the split must considered as organs of the bourgeoisie - immediately after the Third Congress begin to consider that the social democratic parties are part of the workers’ movement. After the defeat of the revolution in Germany, they posed the question of winning over the majority of the workers. It was essential at all costs to reach the workers. How to reach the socialist workers if not by offering a "United Front" to the Socialist parties with a minimum programme of defending the immediate interests of the workers? And in this context they could denounce the non-defence of workers’ interests by the Socialist parties in practice. Treint, secretary general of the CP, used the phrase "plucking the Socialist chicken”, a bit like the cook who approaches the fowl to pull out its feathers. And we did not agree with Treint in these debates. This policy dominated the entire politics of the CPs, except the Italian party, Bordiga, etc2. However, Bordiga, while in the majority in the Italian CP, renounced the leadership, obeying the principle that the party is a unified world party; it is not possible that a section, in a separate country, should have a leadership at odds with the leadership of the International. Very ‘fair play’. Bordiga did not give up fighting for this orientation, but generously renounced the leadership. The battle would be waged, but Bordiga had abandoned the leadership, leaving it to Gramsci/Togliatti.

There were also reactions in the French party, never among the clearest. These were often emotional reactions. One of the delegates of the French left declared: "how can I sit at the table with those who murdered Rosa Luxemburg? Never!" Such an argument, based only on the fact that they had murdered Rosa Luxemburg, was insufficient. It was necessary to prove the fundamental question: were these workers’ parties or not? The International gave credibility to the “workers’” parties a little like the Trotskyists do now with the left parties. But this policy of the left turn, of "class against class", etc., in the 30s, corresponded to the needs of Russia to push the European bourgeoisies not to ally with Germany.

PH: But it was doomed anyway, even if the left democrats were allied with the Stalinists, this would not have counter-balanced the rise of Nazism.

MC: Absolutely! We have the evidence of the national union in France, for example, behind De Gaulle, which did not prevent the right coming to power, from spending many years in government. Alliances and united fronts have never prevented the arrival in government of the various factions of the right. This was not a terrain of struggle for the working class. We also have the example of the united front with Kemal Pasha3, who ended up carrying out an incredible massacre of all the communists, who were beheaded. One cannot make a united front with the bourgeoisie. If in the 19th century it made sense to talk about progressive factions of the bourgeoisie against feudal tendencies, such as the alliance with the democratic bourgeoisie against Bismarck, this no longer has any meaning after the first imperialist world war. The whole bourgeoisie, the bourgeois system, enters into decadence. Progressivism is not progressive. If the bourgeoisie advances, this already shows that the proletariat is hesitant. For the Nazis to come to power and dominate the state in Germany, there had first to be a whole work of undermining on the part of social democracy, in order to demoralise the proletariat. And also the undermining work of the Stalinists, for whom after the Treaty of Versailles Germany had to struggle for national and social revolution at the same time; it was first necessary to destroy the Treaty of Versailles, which was the watchword of the Nazis, of the Nazi bourgeoisie. So if the alliance with the social democrats had existed, as the Trotskyists imagined, it would have done nothing at all. The question was: had the proletariat lost its class terrain? The proletariat had to fight not for the liberation of Germany but against the German bourgeoisie. But this struggle was abandoned in the name of the fight against fascism, the new hobbyhorse, as in Italy in the years after 1922 against Mussolini. It was "democracy" that paved the way for fascism. It needed fascism. And in this sense, the proletariat could not change it, it was already beaten. Thus the arrival of fascism only proved the defeat of the proletariat, a proletariat that had been driven for years onto a terrain of democratic and nationalist mystifications. From this point of view there was no question of "saving the country" against fascism and social democracy.

PH: In the 70s, the Bordigists argued that the communists were the first "anti-fascists" in Italy and Germany.

MC: This is wrong! The communists defended the necessity of grouping the working class on its class terrain, to confront fascism on its class terrain, but not on the side of the "democratic" bourgeoisie. At the time of Bordiga’s leadership of the Italian party, the party refused any alliance with the bourgeois parties which would supposedly prevent the coming to power of Mussolini. The Italian Left, including our Fraction in France, never identified with the anti-fascist struggle. It denounced the United Front in Germany; this is one of the reasons for the rupture of the Italian Fraction with Trotsky. And similarly, concerning Spain, it refused any alliance with or support for the Republicans against Franco. The fight against fascism yes, but on the terrain of the class, not in the name of the defence of the so called "democratic" republic.

The position of the Left was clear: no alliance, no United Front with the parties of the bourgeoisie. This was not a moral position. We denounced precisely the ideology of the bourgeoisie, who will always advance the faction that suits it the most.

PH: We are thus in a period where, globally, with the Laval-Stalin pact in 19344, the opportunist CP which was in the workers' movement passes into the camp of the bourgeoisie; on 1st May 34, it marches behind the tricolor flag and Jeanne d'Arc. It submits itself to the war aims of the bourgeoisie...

MC: This is the climax. It is the completion of a process of degeneration of the CI and the communist parties since the 1920s, on the national question, the question of the United Front, etc., which leads directly, not to being a semi-workers’ party, but a party of the Russian state and the capitalist state.

PH: Overall the left, from the Social Democrats to the Stalinists, has all the cards now to prepare the proletariat for the idea of the inevitability of war. From 1934, they are on a forced march to bind the proletariat hand and foot, say in 3 or 4 years.

MC: And thanks to "anti-fascism". This mystification was crucial to march the workers to war. Without the Popular Front, it would have been impossible to go to war. It took the Popular Front, the events in Spain, the history of "anti-fascism" to bind or at least confuse the workers. The workers did not take part in the Second World War as they did in the First, full of innocent enthusiasm. They left disoriented, believing they were fighting for freedom, but not being very sure. But for years they had been dragged onto the bourgeois terrain of the Popular Front, of anti-fascism, to the point where they no longer knew where to turn. Once dislodged from their class terrain, they could only go - with fear and without enthusiasm – to the front in the war of France against Germany.

But there was so little enthusiasm that it can be verified by comparing the time it took diplomatically and militarily for the occupation of Poland (about 6 weeks) and the time it took for France to collapse. The collapse of France was in eight days. That’s a stampede. And even at the beginning, to a certain extent in the French population, there is Petainism; when Petain starts to speak about stopping the war, everyone welcomes it: "we’re fed up with the war!" So the workers do not go enthusiastically to this war that all the parties were calling them to.

PH: But the workers were not strong enough to prevent it!

MC: They were no longer on their class terrain.

PH: So the ‘Communist’ Party of France supports the Nazi-Soviet pact5. It demands the official reappearance of L'Humanité. But at the same time, at the moment of the declaration of war it appears to defend something like a revolutionary policy. What was it?

MC: Yes, and we must remember that this was a few weeks before the war. This pro-Russian turn immediately provoked splits in the CP. This "defeatist" argument, which consisted of supporting German and Russian imperialism and explaining that this is how to prevent Germany attacking Russia, when it wasn’t even at war, didn’t work. A whole part of the CP split. Gitton, a member of the Political Bureau and secretary general of the CGT, left the party, denouncing the treaty. He didn’t break with the party on a class terrain, but around a political action, lining up with the anti-Russian bloc, and then finding himself on the terrain of national defence, with those who wanted to reconstruct France. A large part of these people naturally found themselves in the government of Petain, starting with Marion who was for 15 years the representative of the CP in the CI. The whole St Denis group also, who were once, in 1923, the most militant young Communist elements. They ended up in Vichy.

PH: And these were people that you had once fought alongside.

MC: Yes. Yes of course. It was Doriot himself who had excluded us. They had reached a nationalist impasse. If they fought on a nationalist terrain, they were nationalists. Especially since Petain stood for "No to the war and defend France."

Then the CP, in turn, changed policy rapidly, coming up with the idea of "national resistance". So the workers were caught in several vices: either you march in the defence of France, or march in the defence of the USSR, or march in defence of Germany, or against Germany. There's a whirlwind in the heads of the workers.

In any case, the story of the "resistance" above all made it possible to drag the workers onto the terrain of national defence, all the more so with the massacres perpetrated by Germany. It was possible to make the workers think that their fate depended on victory against the occupier.

PH: Now let's look at the state of the revolutionary milieu on the eve of the war, those who resisted the degeneration of the First International, who left or were excluded by the then chauvinist CP. There was the empty and premature proclamation of the still-born 4th International. There were a certain number of groups that pronounced against the war. But, with the declaration of war most of them broke apart. The Trotskyists fell into the camp of national resistance. Why was it that the clearest group of the time - the "Bordigists", who came from Bilan - collapsed? Why did no-one in the revolutionary milieu take up revolutionary defeatism in the sense that Lenin did?

MC: Let’s not dwell on the group "Union Communiste"6 who already had a position on the Spanish question which supported or half-supported the POUM7 and the Republic. They broke apart at the moment of the war, and what’s more, they were surprised by the war. But those that had seen the war coming since the beginning of the 30's were above all the Italian Fraction. They had underlined that we had entered into a period of defeats and that these defeats would lead irreversibly to war.

The victory of the Nazis in 33 meant for us that the historic course was henceforth towards war. In view of this a deep reflection was to be undertaken. We had understood that the events in Spain were part of the general rehearsal for war, against those, in particular the Trotskyists, who were affirming that the Popular Fronts opened up the era of revolution.

The successive concessions of the Anglo-French bloc to Germany at the end of the civil war in Spain, and above all Munich, letting them occupy Czechoslovakia, etc., forced us to begin to pose questions.

Vercesi, who was the great theoretician, the great leader of the Italian Fraction, began to wonder: effectively, the crisis and unemployment in Germany had completely disappeared with the advent of Hitler. The development of the armaments industry - as they moved towards war, with Germany in front, and the other western countries close behind – was patent. There was a development of the war economy which effectively reabsorbed unemployment. Towards 38 and the beginning of 39, production reached the levels of 1928, whereas before they had fallen by 40%. World production took off again. There was little unemployment. Workers were back in work. Vercesi also posed the question: "In the first place, can the war economy be an economic solution to the capitalist crisis?" And it seemed to him that it was. It’s of little import who you are working for, the fact is that unemployment has been reabsorbed. Thus there is no necessity for imperialist war. The contradictions of international capitalism seemed to him to have been attenuated thanks to the war economy. And on the other side, there's a series of small wars such as Ethiopia, Manchuria, the war in Spain. All these ended up in terrible massacres, mostly of the workers. Thus Vercesi poses the question: why is there local but not international war? And he ends up by saying that the war economy reabsorbs the contradictions of the capitalist system. He also considers that inter-imperialist tensions are lessening and begins saying that the essential reason for world imperialist war consists of a class to class response, of capitalism to the proletariat. Thus, in his theory the war was a phenomenon aimed at massacring the proletariat. But he says that in order to massacre the proletariat capitalism has no need for a world war; it can massacre it bit by bit. Thus it massacres in Italy with the war in Ethiopia, it massacres in China and Japan with the war in Manchuria. It massacres the civilian population in Spain. Thus world war has ceased to be a necessity for capitalism since it can easily massacre the workers a piece at a time. Munich8, for those who thought like Vercesi, was the new Treaty of Versailles! That was it, it was the end of the war! We were going to see local wars but no longer world wars. There was no process leading towards a world war. That's what the leadership of the Fraction thought, but there was a minority in the Fraction, notably the comrades in Belgium like Mitchell, and then us, the group in Marseilles, who said "all this is madness! It's a complete revision".

PH: But at the beginning you were impressed since it was Vercesi who was talking.

MC: Yes, but our reaction was immediate: "no, no, that doesn't work, all these new theories... the war economy which magically reabsorbs the problems of capitalism…war is a product of imperialist tensions, not of the class struggle”

PH: Bordiga didn't react?

MC: Bordiga wasn't about. He was sleeping! He was in Italy. He never made contact. He refused contact. We tried to make contact with him but he absolutely refused any contact with the outside.

PH: Why?

MC: He didn't give any explanation. This was his position when we asked him why he remained in Italy - and he was there under surveillance by the police, he had been deported to the islands first of all then repatriated to house arrest in Naples - no, I must devote myself to the Italian proletariat, I must remain here because when the situation turns around I will be here! He thus refused any contact abroad, an attitude which went against all the work typical of the Bolsheviks who were obliged to work outside Russia. In France, in Belgium, he would have been able to undertake the work that was impossible for him to do in Italy. On the other hand Damen moved around thirty-six times during the war.

But with this position which dominated the Fraction and which reckoned that we were looking at a resurgence of the workers' movement, after Munich and after Spain, the title of the review Bilan was changed to Octobre. Bilan was the balance-sheet of the defeat, Octobre announced a revolutionary upsurge. Obviously, when war broke out it was those comrades that were most surprised. Thus the whole theory went up in flames. As always in such a case the justification came afterwards through a theoretical sleight of hand. With the war breaking out, we, the minority, asked them for an account of what happened. So? Your position didn't stand up before, and now here's the war, Poland first of all and then France enters the war?

They replied: Oh no! All these are local wars. The war of France and Germany is a local war. With Britain it's also a local war. With Russia's entry into the war it's still local. With the United States it's still local. Throughout the war they continued to support the idea that it wasn't a world imperialist war. For them it was a whole series of local wars. With such an idea their position is simple: if the war expanded that meant that the proletariat had disappeared. It wasn't only defeated. It had disappeared as a political and social force. And as the proletariat had disappeared, a political group could not express a class position. Consequently the group must dissolve itself, that’s it, and stop tilting at windmills.

During the war

PH: What did you do then?

MC: In practice the war was upon us. Activity became difficult. It became difficult to maintain links. In 1940 in Marseilles I myself was mobilised and sent to the front - but I was back there again in June 40. We kept up the life of the group in Marseilles. The group maintained itself. I was in Marseilles from 38. I had been a prisoner and escaped. With Jacob, a member of the leadership of the Fraction, with Cl., my partner9, and other comrades we decided to re-establish links with the different sections in Paris, Lyon, Toulon, Aubagne, and with Belgium. Jacob, as a member of the leadership, opposed it. However, the section in Marseilles took the decision to reconstitute the Fraction. It held a conference. We began by renewing contacts with Toulon first of all, with Lyon and then with Paris, and then Brussels. The comrades of Belgium refused. Some of the Paris comrades joined us, Lyon as well. Thus in 1942, we held the first conference for the reconstitution of the Fraction. It posed the question of pronouncing against the war. But we had no material. We had to procure a typewriter.

PH: Nobody was arrested then?

MC: Jacob was arrested and then deported. He didn't come back. He was stupidly arrested in the street during a round-up. He had false papers and genuine papers. He pulled both out at the same time! We tried to get him out of prison at Aix, but without luck. He was deported to Germany and disappeared. As Mitchell did later....

So it was necessary to find a typewriter. Nobody had one. It was indispensable for publishing anything. We ended up finding one. Our correspondence up to then with the other sections were hand-written. From 41, we had some contacts around us, French comrades and RC. of Belgium.

PH: So in 1942 then you still hadn't made a leaflet against the war?

MC: We hadn't been able to up to then. But when the French comrades arrived, one of whom was a former Trotskyist, we decided to form the French Nucleus of the Communist Left and we produced a "Declaration of Principles" in 1942. It saw itself as part of the International Communist Left and we worked together. This immediately allowed us to produce leaflets.

PH: So you made your first leaflets in 1942? How did you distribute them?

MC: At the beginning it was simply a handful of copies, 50 odd with several carbons re-typed several times with our one typewriter. It was crazy work. We gave them out around us mostly, people who were close. Marseilles was really a place where all the political elements and refugees were coming from Paris. Ten million people had left the north for the south. In Marseilles there was a whole Parisian fauna including surrealists, Victor Serge, etc. Thus the Nucleus was set up and we began to organise our discussions.

PH: Parallel to you another group existed, the RKD, the CR (Revolutionary Communists), who had put out leaflets against the war since its beginning in Italian, German and French. When did you make contact with these groups for the first time? Where did they come from and where were they going?

MC: The RKD was a Viennese Trotskyist group10. They came from Austria. Revolutionäre Kommunisten Deutschland. They were Austrian but preferred to speak in the name of the German proletariat. The group was formed at the beginning of the 30's in Austria in the Left Opposition. It had undergone several splits. When Germany occupied Austria some elements fled and sought refuge in Paris, where one of its leaders still subscribes to Révolution Internationale. They were used to clandestine work. Their position in Paris at the time of the constitution of the Fourth International was to consider that it was premature while remaining in agreement with all the other Trotskyist positions, on the United Front, etc. They considered it too early and the situation not ready for it. They had better positions than Trotsky on the march towards war, like the group of Vereeken11. They didn't join the Fourth International, which allowed them to evolve. When the war broke out they said: struggle against the war. And when the Russian question was posed, they pronounced against the defence of Russia. The Hitler-Stalin Pact had shown for them that it had ceased to be a proletarian state. Others, like Shachtman, who didn't have a very clear position, clearly said however: no defence of Russia, but "defeatism". As the RKD were used to clandestine work, they had kept printing material and could write leaflets and undertake illegal revolutionary work. Further they were in Paris and in touch with all the Trotskyist groups. They had a certain audience that we didn't have.

PH: Finally, they were better prepared than you with the declaration of war?

MC: They kept themselves as they were. They were prepared for clandestine activity whereas the Italian Fraction was absolutely unprepared with the erroneous perspectives of its leadership. The Fraction hadn't kept up links. And then in the Fraction there was the question of political refugees above all during the phoney war which preceded the entry into war proper. The great majority of them had no papers at all. The outbreak of war meant that as Italians they were part of the enemy camp. Or else they had to make pro-French declarations or be sent to a concentration camp. Or else they had to return to Italy. But returning to Italy...

There was a whole discussion in the Fraction: what to do? What's the best solution? A single position dominated: no declarations of support for this side or the other.

PH: Were there those who lay low to save their skin?

MC: No! Some were captured by the Petainist police or the Gestapo and sent to the Italian authorities. Others returned to Italy by their own means and participated in the formation of the Internationalist Communist Party. Others stayed. Before Italy officially entered the war France was already defeated. Which didn't give time to anyone to hesitate in making a pro-this or that declaration. France was at war, thus no longer demanded anything, still less with its rapid defeat.

In any case up to the French rout, the question of choosing between a French concentration camp or an Italian prison was our main concern. These were all the difficulties of the comrades of the Italian Fraction.

For the German refugees the question was simple: France arrests us and delivers us to Germany, including social-democrats like Hilferding. The RKD had already sorted out false papers before the war. They were ready to go underground. Some came from rich families, Viennese Jews who had fled German occupation and who had bought large sums of money with them and so provided themselves with adequate printing material. Whereas the Italians were all poor workers in irregular situations. But the RKD, which had been outside of the Fourth International since 38, made contact with the Vereeken group in Belgium. C was part of the Vereeken group and acted as an intermediary between us, fleeing Paris and coming to Marseilles. The RKD moved around France looking for other Trotskyist groups like themselves, also meeting C who presented himself as a member of the French Nucleus of the Communist Left. The Austrians were interested and asked to make contact with us, particularly when they learned that we were against the war and against the defence of the USSR. We made contact. They then came to Marseilles and showed us their savoir-faire. They were really used to clandestine work. They sent us or gave us documents that they generally transported in boxes of food, with pasta or something else. They were at enormous risk since they travelled around. They had financial means, but even so they travelled on false papers. It took some courage. They'd had the experience of the Gestapo in Austria. One example of a heroic moment in their work: one of their comrades, a German comrade, was arrested. At the time of her arrest she made out that she was ill. She was thus sent to the hospital in Marseilles. At the time politicals were under direct surveillance, in this case by the Gestapo.

In the hospital corridor two members of the Gestapo did 12-hour shifts in order to guard the door of the room containing the false patient. At midday two others from the Gestapo came in to take over the shift.

Comrades of the patient decided to organise her escape. They got hold of German military uniforms. They were of Germanic origin, blond and spoke the language. They came a few minutes before the shift changeover at midday. They told the two guards that it was their turn to take over. The latter didn’t suspect anything, especially as the RKD had worn the uniforms of officers, so they left. The RKD comrades opened the door. The woman left. They had parked a car like that of the Gestapo in the hospital square and then left without obstruction. They were really formidable. None of them fell during the war!

PH: Very good! So these were the famous "hitlero-trotskyists"12 who gave out leaflets in German and who the French bourgeoisie, with the Stalinists at their head, during the period of the Resistance and the Liberation, had wanted to liquidate, having assimilated them with the collaborators because they were anti-patriots (laughter)! And didn’t the French Trotskyists in the Resistance also give out leaflets in German?

MC: The Trotskyists in general did nothing against the war. The RKD did propaganda work in several languages and in German, even towards German soldiers. Even if the Trotskyists produced leaflets in German, it was always with bourgeois positions for the defence of the USSR. We should also remember that when Hitler occupied France there was a discussion within official Trotskyism where some posed the question like the Stalinists: couldn't we get the occupiers to allow the reappearance of our publications? The majority evidently rejected this but a minority envisaged working legally like the Stalinists Duclos and company. Coming back to the RKD, there were only a dozen or so but they undertook formidable work. But they were very activist.

PH: They thought that the war would end in revolution?

MC: Everyone thought so. For us it was the memory of 1917 which predominated. All the remaining theories since 17 held that war opens up possibilities towards revolution. Thus, we thought that if the war is here, the course could be overturned towards a resurgence of class struggle. That's what we were thinking. We questioned this very much later. But the memory of 1917 Russia and 1919 Germany remained a living memory. In the Italian Fraction you couldn't imagine the atmosphere during the war, and above all from 33, we were so isolated. The Trotskyists defended the USSR, the Popular Fronts, carried out entryism into the Socialist parties and the PSOP of Pivert13. They participated in the Amsterdam-Pleyel conference.

PH: What was your analysis of the role of the unions during the war?

MC: Already before the war we were posing the question: are the unions still organs of the working class? But the question was only posed. We posed above all the question of the nature of the Russian state.

PH: But nonetheless minorities of the Dutch Left and the German Left of the 20's had already understood the anti-working class nature of the unions.

MC: Yes. But in the Fraction the dominant position was the necessity to work within union organisations in the tradition of the 3rd International. When the Fraction fought the United Front, it fought the political United Front because it considered that the Socialist parties were a part of the bourgeoisie, while the unions were only reformist and it was possible to work within them despite everything.

PH: But when you began to seriously pose the question during the war you began to reflect on the contribution of the Dutch Left. But up till then you didn't call into question this idea of working within the unions?

MC: Yes, but in the Fraction there was already a debate from the 30's. Some elements posed the question about whether the unions were still organs of the working class. It was a debate that was at its beginnings; it was pursued during the war and it ended with the Liberation. The group Internationalisme henceforth had a clear position on the question, whereas the others with Vercesi remained prisoners of the idea that the unions were, despite everything, organs of the working class.

PH: What did you think of the strikes during the war? What for example did you make of the strike by miners in Pas de Calais which were not initially controlled by the PCF, contrary to what they boasted about afterwards?

MC: Behind the whole question of strikes... there weren't many strikes, above all there were campaigns against the STO, compulsory work in Germany - which was manna for the nationalist Resistance - but which signified super-exploitation and deportation of the workers. The Italian Fraction said that it wasn't a question of ignoring it, it recognised that the workers' protests responded to a will not to work for the occupier, but underlined that the Stalinists profited from it by recruiting for the Resistance, claiming that this was the way to save workers from deportation.

PH: What did you do then?

MC: Inasmuch as we had possibilities to talk, to contact those around us, we supported the validity of workers' resistance, of the refusal to line up with the war, while denouncing the idea of joining the Maquis. Otherwise what choice was there? The workers were asked either to participate in the war in Germany or join the war here in the Resistance. Whereas it was absolutely necessary to struggle against both.

PH: This miners' strike then, did you try to do something towards it?

MC: Not this strike in particular. Generally our hope rested in waiting for a workers' uprising. It was a traditional point for us that the workers would revolt against the war. An anecdote can illustrate the validity of this. I worked in Marseilles as an electrician. I put up the telegraph poles. One day, one of our overseers said to us "come down here, war is declared! Mobilisation is underway!" Each of us avoided the temptation to go home. A large number of workers were immediately mobilised. I recall going directly to the house of a comrade. His wife was there in tears. I asked her what she was crying about? She replied, war has broken out, it is terrible! I responded: listen, now it will happen. What was difficult was the wait. Now we are going to wait for revolution! Finally, things will move!

For me, as for my comrades, it was the eve of the storm when you can no longer bear the tension. Ah! At last! The storm is breaking and then we wait for its consequences.

Whereas the leadership of the Fraction in Belgium declared the dissolution of the group, for us on the contrary, it was the moment we were going to continue the work, but in clandestinity, during the war in order to constitute the revolutionary forces.

PH: Why did they declare the dissolution?

MC: On the basis that the proletariat had disappeared as a social class!

PH: They were the modernists of the time (laughter).

MC: Then we stayed with the idea that a new period was opening up. We remained on the look-out for any movement of the workers that could come from discontent with the war. In France we thought that it would be small sparks that would ignite it. It's true that the miners' strike or other strikes were an expression of the discontent of workers who no longer believed the ideas told to them about working harder. There were reactions against misery, around the problems of bad provisions. Any movement of discontent by the workers in this sense is a premise for the revolt against war.

Also in 1943, when the movement in Italy broke out, some movements in Turin, Milan, etc., against the war, we said that it was the beginning of an international workers' reaction against the war. Of course the workers were straight away hemmed in from all sides...14

PH: Did you exaggerate the significance of this workers' uprising in Italy?

MC: We didn't have concrete, precise elements on these events. We had a paper from Geneva published in Swiss and, despite everything, the French press. The Petainist press denounced this movement: they're the enemies of Mussolini, infiltrated by Anglo-Americans, etc. For us the fact that French radio and press was strongly denouncing this workers' movement meant that the truth was very much contrary to what our class enemies were saying!

It was on the basis of these elements and our conviction of fact that the war was necessarily finished and that the general discontent would develop, that we were optimistic.

We organised a conference of the French Nucleus in Marseilles where we took a position, calling for vigilance about what would develop on the international level. What reinforced this conviction, regarding the question of our overestimation, was the declarations of Churchill. Since the south of Italy with Badoglio went over to the Allies, the entire front between north and south remain closed. There was no offensive from the Anglo-American bloc to try to force the issue. There was such immobilisation that it allowed the Germans, while Mussolini had been arrested and deported to an island, to go by plane and free him. It was incredible and the British didn't budge. And when the question was posed to Churchill in England about what are we waiting for - the Italian front is about to collapse? Churchill replied, it's intentional, we must let the Italian situation "stew in its own juice" for a time. And they gave the Germans, who were occupying the north at that time, the possibility of carrying a massacre, a formidable repression against the workers. The workers of Milan and Turin could only save themselves by joining the Maquis. The Maquis strengthened in Italy following the defeat of Mussolini which paved the way for German repression. The Allies had good reason for leaving them to "stew", in order to preserve capitalist social peace. They preferred to let this repression happen. They had no need of the workers for conquering the country, their military force was sufficient. What was at stake was the need to smother workers' discontent against the war. A win/win situation: by letting the Germans carry out the repression, they pushed the workers into the arms of the "democratic" ally. With the support of the Stalinists and all the democrats, there was a real development of the Italian Maquis, which didn't exist before, contrary to France.

For us this business demonstrated that the bourgeoisie are intelligent. Churchill knew what he was doing. He didn't jump the gun. He let the massacre of workers who were about to rise up happen, nipping it in the bud at the first symptoms.

Liberation

PH: And what was the position of Bordiga at this moment?

MC: It was unknown! We hadn't made contact with him. Bordiga was in the south, in free Naples. He was at liberty to speak. Democracy came back with the government of Badoglio. Many papers appeared, a whole press, all sorts of declarations. But these declarations above all focused on the massacre of the workers of Milan and Turin by the Nazis. This avoided the fundamental problem. Basically it was inculcated in the workers of the south that they should fight Mussolini and fascism first of all – in other words, the same anti-fascism that had sent the workers to war. Now the bourgeoisie wanted the defeat of Mussolini. A whole heap of half-Trotskyist, half-Stalinist groups arose in terrible confusion posing the question: what is this war? And people calling themselves Left Communists appeared also, quoting Bordiga and bringing out papers.

One day we heard Henriot, government spokesman for Petainist propaganda, on the radio. He gave a speech saying in particular that Bordiga had just made a declaration saying that the conquests of the Red Army in Europe are not capitalist conquests but are in favour of the world revolution.

PH: Are you sure you heard this declaration?

MC: Yes, yes. And immediately, at its conference, the Fraction took a position: if it was true what the radio and press had just said about the declaration of Bordiga, that the Red Army supported revolution in Europe, we declared that Bordiga is not part of the Fraction and we will combat him and we will fight Stalinism. Bordiga was paying the price of 15 years of retirement and isolation. He wasn't up to speed with the evolution of our discussions.

A first question developed with Vercesi again. He said: Mussolini has fallen like rotten fruit. The situation of Italian capitalism was such that Mussolini could no longer represent it. Consequently the bourgeoisie had let him fall. We asked therefore: does the situation in Milan and the uprising of workers count for nothing? For Vercesi the war was finished but it was finished by "the exhaustion of the war economy"!

PH: Not by the mutual exhaustion of the combatants?

MC: No, by the exhaustion of the war economy. And according to him in this case there will be a new crisis. And since the working class doesn't exist, there's no question of a resurgence nor of a workers' reaction to stop the war. There's no longer any need for Mussolini in Italy because there is a crisis of the war economy. Thus, we discussed amongst ourselves the significance of 43.

PH: German refugees were also bombed at this time?

MC: That started. The war took a very violent turn in northern Italy after the Allied landings.

The resistance of the German soldiers was desperate. Then again there was the landing in France where we saw the Germans pushed back. In Russia, it was the same after Stalingrad at the end of 44.

For the repression of the routed Germans, the Allied bourgeoisie applied the same principles as that of Churchill in Italy. When the German army found itself at the gates of Warsaw, the Red Army stopped: it let the massacre happen for 8 days. The Red Army didn't budge, it needed Warsaw "to stew in its own blood". Then the German army withdrew and the Russians entered a cemetery.

As the German army retreated, the same thing happened in Budapest for example. Again the Russian stopped. There was an uprising in the capital of Hungary, more or less confused obviously. And letting them be massacred was at least as important as in Warsaw. After the massacre was accomplished the Russians entered the town with ease, as the gravediggers of a cemetery.

The whole of this plan was applied from 43, a policy of wiping out workers. A plan above all implicating Germany - which in any case was finished - in order to make it responsible for the massacre of the workers so that there was no possibility of the workers understanding who was really responsible.

PH: And the aim of the bombings?

MC: They bombed, they destroyed entire towns that had no military objective: Dresden, Hamburg, Leipzig... A crazy massacre! But there was something else. As the German army retreated there begun, on the German front as well, there was a series of demonstrations and discontent against the war, with the question of provisions at the heart of them. At the front itself there were demonstrations against the war. At Stalingrad the Germans had suffered enormous losses. But the campaign for the conquest of Germany was a riposte against the general tendency to desertion. In the absence of the press it was difficult to get a clear account of the state of things. It was sufficient to see the reaction of the German military apparatus. Along the road of its debacle from Russia, thousands of German soldiers were hung in order to dissuade the others. This previously unheard of repression was testimony to a general tendency towards desertion.

Inasmuch as we were able to talk in Marseilles, I had the opportunity to work in an area where there was a unit of German soldiers. I talked with some veteran soldiers. All were afraid to return to the Russian front. That meant a terrible massacre for them. They said that Germany was kaput, Hitler was kaput. They also wanted the end of the war. It should be said that with the Liberation a large number of German soldiers wanted to desert although the officers tried to keep them together "in order to retreat together". Many were those who tried to desert. But, in France, it was something dreadful for the German soldier. It was better for them to stay in the corps making up the German army than try to desert! The French population was unleashed. I have never seen such chauvinism in my life. Any German risked being lynched. This hysteria was stoked up by the whole of the French press, with L’Humanité at its head howling "to each his Boche!". It wasn't just words, but an appeal to public murder. Even Le Libertaire - contrary to those of us who were saying "in the final analysis, it's not the fault of the German people, but of the Nazi regime" - affirmed that "there was a general culpability of the German people!".

Sometimes, when the hysteria died down in Marseilles, we prevented some small groups of arrested German soldiers being lynched by the crowd.

Faced with that, I should say that the German soldiers in Marseilles locked themselves up in a fortress, saying that they didn't want to continue the war, but above all they didn't want to give themselves up to the FFI, the French Interior Forces: "we will only give ourselves up to the Americans". For them the American army was more of a guarantee that they wouldn't be given over to an unbridled mob. The German prisoners did not want to give themselves up individually and above all not to the French forces. They would only let themselves be disarmed by the Americans.

We saw arbitrary and improbable arrests. For example we knew some people from Alsace who were part of the German army, since Alsace was considered part of Germany. They were friends who had been mobilised against their will. They stayed working at the rear in offices. When the Americans arrived they tried to desert. They dressed in civilian clothes and escaped to Marseilles, arriving at Aubagne. It was two couples and they talked among themselves in Alsatian. The populace arrested them, said that they were German spies. They didn't hide the fact that they were Alsatians and had been part of the German army. They were tortured and killed.

PH: And among you, the communist minority during the war, did you also lose comrades?

MC: During the war some had been arrested and deported. But, at the Liberation, no, because we knew that it was necessary to be careful. That didn't prevent us from bringing out a leaflet at that time (May 1st 1945) calling on workers to fraternise.

PH: How many copies? And you weren't beaten up?

MC: We didn't give them out hand to hand (laughter). We went to train stops and left them in the coaches. We distributed them at night in letter boxes. It was too risky during the day with the exacerbated chauvinism. For example, one day when a group of soldiers were being led under escort by the FFI we saw an intolerable scene. There were older German soldiers who had been in the rearguard. All along the route the crowd threw stones, spat in their faces, struck them, all sorts of things. The FFI had rounded up the scattered soldiers in the town in order to take them to prison. Then myself, with some of my comrades, stood up against it and spoke: - but these are men, stop hitting them, these are only soldiers recruited by force. What you're doing is scandalous.

I hadn't finished speaking when I was immediately trapped, surrounded by a threatening crowd: Who are you? And your accent is not quite French?

It could have been my turn to be lynched, my comrades quickly grabbed my hand and pulled me loose from this mess. We got out very quickly. It was impossible to say a word in public; it was shameful!

PH: It was the worst period of your life?

MC: I had never seen such a thing!

PH: You could still believe in the working class at times like these?

MC: Ah, yes! You could not stop believing in the working class. It was the only force which could react to the barbarity. Chauvinism can evaporate little by little afterwards... Thus the end of the war didn't happen easily. In Germany in particular there were very marked movements of desertions, on the Russian front as well as in Europe. The uprisings in Germany were notable as all the young forces had been sent to the front and the ones who remained in the country were the foreign slave workers, the old and the women. A local militia was rapidly set up for each town. In several towns the population rose up, arrested the Nazis and massacred them. But the policy of the European democratic bloc consisted first of all of not letting the prisoners return. The general order was to prevent prisoners returning to their families in the towns and villages. The memory was present of the risk represented by this return, as in 17-18, when the sailors of the German navy in Kiel rose up against the war. The bourgeoisie had this fact in its head. In France about 2 million German soldiers were held prisoner. It was the same in Italy. But they were kept prisoner for 5 or 6 years! This force, this youth, if they had been returned to Germany, would have been equivalent to an enormous mass of unemployed and there would have been more important uprisings than those of the old and women. Germany was occupied and the Russians and Americans forbade any relation between soldiers and civil society.

PH: Now I'm trying to understand better why the war ended. You describe how the Russian and western bourgeoisie tried hard to counter any risk of an uprising of any scale by the massacre of refugees and the prolonged internment of German soldiers, leaving proletarian reactions to "stew in their own juice". How did the Second World War finish? It finished anyway with a victory for capitalism.

MC: As in all capitalist wars it terminated in defeat for some and victory for others. Here, the western bourgeoisie, with the USA at its head, along with Russia, completely changed the balance of forces that existed before the war. Germany could fight on one front, but not on two...

PH: Revolution wasn't possible at the time then?

MC: That's something else. That is a question which can only be raised from the point of view of the proletariat. From a capitalist point of view, and the different sides of capitalism, it was a question of avoiding an uprising of the class. Together they worked hard to smother any manifestations of proletarian struggle. For 3 or 4 years it was Germany that was the gendarme of Europe, it had the keys to the safe for the maintenance of social order; but when it began to weaken, the western bloc and Russia knew that they had to step in, fill the breach and take up this function of gendarme against any show of proletarian resurgence.

For those of us who understood that the war was a world war, this had to precipitate, sooner or later, a revolutionary uprising. On what did we base this? We based it on the lessons of history. Each great war had brought about a proletarian movement: the experience of 1871 with the Paris Commune, the Russian-Japanese war of 1905. But that only happened in the defeated countries: that's what we didn't draw out sufficiently. The First World War produced 1917 in Russia and 1917 and 1919 in Germany. The war produced the first revolutionary combats of the century.

We thus went into the Second World War with the conviction that the proletariat would be put in the situation where, after a series of massacres, it would say "better to rise up than to die". For us it was the classic, most comprehensible position. Those who didn't recognise what an imperialist war signified, as the majority of the Fraction beginning with Vercesi, considered that there would simply be massacres and not simply a generalised war, and that the proletariat had disappeared during the war, and they thus gave up hope of a proletarian uprising. For them the sole perspective was that the war would end with a crisis of the capitalist economy. Shortages would be so great in one of the blocs that they would no longer have the forces to continue the war. They were waiting for the crisis of armaments during the war. Nothing could happen for them, and when it did, they denied the importance of it; they denied the importance of 43 in Italy, of the uprising of Budapest and Warsaw, of revolts in Germany. They didn't understand why the western bloc took the responsibility of holding prisoner 5 million German soldiers. It didn't occur to them why it was that the finest flower of the world proletariat before the war, in Germany, had been disarmed and decimated15.

On the situation in the victorious countries in 17, on which revolutionaries had not sufficiently reflected: there was no uprising like in the defeated countries. It's the victorious countries that became the gendarmes against the uprisings in the defeated countries. France and Britain were in coalition against Russia. They took Poland in order to separate Russia from Germany. And when uprisings broke out in the defeated country of Germany they set up a cordon-sanitaire and when the revolution failed, they maintained 5000 soldiers and furnished them with arms for keeping domestic order. In the years after, uprisings did not stop in Germany: the Kapp putsch16, etc. Against that France occupied the Ruhr. It was the lesson of WWI that we hadn't seen. It’s not until today that this has become clearer, and even then the ICC alone has managed to draw out the idea that wars do not provide the best conditions for the revolution. The defeated bourgeoisie, weakened, called for help from the victors. In the Second World War this was much clearer than after the first. When the German government which succeeded Hitler proposed talks with the Allies, the latter refused because any German government in their absence would be too weak and this would lay the ground for revolution. No question of talks then; the Allies did not stop the war. They went on to occupy all the German territory...

PH: We know from official histories now that the Americans raced the Russians for the occupation of German territory.

MC: It's of little importance. They had the same interests. It was a race in order not to leave the ground free to the rival. The question of getting there first depended on the resistance of the German army.

PH: No, no. It seems that Truman made a blunder, was taken in by Stalin whose army was decisively implanted in Europe, in East Berlin.

MC: Perhaps. But it's not a problem for us to know who was faster than the other...

PH: But there was a problem, I insist on that. In the workers' movement revolutionaries classically say "war or revolution". But here was a "liberation" from which no revolution came, where world war stopped, where the imbeciles of Trotskyism hid behind the idea of a national insurrection. According to the mass of recent works concerned with this war, it appears that the 3rd world war was already being prepared in the middle of the 2nd. Already the antagonisms between Russia and American were building and many in the west would have preferred an alliance with Hitler against Stalin; and in any case many were posing the problem of war against Russia.

MC: In any case, in the war, at the beginning, yes there was a problem. They weren't certain of their alliances. But when it was necessary for Russia to enter the war the alliance was formed. Henceforth, they marched together hand in hand, with each trying to act for their own account. Exactly as in the case of the Hitler-Stalin bargain on the division of Poland which took place very quickly. But that always exists in imperialist conflicts. The same for tensions between France, America and the English. France didn't want to pay the costs of the war.

PH: But in the revolutionary movement you talked of a possibility of a third world war at the end of the second?

MC: Before coming to that, the question was: how to end the 2nd? What is the perspective from 43 onwards? Germany was heading for defeat, no-one had any illusions about that. The question was: does the perspective of a workers' uprising remain valid? As far as we were concerned, yes. We were waiting for a new wave of uprisings in line with the Paris Commune and above all based on the lessons of 1917. But did this perspective exist? Some denied any perspective of possible workers' uprisings given the famous notion of the disappearance of the working class. A banal defeatist position from those who didn't understand and couldn’t see.

Our position was to situate ourselves vis-à-vis these uprisings, to participate in them, contribute to them. We should note that these uprisings had indeed taken place. It had begun began a little like at the time of the First World War, by a struggle within armies, desertions in Germany, strikes which announced the awakening of the working class from being chloroformed as it had been in 1914. There was real discontent but above all, once again in the defeated countries: in Italy, in Germany, in Poland. As I already said, in numerous small towns in Germany, there was a control by some popular militias. What was new was that the bourgeoisie understood it. It had drawn the lessons from World War One and it wasn't going to let flashpoints of struggle develop. It faced up to them, preventing prisoners from returning to Germany and occupying the country. Japan was the same.

There was above all the fact that the bourgeoisie know perfectly well how to play on chauvinist sentiments against the Nazi massacres. Within the populations an anti-German sentiment of revenge predominated. The western and Russian bourgeoisie played on this scale with all their forces. To such a point that the anarchists, the Trotskyists and all those situated on the left of Stalinism exalted the "victory against Nazism". It was their way of taking part in the unleashing of chauvinism.

In the beaten countries, there was the onslaught of the Americans and Russian armies. And in the victorious countries there was the unleashing of an incredible chauvinism, much worse than at the time of the First World War.

It was necessary to draw lessons from it. We saw the Russians and Americans in a race. They were leaving no no-man's land. The German army was chased out of each town and they took their place. They massacred any hint of proletarian resistance.

On the contrary, the others, Vercesi and co., what they hadn't understood as a perspective before, they now considered that we were going into a period of the development of class struggle where the proletariat would move towards the reconstitution of the party. Our position in 45 was contrary to that: no reconstitution of the party, the movement wasn't there for it. We were still in a period of reaction.

The end of the war didn't resolve any problems. There was now the Russian/American antagonism, we were going to continue in the course of war and probably towards a third. The war in Korea confirmed this idea for us.

PH: But before coming to that, you had seen a war more terrifying than the first. But Jaures had said that if there was another world war, it would be frightening, would result in millions of deaths and leave humanity drained of blood. You saw the unspeakable capacity for capitalist destruction, massive destructions of populations: did this irrational destructiveness of capitalism produce a discouragement in the revolutionary minority or among others – the idea that whatever happened they would destroy you?

MC: The idea of Jaures has not been verified. On the contrary, the communist position was valid. If the proletariat didn't make a revolution (as the First Congress of 1919 said), if the wave of revolution did not develop, then, inevitably, a second world war would be prepared since the problems of capitalism were not resolved by the first. For us this was still more valid after the Second World War. This was only a continuation of the first. The second war was different, new blocs would be set up at the end of it. The same classical problem of marxism remained: there is no place in decadent capitalism for the development of the productive forces in relation to the markets. Consequently, another war will take place. What we did see was the this capacity of Russian and American occupation, this taking hostage of 5 million German soldiers from Germany who were put into work camps, and all the triumphant chauvinism, so we concluded that we had to again wait until a situation arose where a revolution would be possible. The attempts of 43 and 45 had failed. Consequently there inevitably opened a period of reaction for quite a long time in a situation comparable to that of the 30's.

Reconstruction

PH: Capitalism went on to a reconstruction.

MC: We hadn't seen the possibilities of reconstruction. We only saw the continuation of war. And, effectively, when you make a balance sheet - it's easier to judge today - the number of massacres, wars and destruction since 45 is greater than the Second World War cost humanity. Entire countries in Africa and Asia have been ravaged by war. There have been incredible massacres in Indo-China, Cambodia, etc. That has been the continuation of the world war in other forms, because capitalism has no solution.

But in the main industrial countries, in Europe above all, capitalism ensured a reconstruction which has allowed it to breathe life into the centre of capitalism and not the periphery.

We thought that the continuation of the war under other forms would lead the world proletariat against a brick wall, those of the victorious countries this time, faced with shortages of provisions. It took close to 6 years in Europe in order to assure normal provisions. Up until 1950 there were ration books in France. The precarious conditions of war persisted up to the 1950's.

PH: That's the reason why I have been well-fed, since I was born in 1950 (laughter).

MC: Immediately afterwards came the Korean War. What was also new is that for us it wasn't a new period of reconstruction and disarmament, as after the First World War where we saw disarmament and speeches about peace. It was only by the 30's that rearmament took off and assured the development of the war economy. Here, after the Second World War, rearmament didn't let up. The Americans distributed their surplus, implemented the Marshall Plan, but the development of armaments didn't stop. The whole period from 1950 to 1970 was a period of the continuation of the war economy. Rearmament had only restarted beforehand in 1934, 16 years after the war. Here, on the contrary, no armaments crisis, but an immense development of sophisticated armaments that were more and more destructive, and a continual massacre in the world.

PH: You have been reproached for exaggerating the war in Korea as an imminent preclude to a new world war.

MC: Tensions between the two blocs reached incredible paroxysms. There were more than a million deaths. It wasn't only MacArthur who envisaged using the atomic bomb. The most powerful imperialism in the world was engaged here, the United States. The Russians didn't have the atomic bomb yet. Korea was supported by China which was friendly with Russia. The configuration of the blocs that we know today was established following the world war. Some small countries changed places, but the heads of the bloc remained the same.

Thus this reproach of exaggeration is stupid, since the situation lacked very little for war to break out. MacArthur was only an army general but there were all the councillors of the White House who came from Trotskyism like Shachtman and Burnham. It's enough to read Burnham's book of the time which says: "Russia hasn't got the atomic bomb, we have it, why are we waiting to use it preventively, when we recall that on the eve of the war we allowed Germany to reconstruct."

When you read the press of the time, you see a debate in the United States: do we use the bomb and lose China or do we simply try to divide Korea. When this debate unfolded, we had in our memory all the conferences between France-Britain and Hitler where each time the former gave concessions in order to stop war. In the end, Munich resolved none of the problems and led to war. Just as today, they filled our ears with peace conferences and destroyed some obsolete missiles. There was in fact a new preparation for the use of better arms. That was the state of mind in which we found ourselves in 1950. They were going to war... there was a cold war for a whole period. There were all the wars for decolonisation. We considered that it was a different period from the one between the world wars, 1919-30, where great illusions in peace predominated.

The crisis in Cuba was serious. It was only at the last second that the Russians understood that they were badly placed to take Cuba, which was too far away...

PH: After the war, what became of the revolutionary minorities who had resisted on proletarian positions during the war? The RKD, Bordiga's party, Battaglia Comunista and you?

MC: After the Liberation, let's look first of all at the RKD. They were disappointed Trotskyists. They were fundamentally against the defence of the USSR, but apart from that they remained Trotskyists. There was a crisis in general among Trotskyists in 46.

But you have to bear in mind that in this period there was a halt in the development of revolutionary groups. Two years after the Liberation. Whereas just at the end of the war we saw a development, two years later revolutionaries again found themselves particularly isolated. We found ourselves in the same situation as in the 30's.

The RKD focussed on anti-Stalinism, being anti-Russian became an essential question for them. It was the Evil Empire for them. They began to lose the marxist method and that led them towards anarchism.

To be clear here it was during the war that we had envisaged holding international conferences, open to the Dutch Left (with Canne Meier, etc) and several councilist groups, with the RKD and the OCR.

PH: Who are the OCR?

MC: These were the Trotskyists that the RKD had enticed away from Trotskyism by their platform at the end of the war. They were in the 4th International in Toulouse. Organisation Communiste Révolutionnaire. The two groups more or less evolved together.

The Dutch Left were mixed together with some elements close to Sneevliet17. They were also against the defence of the USSR. Sneevliet, who came from Spartacusbond18, was at least firmer on the question of the party, on the necessity for an organisation, whereas the Dutch Left did not support the idea of political organisation; it preferred the notion of working groups, thus it separated from Sneevliet.

All the groups were invited, even the ICP.

PH: But you were an irritant to the ICP?

MC: yes, of course. And the ICP didn't want to participate in this conference after the war. They considered that the Bordigist party was the single, unique expression. From 45 to 46, the ICP comprised 3000 people, which was already enormous.

Contrary to the position of the RKD, who thought that Russia was enemy number 1, Bordiga on the other hand thought that it was the USA. Bordiga hadn't accepted the idea of Russian state capitalism. He said: in Russia there are agents who work for American imperialism, who exploit the Russian workers and serve to transfer the benefits to American capital. He didn't recognise that they worked for their own account. For him the real enemy wasn't bureaucratic Russia but the American state. I made several attempts for the ICP to come, especially because the conference was taking place in Brussels.

PH: What became of Vercesi? When did he participate in the Brussels anti-fascist committee?

MC: It was at the beginning of 1945. We made a resolution for the exclusion of Vercesi but at the time when the Fraction was united.

Contacts in the USA were very sparse.

Soon after the exclusion of Vercesi the ICP reconstituted itself, but the crisis in the Italian Fraction also existed in the French nucleus on the fundamental question of perspectives. We recognised that at the end of the war the dark period, the reactionary course, would continue and that there would not be an immediate resurgence in the class struggle throughout the world. We kept the same position that we took in the 30's: it was stupid to form the party in such periods. Whereas the Italians, the party constituted around Bordiga and Damen, considered that a revolutionary period was starting up again: they participated in elections. The fact that they were 3000 strong led to the vision that it was the small foreign groups who should adhere to the party. They opened their arms to all the world, to those who had gone off to fight in the war in Spain, to those who remained with Vercesi.

We were evidently not in agreement on immediate perspectives, and above all we were against the idea of forming a party which included people who had been excluded, who did not renounce their positions.

PH: It seems that according to the documents you were also for the formation of the party?

MC: At the beginning, that was the line from 43 to 45. As the war finished we changed position: the revolution will not happen, it has been nipped in the bud preventively, thus no possibility of the party for the moment. There is only the possibility of an organisation of revolutionaries as in the 30's.

All the old members of the Union Communiste were caught up in this creation of the party (D., L., etc).

Two positions emerged: one is that the party is reconstituted and we no longer have any reason to exist as a separate group; the Fraction must dissolve itself and enter the party in Italy as individuals - the majority of them were Italian refugees (as some said at the time "the Italian proletariat has golden balls"!). The authority of Bordiga did the rest. The other position, for us the majority of the French group, held that if founding the party in 43 might have been valid, now it was no longer so, so our position was: we should go to Italy to discuss their platform with these people, because in fact we had no basis, no document. We couldn't judge. We couldn't dissolve without knowing the positions and the usefulness or not of joining as a fraction, etc.

It thus produced a split in the Fraction; a part of the French nucleus joined the ICP.

We continued to lay claim to the tradition of the IIIrd International: the party couldn't be formed anytime and anyhow, we couldn't dissolve just like that.

When the conference took place in Brussels, Vercesi was there also; we maintained a high personal regard. When I asked him for some explanation for his participation in the anti-fascist committee, he replied: this committee represented the soviets for me.

I replied to him that it wasn't true: the anti-fascist committee represented a conglomeration of parties, whereas the soviets were unitary organs of the proletariat.

Vercesi was still part of the Fraction in Belgium as an opportunist element. When we were talking about making common work at the end of the war, with the RKD and the councilists, he said to us: what? This is the United Front, etc. There was no longer any need to hold conferences, at all costs it was necessary to join the newly-created party.

PH: Can you say something about the evolution of Bordiga's party?

MC: It was formed in 43 in the north of Italy on the clearest positions against the war. In the north it was above all old comrades from the Fraction. In the platform of 43 they had much clearer positions in relation to Russia and in relation to the war. But, at the same time, in the south where the government of Badoglio was established, a number of more or less confused groups were formed, more or less against the war, but above all against fascism. Bordiga's and Vercesi's positions were equivocal.

But, up to 45 they evolved in parallel. In 45, with the reunification of Italy, the two halves of the party found each other. They then published the platform of 45 which is much more ambiguous, less clear on the question of Russia - it's the contribution of Bordiga. And that continued like that up to 52, where we see the split between the two19. In fact it was an unlikely, confused unity. Many comrades from abroad, in France, joined the party of Bordiga.

However, in 52, Bordiga and Suzanne20 recognised that it was an error to form the party. But against this, those of the north continued to defend the validity of it. The question of the ICP on the unions remained orthodox, along the lines of the International, but at root closer to those of Trotskyism. Those in the north were in favour of participation in elections.

It was easier to discuss with Battaglia Comunista. But numerically ICP-Programma developed with a more particular sense of its activity.

PH: On the whole did the two parties continue with a correct denunciation of bourgeois anti-fascism?

MC: Yes but with many difficulties and ambiguities, from the fact that the minority had never been condemned for its position on Spain when it came into the party. In order not to embarrass these comrades who had been in Spain, they preferred not to talk about it; nor about Vercesi and his anti-fascist committee in Belgium. We had to wait 4 years for them to pronounce on it. We recalled that he had been excluded for this position and asked: how is he now a member of the central committee of the new ICP?

It was four years after that there was a small paragraph in their press saying that it was an error to have participated in such a committee.

PH: The RKD reproached you, and yourself in particular, for not wanting the split immediately with the revisionists of Vercesi. I'll quote an extract of the RKD bulletin of April 45: "... it took a direct and open betrayal to advance the group of Marco21 which then formed the left wing of the French and Italian Fraction but which didn't want to separate from Vercesi and company. Even after the entry of the revisionist fraction into the imperialist coalition, comrade Marco pronounced against an immediate split out of a concern that the discussion would suffer from it".

MC: The RKD were above all Trotskyists, with correct positions against the war and on Russia. But on other questions, the national question, on the question of the party, they had the position of Lenin. They kept to their Trotskyist methods. They were for entryism vis-a-vis Trotskyism. They wanted to provoke splits among other groups. In relation to the Trotskyists I wanted to see splits, but not in the Fraction. Thus we were debating the question of the anti-fascist committee. When the question of joining the Italian party came up, some comrades said: it is necessary to make a split on this question. It was a fundamental question to discuss, and we really wanted to discuss it. We had wanted to go to Italy. And we did go there. We had been discussing the question of what the party was. Bordiga was there. There was a refusal by Bordiga.

PH: Last question. What came out of the conference of 45? Why did you disappear in 1952, leaving the ground free for Trotskyists groups such as Socialisme ou Barbarie? During this whole period of the triumph of the ideologies of national liberation, there was no longer a revolutionary voice against a bourgeois point of view. All the existing groups from the Bordigists to the Trotskyists wanted to support this farce of national independence for 20 years. You were irresponsible in leaving the ground free to them like this. And finally you did not contribute to theoretically arming the proletariat on the eve of the historic resurgence of 68.

M.C: In the fifties, all the revolutionary groups began to run out of breath in their isolation. Their numbers fell. The Stalinists ruled on the streets. As we reached a clear position on the anti-working class nature of the unions and the workers were sticking with them like never before, we were cut off from the situation. So we brought out Internationalisme and L'étincelle in print.

PH: A printed paper was costly.

M.C: It was dear but it came out of our pockets although we were only about a dozen of us. It came out with from 2 to 300 copies. After that we had no more means so we brought out Internationalisme only in a roneoed form. We settled on beginning anew the work of Bilan while waiting for the situation to decant.

After the conference of 45, we tried along with comrades of the Dutch Left to launch an international review for clarification together which could be a pole of reference for dispersed elements. There was only a single issue. We had some correspondence with Mattick22 who had the same positions as Canne Meier23 on the question of organisation. These councilist groups disappeared very quickly. We remained in contact with Spartacusbond ...

The period didn't allow the emergence of new groups.

The Bordigists in Italy shrunk from 3000 to about a hundred. All that was left after the departure of Battaglia Communista was Programma, which diminished in numbers in its turn because discussion was not possible within it. If there was a discussion there was a split. All the old comrades disappeared little by little. But the group kept going because it had a platform around Maffi and Bordiga. But they were engaging in an activism around union struggles, around struggles for national liberation, saluting Che Guevara. It was the time that Dangeville and Camatte left. They gathered together a number of unprincipled types.

Internationalisme in its turn underwent difficulties. Some left for Socialisme ou Barbarie, seduced by the theories of Chaulieu on the third bureaucratic system. In this period comrades began to leave. And then the question of the Korean War. Some left for the United States. We went to Venezuela.

We thought that France would be at the heart of the next war and it was important that the activity of the group didn’t stop. The idea was to continue working from abroad.

PH: What do you think about this polemic on the gas chambers24?

MC: I know nothing about it. I don't care how they were killed. They were killed in their millions. Guillaume and Co. are imbeciles.

This issue of the International Review brings together four documents that express our present concerns regarding the world situation and our role as revolutionaries within it.
First a new statement about Catalonia. We have already taken take position on these events, as readers of our publications, above all the website will have noticed. In October 2017 we distributed the leaflet “Confrontations in Catalonia: Democracy and the Nation are the reactionary past, the proletariat is the future”, translated into different languages. A number of other articles have appeared, in particular on our Spanish-language page, but these events will require a close following in the period ahead and the latest statement will certainly not be the last.
The independence movement in Catalonia is in direct contradiction with the “rational” management of the capitalist state and economy at the levels of Catalonia, Spain and the European Union. The only ones in the ranks of the bourgeoisie who could profit from a further deepening of this process would be the likes of Putin, the rivals of a strong EU in the world wide inter-imperialist competition. But the aspect that must concern us most of all is the impact of these events on the proletariat. The nationalist fever around Catalonia’s “independence” is a heavy blow against the working class not only in this area, but internationally, given the global importance of the class struggle in Spain.
We are seeing many of those who took part in the “Indignados” revolt in 2001, a movement which strove towards internationalism, towards proletarian principles, abandoning any idea of a fight against capitalism to join the demonstrations for or against independence. Proletarian families are torn apart between those who support Puigdemont or other fractions of the Catalonian cause and the Españolistas who think that Spain should remain one country. And where are the internationalists? They are currently a beleaguered minority, but the need for them to speak out is greater than ever.
The second article ‘The United States at the heart of the growing world disorder’ is about the life of the bourgeoisie of the strongest economic and military power. It is part of an analysis of the ruling class in the main Western countries. The complete article has been published online. The article highlights the great difficulties of the ruling class in the US after almost one year of Trump as president. An important chapter is dedicated to the relationship between the two former bloc leaders, to the role Russia plays today in America’s strategic options.
These assessments  should be seen as a continuation of the orientation decided at the 21st international congress in 2015 to critically analyse the international situation, not excluding a self-critical reflection on possible mistakes we committed at this level in the past (cf. "40 years after the foundation of the ICC” in International Review 156").
The third text in the present review is our Manifesto on the October revolution, Russia 1917, one century after the first successful proletarian revolution. We published it online in October and organised a series of public meetings on the issue. First, we have to defend the internationalist character of the October revolution as part of a world class movement against capitalism. Without this reference point, together with a fearless examination of all the errors committed and the weaknesses encountered, a successful new attempt in the future will not be possible. The Russian revolution is part of our history, part of the proletarian story, despite its degeneration and the atrocities committed in its name afterwards. The Manifesto not only answers the present bourgeois campaigns but also draws the lessons and tries to give indications for the perspective of communism today. Although the revolution did not spread to the whole world and the process remained isolated and thus without a real perspective to overcome capitalism, “the October insurrection is to this day the highest point achieved by the proletarian class struggle – an expression of its ability to become organised on a mass scale, conscious of its goals, confident of taking the reins of social life. It was the anticipation of what Marx called ‘the end of prehistory’, of all conditions in which humanity is at the mercy of unconscious social forces; the anticipation of a future in which, for the first time, humanity will make its own history according to its own needs and purposes.”
The last text in this review is the Resolution on the international class struggle, a document of the last international congress of the ICC in spring 2017.     
With this global analysis of the situation we start the reporting of the results of our congress which traditionally has the fundamental task of deciding the general orientations for our activities in the period ahead. The analysis of the world situation is a crucial element in this. 
The resolution is focussed on the social situation, the balance of forces between the two main classes of present capitalist society – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Almost three decades after the collapse of the old bloc system and the onset of what we call the period of decomposition we are still trying  to get a better understanding of the  challenges facing  revolutionaries today, to sharpen our concepts of the historic course and of decomposition: "The class movements that erupted in the advanced countries after 1968 marked the end of the counter-revolution, and the continuing resistance of the working class constituted an obstacle to the bourgeoisie’s ‘solution’ to the economic crisis: world war. It was possible to define this period as a ‘course towards massive class confrontations’, and to insist that a course towards war could not be opened up without a head-on defeat of an insurgent working class. In the new phase, the disintegration of both imperialist blocs took world war off the agenda independently of the level of class struggle. But this meant that the question of the historic course could no longer be posed in the same terms. The inability of capitalism to overcome its contradictions still means that it can only offer humanity a future of barbarism, whose contours can already be glimpsed in a hellish combination of local and regional wars, ecological devastation, pogromism and fratricidal social violence. But unlike world war, which requires a direct physical as well as ideological defeat of the working class, this ‘new’ descent into barbarism operates in a slower, more insidious manner which can gradually engulf the working class and render it incapable of reconstituting itself as a class. The criterion for measuring the evolution of the balance of forces between the classes can no longer be that the proletariat holding back world war, and has in general become more difficult to gage." (Resolution point 11)

Which criteria do we need today for an appropriate assessment of the balance of class forces?

• The capacity of the working class to resist the austerity policy of the bourgeoisie and the degree of solidarity developed within its ranks are certainly relevant factors for such an assessment.
• However, there is also the question of the perspectives. If the proletariat is not able to perceive itself as a distinct class and develop a perspective going beyond the existing society which subjects us to the alienated logic of profit for the profit's sake, there is no future to strive for – and this state of mind affects the proletariat's capacity to resist. "After 1989, with the collapse of the ‘socialist’ regimes, a qualitatively new factor emerged: the impression of the impossibility of a modern society not based on capitalist principles. Under these circumstances, it is more difficult for the proletariat to develop, not only its class consciousness and class identity, but even its defensive economic struggles, since the logic of the needs of the capitalist economy weigh much heavier if they appear to be without any alternative." (Point 13)
• More specifically the resolution points to the pernicious effects of the loss of solidarity within the ranks of the proletariat: "In particular, we are seeing the rise of the phenomenon of scapegoating, of ways of thinking which blame persons – onto whom all of the evil of the world is projected – for whatever goes wrong in society. Such ideas open the door to the pogrom. Today populism is the most striking, but far from being the only manifestation of this problem, which tends to permeate all social relations. At work and in the everyday life of the working class, it increasingly weakens cooperation, and favours atomisation and the development of mutual suspicion and of mobbing." (point 19)

We do not think that the point of no return has been crossed, that the class in the established centres of world capitalism, along with the enormous proletariat of China, has been defeated. We still see a potential for the development of what we call the political-moral dimension of the proletarian struggle: the emerging of a deep seated rejection of the existing way of life on the part of wider sectors of the class (point 24).

This difficult situation also affects our tasks as a minority of the class. The revolutionary minorities are a product of the class and have a specific role – in the present period to be an organisational bridge from the past revolutionary struggles to those of the future, even if a huge distance has to be travelled.

November 2017   
 

Catalonia, and Barcelona in particular, is one of those places inscribed in the memory of the Spanish and world proletariat. The struggles, the victories and defeats of the working class in this region have left their mark in the history of our class. Therefore, in the present situation, the ICC, through this article and others which have appeared in our territorial press, aims to alert our class to the danger of the proletariat being dragged into the unfolding nationalist squabble, which can only damage it.

From the hope generated by the Indignados movement in 2011…

In the same place, only a few years apart, two social scenarios that are not just different, but completely opposed to each other.

Barcelona, a few days after 15 May 2011: during the movement of the Indignados, Catalonia Square is a nub of meetings and assemblies. More than 40 different commissions are looking into questions from the environmental catastrophe to solidarity with the struggles in Greece against the cuts in social benefits. There are no flags, but there are improvised libraries brought along by anonymous participants and available to all, with the aim of widening the vision of the movement, which is essentially an expression of indignation about the ravages of the capitalist crisis, of concern about the sombre future which the survival of this system implies for the whole of humanity. Places like this in Barcelona or elsewhere in Spain, in a movement initiated at the Puerta de Sol in Madrid, are seeing people of all ages, all languages, different conditions, coming together and debating with a sense of respect and a desire to listen. Day after day workers’ demonstrations converge on the assemblies, demonstrations against the cuts in health benefits, delegations from neighbourhoods looking for solidarity in their fight against evictions and so on. The assemblies function as a collective brain which tries to link together the different expressions of the struggle into a common, unifying cause. “We are against the system because the system is inhuman”, this is what is proudly proclaimed. The movement is subjected to ruthless repression[1]. This violent attack is denounced, but the movement also raises the slogan “violence is also being paid 600 euros a month”.

…to the backward step into nationalism in 2017

And today, in the same streets, hundreds of thousands are demonstrating “for the independence of Catalonia”, but in this they can only be manipulated, can only operate as a mass to be manoeuvred, can only follow actions called by shadowy forces, actions which follow a script written by others. This is what happened to those who suffered the blows of police truncheons when they defended the ballot boxes during the October 1st referendum, those who saw how, in the days that followed the referendum, the organisations behind it relativised its significance and reduced it to a purely “symbolic” act. It’s what happened to those who got caught up in the euphoria of “we are already a republic” after the pantomime of the proclamation of the Catalan republic on 27 October. As the independence leaders later insisted, this was a virtual, “symbolic” action. In complete contrast to 15th May movement 15M in 2011, when you join in with nationalist actions, the slightest critical spirit can only be an obstacle. All you need is to learn by heart the national “narrative”. This is true of all nationalism, but in the case of Catalonia and other countries which don’t have their own state, this narrative is real mess where everything is mixed up and where no critical voices can be heard. So there are demands for a lost Arcadia , for a Catalan fatherland that never existed. In this process an enemy is needed and this can only be the central state with its “fascist” vestiges. And a scapegoat: the “Spanish” in general and everything which goes with them, presented as the cause of all the suffering of this society. And then you are ready to respond to the calls on social media and march, head down, eyes closed, alongside Catalan exploiters, corrupt Catalan politicians, the Catalan police, the Catalanist “ultras” dedicated to pointing the finger at and intimidating anyone who’s not fervent enough in their anti-Spanish feelings. And it’s the same ignoble schema we see again in the demonstrations which, a few days later, in the same streets, march “against the independence of Catalonia”. This time the lost paradise is the “peaceful co-existence of all Spaniards”. This time, the scapegoats, those to blame for poverty or uncertainty about the future are those who “defy the law” or “those who want to break up Spain”. And again, you march with a cohort of corrupt and repressive exploiters, and with another set of ultras who follow the same path of more or less open violence and intimidation[2].

Two diametrically opposed options for the future of society

Between the Indignados movement in 2011 and the recent orgies of Catalan or Spanish patriotism, there is a class frontier, a gulf in perspectives. The first, despite the undeniable difficulties this movement had, was the expression of a class – the proletariat – which carries within itself the possibility of social transformation on a planetary scale, a class which needs to find a coherent explanation for all the problems facing the world, a class whose struggle creates the basis for a real unification of humanity, overcoming divisions of class, race, culture etc. A movement based on the quest for a revolutionary solution for humanity, for a future free from the chains of exploitation. These patriotic orgies, by contrast, are based on an atavistic yearning for a mythified past. Not only that: marching under nationalist flags justifies and deepens the separation between class brothers and sisters. Their perspective is not one of a revolutionary step forward, but of a reactionary step backwards to a past full of fear and distrust. It is fuelled not by a search for a new social organisation aimed at satisfying the needs of all, but by the decomposition of the old social order whose watchword is “every man for himself”.

How did it come to this?

Various circumstantial and local explanations are put forward. According to the Catalan nationalists, we are seeing the resurgence of the Francoist vestiges which remained in Spain after the transition to democracy. According to the Spanish nationalists, the movement for independence is a way of diverting attention from the corrupt practises which have characterised Catalan administrations for decades. The main refutation of these apologetics is the behaviour of the main actors in this process. For decades, the main party of the Generalitat (the autonomous Catalan administration), formerly known as CiU and now the PDECat[3], based its hegemony on a corrupt, client-centred regime. But this didn’t stop successive Spanish governments of right and left from handing out succulent subsidies to this party from the coffers of the central state. And for their part, the Catalan nationalists have never had any qualms about working with the “residues of Francoism” in the Spanish state they talk about so much, making agreements with the Popular Party on the right[4] and then with the Socialist Zapatero[5] on the left (the tripartite governments of ERC and Iniciativa[6], who are now part of the supporters of the Mayor of Barcelona). When the PDECat came back to the Generalitat in 2010, Artur Mas[7] – the successor anointed by Pujol himself[8] – didn’t hesitate to count on the PP to carry out a programme of implacable austerity against living standards which would later inspire Mariano Rajoy[9] himself.

This is why we can say that the explanation for the separatist drive in Catalonia can’t be found in the specific historical evolution of Catalonia or Spain but in world historic conditions, in the fact that world capitalism as a whole has entered into its final phase, its phase of social decomposition.

The historic causes

This is why we can say that the explanation for the separatist movement in Catalonia doesn’t have its origins in the specific elements of historical evolution in Catalonia or Spain, but in world historic conditions, in the entry of global capitalism into its final phase, the phase of social decomposition.

Marxism has never denied the existence of particular factors in the evolution of capitalism in each country. In particular, in the case of the different separatist movements in Spain, which function as a supplementary and reactionary barrier to the capacity of the proletariat to recognise itself as an indivisible class, it recognises the weight of the uneven development between those zones more open to commerce and industry, and others more caught up in isolation and unable to catch up with the rest[10]. But marxism also explains how the evolution of these local conflicts and contradictions is conditioned by the course of capitalism on world scale. This is especially obvious in the case of nationalism. While in the 18th and 19th centuries the formation of certain new nations could represent a decisive advance in the demolition of feudal structures and the development of the productive forces, once capitalism had reached the end of its ascendant phase at the beginning of the 20th century, “national liberation” became a clearly reactionary myth used to dragoon the population, and the revolutionary class in particular, in and for imperialist war[11] This is why genuine revolutionaries have always denounced the anti-proletarian character of separatism in Spain, as a means to defend exploitation, as an enemy of the working class. The proletariat in Catalonia, one of the oldest in the world workers’ movement, has been obliged on a number of occasions to recognise this.

The history of the proletariat in Catalonia and the grip of nationalism

It’s not by chance that Barcelona was the theatre for the first general strike on Spanish territory, in 1855, or that this city was the seat of the Congress of the Workers of the Spanish Region, which in 1870 formed the basis of the First International in Spain[12]. It was equally no coincidence that, faced with the most advanced expressions of the class struggle, such as the “La Canadiense” strike in Barcelona in 1919, the Catalan bourgeoisie, in 1920-22, made use of the bosses’ “pistolero” gangs against strikes and the militants of anarcho-syndicalist organisations[13]. It’s not by chance that Catalan nationalism (under the leadership of Francisco Cambó), along with the most backward sectors of the Spanish army, was the main promoter of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship of 1923-30. And it was again not by chance that it was the Catalan Generalitat (Companys supported by the Stalinists and with the complicity of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT itself) that became the bastion of the Republican state, diverting the workers – through both mystifications and force of arms - from their class terrain, from the fight against exploitation, towards the military fronts and the conflict between the fascist and democratic camps which prefigured the camp that lined up in the second world imperialist butchery. It was not fortuitous that it was the Catalan Generalitat which was charged with the criminal mission to put down in fire and blood the rising of the proletariat of Barcelona in May 1937, the last attempt of the proletariat to fight on its own terrain against the exploiters of all camps and all fatherlands[14].

Neither was it an accident that it was the workers of Catalonia, who had sometimes come from the most backward regions in the country, who in 1970 transformed their struggles (Bajo Llobregat in 1973, SEAT in 1975) into real beacons for the struggles of the whole working class in Spain. The working class in Catalonia, through its own development and its accumulated experience, is a central link in the chain of the associated production of social wealth, a process embodied in the international proletariat which comes up against the private, national appropriation of this wealth. In the region of Barcelona you will find workers from more than 60 nationalities, from trainee American engineers to immigrant workers from Sub-Saharan Africa. All of them are an integral and fundamental part of the same world working class, even if capitalist ideology, above all through its forces on the extreme left, constantly seeks to confer a “national” identity on the proletariat, which can only serve to undermine its class unity.[15]

What’s at stake for the proletariat of Catalonia and for the proletariat of the world

Today, it’s the whole potential accumulated over decades of workers’ struggles which is threatened by the advance of capitalist social decomposition. This is not a social situation in which the workers are prepared to submit, like cannon fodder, to the quarrels between different factions of the exploiting class. That would mean the complete victory of the bourgeois solution to the historic crisis of capitalism. This is illustrated by the current situation in Catalonia, by the fact that the workers are not following with any great enthusiasm the calls for a general strike in favour of “independence”. But neither does it mean that the workers are aware that they represent an alternative for the future of humanity, a future which can banish forever the war of each against all which decomposing capitalism carries in its entrails.

Particularly dangerous to the consciousness of the working class are the alternatives which claim that there is a “rational” solution to these tensions within the exploiting class, when capitalist decomposition is throwing up increasingly irrational “populist” answers, such as the call to leave the European Union (proposed for example by the CUP or parts of Podemos[16]), or the total acceptance of the Spanish state, as put forward by the “constitutionalist” parties. Nationalism can only end in violence. The illusion of a “revolution of smiles” peddled by Catalan separatism, or the dream of a “return to normal” by the supporters of Spanish unity, is a mystifying fiction. As we already stressed in our 1990 article (International Review 62), “The East: nationalist barbarism [77]” , “all expressions of nationalism, big or small, necessarily and fatally lead into the march of aggression, of war, of each against all’, of exclusivism and discrimination”.

The alternative of the world proletariat is a completely different perspective for humanity. As we underline in this article on nationalist barbarism:

“The struggle of the proletariat contains the seed for overcoming national, ethnic, religious and linguistic divisions with which capitalism ­continuing the work of the oppressors of the previous modes of production has tortured humanity. In the common body of the united struggle for class interests these divisions will naturally and logically disappear. The common bases are the conditions of exploitation, which everywhere will tend to worsen with the world crisis, the common interest is the affirmation of their necessities as human beings against the inhuman necessities, each time more despotic, of the commodity and the national interest”.

What’s at stake in the situation of the fraction of the world proletariat in Catalonia is the necessity for the revolutionary class to defend the interests of humanity as a whole, to advocate international class solidarity against the social disintegration which decadent capitalism is bringing about.

Faced with the search for a refuge in false local identities, with the notion of “every man for himself” to the detriment of everyone else, with growing social pessimism and national divisions, the proletariat must have confidence in its own forms of association. It must understand that the barbarism of the present world is the result of submitting the planet to the capitalist laws of profit and competition.  And above all, it is the duty of those groups who aim to stand in the forefront of the class struggle to denounce all the traps which divide our class and, above all, those elements who try to justify their support for one or another faction of the ruling class because they claim that they are “less repressive” or more favourable to the interests of the proletarian struggle. If the world-wide revolutionary alternative of the proletariat fails, the perspective can only be a war of each against all, in which it will be difficult to say which faction is the most cruel or the most inhuman in its attempt to ensure its survival at the expense of the rest of the human race.

When the police tried to tear down the camps of the 15M movement in Barcelona 2011, the cry went up: “we are all Barcelona”. It was raised in all the squares and all the demonstrations, and nowhere more loudly than at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. The upsurge of nationalism in Catalonia is a blow to the head not only to the proletariat of Barcelona, but to the proletariat in the whole of Spain, since throughout the country proletarians have been pulled into mobilisations for or against the unity of the Spanish state. This poison has also affected the many immigrants from Spain now working in other European countries, where there have been small but significant demonstrations around the same theme. And a blow against the proletariat of Spain, precisely because of the depth of its revolutionary traditions, is a blow against the entire world proletariat. As ever, solidarity with the workers of Spain can only lie in the development of the international class struggle.

Valerio, 5 December 2017

Last year, the ruling “elites” of world capitalism were shocked by the outcome of the referendum in the United Kingdom about British membership in the European Union (“Brexit”), and by the result of the presidential elections in the United States (President Trump). In both cases, the results obtained did not correspond to the intentions or the interests of leading factions of the bourgeois class. We are therefore embarking on a series of interconnected pieces which will aim at making an initial balance sheet of the political situation in the United States and Britain in the aftermath of these events[1]. To widen the scope of our examination, we will also develop an analysis of the politics of the ruling class in the two main countries of continental Europe, France and Germany. In France, presidential and parliamentary elections took place in the early summer of this year. In Germany, the general elections to the Bundestag took place in September. The bourgeoisie of both countries is obliged to react to what has taken place in Britain and the USA – and they have reacted.

In choosing to concentrate on these four countries, these pieces will not attempt an analysis of the political life of the bourgeoisie in two countries – Russia and China – which play a key role in the capitalist, imperialist power constellation today. A study of the situation there remains to be done. Having said this, we should point out that both Russia and China play an extremely prominent role in our analysis of the political situation of the four old central “western” capitalist countries to be examined in these pieces. We will also concentrate on the political life of the ruling class, without entering into that of the proletariat. Here again, it is clear that the present situation poses a series of questions and challenges to the working class which revolutionary organisations have to take up and help clarify, and which we will attempt to do in future articles. For the moment, we recommend readers to consult the resolution on the international class struggle [84] from our last international congress, published in this issue of the International Review.

The historical background to these political developments is provided by a deeper process: the accelerating decomposition of the capitalist social order. We highly recommend that the reading of this and following articles be supplemented by a reading or re-reading of our “Theses on Decomposition [85]”, available on our site. For us, the present situation is a strong confirmation of what we outlined in that text, written over a quarter of a century ago. In particular, the concrete examination of the present situation confirms that it is indeed the ruling class itself which is first and foremost affected by this decomposition of its system, and that (except in face of a proletarian menace) the bourgeoisie has increasing difficulties to maintain its political unity and coherence.

1. The election of Donald Trump as president of the USA, which closely followed the unexpected result of the EU referendum in the UK, has created a wave of unease, fear, but also questioning across the world. How could our rulers, those who are supposedly in charge of the present world order, allow such things to happen – turns of events that seem to go against the “rational” interests of the capitalist class? How did it come about that a chancer, a narcissist thug and hustler is now at the head of the world’s most powerful state? And more important: what does this tell us about where the entire world is headed.

Part I: A hundred years of class struggle

2. In our view, the real condition of human society can only be understood by looking it at from the point of view of the class struggle, of the exploited class of this society, the proletariat, which has no interest in hiding the truth and whose struggle oblige it to see through all the mystifications of capitalism in pursuit of the goal of overthrowing it.  Equally, it is only possible to understand current, immediate or localised events by locating them in a world-historic framework. This is the essence of the marxist method. It is for this reason, and not simply because 2017 marks the centenary of the revolution in Russia, that we begin by going back a century or more to understand the historic epoch within which the most recent developments in the world situation are taking place: that of the decline or decadence of the capitalist mode of production.

The revolution in Russia was the response of the working class in Russia to the horrors of the first imperialist world war. As affirmed by the Communist International in 1919, this war marked the beginning of the new epoch, the end of the ascendant period of capitalism, of the first great burst of capitalist “globalisation” as it hit the barriers posed by the division of the world into rival national states: the epoch of “wars and revolutions”  The capacity of the working class to overthrow the bourgeois state in an entire country and to endow itself with a political party capable of guiding the  class toward the dictatorship of the proletariat was indicative that the promise of replacing  capitalist barbarism was both an historic possibility and necessity.

Moreover the Bolshevik party which, in 1917, was in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement, recognised that the seizure of power by the workers’ soviets in Russia could only be sustained if it was the first blow of an incipient world revolution. Equally, the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg understood that if the world proletariat did not respond to the challenge posed by the October insurrection, and put an end to the capitalist system, mankind would be plunged into an epoch of growing barbarism, a spiral of wars and destruction that would endanger human civilisation.

With the world revolution in mind, and with the need to create an alternative pole of reference for the proletariat to now counter revolutionary Social Democracy, the Bolshevik Party took the lead in the creation of the Communist International whose first congress took place in Moscow in 1919. The new Communist Parties particularly those in Germany, Italy were to spearhead the extension of the proletarian revolution to western Europe.

3. The revolution in Russia indeed sparked off a world-wide series of mass strikes and uprisings which compelled the bourgeoisie to put an end to the imperialist slaughter, but the international working class was not able to take power in other countries, aside from some short-lived attempts in Hungary and in some German cities. Faced with the greatest threat yet from its potential grave-digger, the ruling class was able to overcome its most bitter rivalries to unite against the proletarian revolution: isolating the soviet power in Russia by blockade, invasion and support for the armed counter-revolution; making use of the social democratic workers’ parties and the unions, which had already shown their loyalty to capital by participating in the imperialist war effort, to infiltrate or neutralise the workers’ councils in Germany and divert them towards an accommodation with the new “democratic” bourgeois regime. But the defeat not only showed the continuing capacity of a now reactionary ruling class to rule; it also derived from the immaturity of the working class which was forced to make a sudden transition from the struggle for reforms to the struggle for revolution, and still carried within itself many profound illusions in the possibility of improving the capitalist regime through the democratic vote, the nationalisation of key industries or the granting of social benefits to the poorest layers of society. In addition, the working class had been severely traumatised by the horrors of war, in which the fine flower of its youth had been decimated, emerging from it with deep divisions between workers of the “victorious” and “vanquished” nations.

In Russia, the Bolshevik party, faced with isolation, civil war and economic collapse, and more and entangled with the apparatus of the Soviet State, made a series of disastrous errors which more and more brought it into violent conflict with the working class, notably the policy of the “Red Terror” which involved the suppression of workers’ protests and political organisations, culminating in the crushing of the revolt at Kronstadt in 1921 when the latter demanded the restoration of the genuine soviet power which had existed in 1917.  On the international level, the Communist International, which was also increasingly tied to the needs of the Soviet State rather than the world revolution, began to resort to opportunist policies which undermined its original clarity, such as the United Front Tactic adopted in 1922.

This degeneration gave rise to an important left opposition notably in the German and Italian Parties. And it was from the latter that the Italian fraction was able, in the late twenties and thirties to uncover the lessons of the eventual defeat of the revolution.

4. The defeat of the world revolutionary wave thus verified the warnings of the revolutionaries in 1917-18 about the consequences of such a failure: a new descent into barbarism. The dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia not only degenerated but turned into a capitalist dictatorship against the proletariat, a process that was confirmed (though not begun) by the victory of the Stalinist apparatus with its doctrine of “socialism in one country”. The “peace” installed to end the threat of revolution soon gave way to new imperialist conflicts which were accelerated and intensified by the outbreak of the world crisis of overproduction in 1929, a further sign that the expansion of capital was coming up against its own inbuilt limits. The working class in the heartlands of the system, especially the US and Germany, was fully exposed to the blows of the economic depression, but having tried and failed to make the revolution a decade earlier, it was fundamentally a defeated class, despite some real expressions of class resistance, such as in the USA and Spain. It was thus unable to stand in the way of another march towards world war.

5. The pitch-fork of the counter-revolution had three main prongs: Stalinism, fascism, democracy, each one of which has left deep scars in the psyche of the working class.

The counter-revolution plumbed the lowest depths in the countries where the revolutionary flame had risen the highest: Russia and Germany. But everywhere, faced with the necessity to exorcise the proletarian spectre, to cope with the greatest economic crisis in its history, and to prepare for war, capitalism assumed an increasingly totalitarian form, penetrating every pore of social and economic life. The Stalinist regime set the tone: a complete war economy, the crushing of all dissent, monstrous rates of exploitation, a vast concentration camp. But the worst legacy of Stalinism – in life as well as in death decades later – was that it masqueraded as the true heir of the October revolution. The centralisation of capital in the hands of the state was sold to the world as socialism, imperialist expansion as proletarian internationalism. Although, in the years when the October revolution was still a living memory, many workers continued to believe in this myth of the Socialist Fatherland, many more have been turned away from all thought of revolution by successive revelations of the true nature of the Stalinist regime. The damage Stalinism has done to the perspective of communism, to the hope that working class revolution can inaugurate a higher form of social organisation, is incalculable, not least because Stalinism did not descend on the proletariat from the clouds, but was made possible by the international defeat of the class movement and above all the degeneration of its political party. After the traumatic defection of the social democratic parties in 1914, for the second time in the space of less than two decades the organisations that the working class had laboured mightily to create and defend had betrayed it and become its worst enemy. Could there be a greater blow to the proletariat’s self-confidence, its conviction in the possibility of leading humanity onto a higher level of social life?

Fascism, initially a movement of outcasts from the ruling and middle classes, and even renegades from the workers’ movement, could be taken up by the most powerful factions of German and Italian capital because it coincided with their needs: to complete the crushing of the proletariat and the mobilisation for war. It specialised in the use of modern techniques to unleash the dark forces of irrationality that lie under the surface of bourgeois society. Nazism in particular, the product of a much more devastating defeat of the working class in Germany, attained new depths of irrationality, statifying and industrialising the mediaeval pogrom, and leading demoralised masses in a mad march towards self-destruction. The working class, on the whole, did not succumb to any positive belief in fascism – on the contrary it was much more vulnerable to the lure of anti-fascism, which was the principal rallying cry for the coming war. But the unprecedented horror of the Nazi death camps was no less a blow against confidence in mankind’s future – and thus the perspective of communism - than the Stalinist Gulag.

Democracy, the dominant form of bourgeois rule in the advanced industrial countries, presented itself as the opponent of these totalitarian formations – which did not prevent it from supporting fascism when it was finishing off the revolutionary workers’ movement, or allying with the Stalinist regime in the war against Hitler Germany. But democracy has proved itself to be a far more intelligent and durable form of capitalist totalitarianism than either fascism, which collapsed in the rubble of war, or Stalinism, which (with the notable exception of China and the anomalous regime in North Korea) was to fall under the weight of the economic crisis and its inability to compete on the capitalist world market, whose laws it had it tried to circumvent by state decree.

The managers of democratic capitalism have also been obliged by the crisis of the system to use the state and the power of credit to bend the forces of the market, but they were not compelled to adopt the extreme form of top-down centralisation imposed by a situation of material and strategic weakness on the eastern bloc regimes. Democracy has outlived its rivals and has now become the only game in town in the old capitalist heartlands of the West. To this day, it is irreligious to call into the question the necessity to have supported democracy against fascism in World War Two; and those who argue that behind the façade of democracy stands the dictatorship of the ruling class are dismissed as conspiracy theorists.  Already during the 1920s and 30s, the development of the mass media in the democracies provided a model for the dissemination of official propaganda that was the envy of a Goebbels, while the penetration of commodity relations into the spheres of leisure and family life, as pioneered by American capitalism provided a more subtle channel for the totalitarian domination of capital than the mere reliance on informers and naked terror. 

6. Contrary to the hopes of the much-reduced revolutionary minority which held onto internationalist positions during the 30s and 40s, the end of the war did not bring about a new revolutionary upsurge. On the contrary it was the bourgeoisie, with Churchill in the vanguard, which learned the lessons of 1917 and nipped any possibility of proletarian revolt in the bud, through the carpet bombing of German cities and through the policy of “letting the Italians stew in their own juice” in the wake of the massive strikes in the north of Italy in 1943. The end of the war thus deepened the defeat of the working class. And again, contrary to the expectations of many revolutionaries, the war was not followed by a further economic depression and a new drive towards world war, even if the imperialist antagonisms between the victorious blocs remained as a constant threat hanging over humanity’s head. Instead the post-war period witnessed a phase of real expansion of capitalist relations under American leadership, even if one part of the world market (the Russian bloc and China) attempted to shut itself off from the penetration of western capital. The continuation of austerity and repression in the eastern bloc did provoke important workers’ revolts (East Germany 1953, Poland and Hungary 1956), but in the West, following some post-war expressions of discontent like the strikes in France in 1947, there was a gradual attenuation of the class struggle, to the point where sociologists could begin theorising about the “embourgeoisiement” of the working class as a result of the spread of consumerism and the development of the welfare state. And indeed both these aspects of capitalism after 1945 remain as important added weights on the possibility of the working class reconstituting itself as a revolutionary force.  Consumerism atomises the working class and peddles the illusion that everyone can attain the paradise of individual ownership.  Welfarism – which was often introduced by left parties and presented as a conquest of the working class, is an even more significant instrument of capitalist control. It undermines the self-confidence of the working class and makes it reliant on the benevolence of the state; and later on, in a phase of mass migration, its organisation by the nation state would mean that the issue of access to health, housing and other benefits became a potent factor in the scapegoating of immigrants and divisions within the working class. Meanwhile, along with the apparent disappearance of the class struggle in the 1950s and 60s, the revolutionary political movement was reduced to the most isolated state in its history.

7. Some of those revolutionaries who did maintain an activity during this dark period had begun to argue that capitalism had, thanks to bureaucratic state management, learned to control the economic contradictions analysed by Marx. But others, more prescient, like the Internacialismo group in Venezuela, recognised that the old problems – the limits of the market, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall – could not be conjured away, and that the financial difficulties experienced in the late 60s heralded a new phase of open economic crisis. They also hailed the capacity of a new generation of proletarians to respond to the crisis through the reassertion of the class struggle – a prediction amply confirmed by the formidable movement in France in May 1968 and the subsequent international wave of struggles, which demonstrated that decades of counter-revolution had come to an end, and that the proletarian struggle was the key obstacle in preventing the new crisis initiating a course towards world war.

8. The proletarian upsurge of the late sixties and early 70s had been preceded by a growing political agitation among wide layers of the population in the advanced capitalist countries, and particularly among the young. In the US, protests against the Vietnam war and racial segregation; movements among German students who manifested an interest in a more theoretical approach to the analysis of contemporary capitalism; in France, the agitation of students against the war in Vietnam and the repressive regime in the universities; in Italy, the “operaist” or autonomist tendency which reaffirmed the inevitability of the class struggle when those wise sociologists were proclaiming its obsolescence. Everywhere, a growing dissatisfaction with the dehumanised life advertised as the luscious fruit of post-war economic prosperity. A small minority, propelled by the upsurge of militant struggles in France and other industrial countries, could have participated in the foundation of a conscious, internationalist political vanguard, not least because part of this minority had begun to rediscover the contribution of the communist left.

9. As we are only too aware, the rendez-vous between this minority and the wider class movement only took place episodically during the movements of the late sixties and early 70s. This was partly the result of the fact that the politicised minority was heavily dominated by a discontented petty bourgeoisie: the student movement, in particular, lacked the strong proletarian core brought into being by changes in the organisation of capitalism over the next few decades. And despite powerful class movements across the world, despite serious confrontations between the workers and the forces of containment in their midst – unions and left parties – the majority of class struggles remained defensive, and only rarely posed directly political questions. Furthermore the working class faced important divisions within its ranks as a world-wide class: the “iron curtain” between East and West, and the division between the so-called “privileged” workers of the centres of capital and the impoverished masses in the former colonial areas. Meanwhile the maturation of a political vanguard was held back by a vision of immediate revolution and by activist practices, typical of petty bourgeois impatience, which failed to grasp the long-term character of revolutionary work and the gigantic scale of the theoretical tasks facing the politicised minority. The predominance of activism made large parts of the minority vulnerable to recuperation by leftism or, when the struggles died down, to demoralisation. Meanwhile, those who rejected leftism were often hampered by councilist notions which rejected the whole problem of organisational construction. However, a small minority was able to overcome these obstacles and to take up the tradition of the communist left, initiating a dynamic towards growth and regroupment which continued throughout the 1970s, but this too came to an end at the beginning of the 1980s, symbolised by the break-down of the International Conferences. The failure of the struggles of this period to reach a more advanced political level, to nourish the seeds that, in the streets and meetings of 1968, had posed the problem the replacement of capitalism East and West with a new society, was to have very significant consequences in the following decade.

Nevertheless, this huge outburst of proletarian energy did not simply run out of steam, but required a concerted effort by the ruling class to divert, derail and repress it. Fundamentally, this took place at the political level, making maximum use of the forces of the capitalist left and the unions, which still had a considerable influence within the working class. Whether through the promise of electing governments of the left, or through the later strategy of the “left in opposition” coupled with the development of radical trade unionism, throughout the two decades that followed 1968 the instrumentalisation of organs which the workers still to some extent saw as their own was indispensable to the containment of the struggles of the class.

At the same time, the bourgeoisie took all the advantages it could of the structural changes imposed on it by the world crisis: on the one hand, the introduction of technological changes which replaced both skilled and unskilled labour in industries like the docks, automobile and print; on the other hand, the movement towards the “globalisation” of the production process, which decimated whole industrial networks in the old centres of capital and shifted production to the peripheries where labour power was incomparably cheaper and profits far greater. These alterations in the composition of the working class in the heartlands, often affecting sectors which had been at the centre of the struggle in the 70s and early 80s, became additional factors in the atomisation of the class and the undermining of its class identity.

10. Despite certain pauses, the dynamic of struggle unleashed in 1968 continued through the 70s. The high point in the maturation of the proletariat’s capacity for self-organisation and extension was attained in the Polish mass strike in 1980. However, this zenith also marked the beginning of a decline. Although the strikes in Poland revealed the classic interplay between economic and political demands, at no point did the workers in Poland pose the problem of a new society. In this aspect, the strikes were “below” the level of the movement in 68 where self-organisation was somewhat embryonic, but which provided a context for a much more radical debate about the need for social revolution. The movement in Poland, with a few very limited exceptions, looked to the “Free West” as the alternative society they wanted, to ideals of democratic government, “independent trade unions” and all the rest. In the West itself, there were some expressions of solidarity with the strikes in Poland, and from 1983, in the face of a rapidly deepening economic crisis, we saw a wave of struggles which were increasingly simultaneous and global in their scope; in a number of cases they showed a growing conflict between the workers and the trade unions. But the juxtaposition of struggles across the world did not automatically mean that there was an awareness of the need for the conscious internationalisation of the struggle; neither did clashing with the unions, which are of course part of the state, entail a politicisation of the movement in the sense of a realisation that the state must be overthrown, or of a growing capacity to put forward a perspective for humanity. Even more than in the 70s, the struggles of the 80s in the advanced countries remained on the terrain of sectional demands and in this sense also remained vulnerable to sabotage by radicalised forms of trade unionism.  The aggravation of imperialist tensions between the two blocs in this period certainly gave rise to a growing preoccupation with the threat of war, but this was largely diverted towards pacifist movements which effectively prevented the development of a conscious connection between economic resistance and the war danger. As for the small groups of revolutionaries who maintained organised activity during this period, though they were able to intervene more directly in certain initiatives by the workers, on a deeper level they were coming up against the prevailing suspicion of ‘politics’ within the working class as a whole – and this growing gulf between the class and its political minority was itself a further factor in the inability of the class to develop its own perspective.

Part II: The impact of decomposition

11. The struggle in Poland, and its defeat, would provide a summation of the global balance between the classes. The strikes made it clear that the workers of eastern Europe would not be prepared to fight a war on behalf of their Russian overlords, and yet they were not able to offer a revolutionary alternative to the deepening crisis of the system. Indeed, the physical crushing of the Polish workers had extremely negative political consequences for the working class in that entire region, who were absent as a class in the political upheavals that initiated the demise of the Stalinist regimes, and who were subsequently vulnerable to a sinister wave of nationalist propaganda which is today embodied in the authoritarian regimes reigning in Russia, Hungary and Poland. The Stalinist ruling class, unable to deal with the crisis and the class struggle without ruthless repression, showed that it lacked the political flexibility to adapt to changing historical circumstances. Thus in 1980-81 the scene was already set for the collapse of the eastern bloc as a whole, heralding a new phase in the historic decline of capitalism. But this new phase, which we define as that of the decomposition of capitalism, has its origins in a much wider stalemate between the classes. The class movements that erupted in the advanced countries after 1968 marked the end of the counter-revolution, and the continuing resistance of the working class constituted an obstacle to the bourgeoisie’s “solution” to the economic crisis: world war. It was possible to define this period as a “course towards massive class confrontations”, and to insist that a course towards war could not be opened up without a head-on defeat of an insurgent working class. In the new phase, the disintegration of both imperialist blocs took world war off the agenda independently of the level of class struggle. But this meant that the question of the historic course could no longer be posed in the same terms. The inability of capitalism to overcome its contradictions still means that it can only offer humanity a future of barbarism, whose contours can already be glimpsed in a hellish combination of local and regional wars, ecological devastation, pogromism and fratricidal social violence. But unlike world war, which requires a direct physical as well as ideological defeat of the working class, this “new” descent into barbarism operates in a slower, more insidious manner which can gradually engulf the working class and render it incapable of reconstituting itself as a class. The criterion for measuring the evolution of the balance of forces between the classes can no longer be that the proletariat holding back world war, and has in general become more difficult to gage.

12. In the initial phase of the rebirth of the communist movement after 1968, the thesis of the decadence of capitalism won numerous adherents and would provide the programmatic bedrock of a revived communist left. Today this is no longer the case: the majority of new elements who look to communism as an answer to the problems facing humanity find all kinds of reasons to resist the concept of decadence. And when it comes to the notion of decomposition, which we define as the final phase of capitalist decline, the ICC is more or less on its own. Other groups accept the existence of the main manifestations of the new  period  - the inter-imperialist free-for –all, the return of deeply reactionary ideologies such as religious fundamentalism and rampant nationalism, the crisis in man’s relationship with the natural world – but few if any draw the conclusion that this situation derives from an impasse in the balance of class forces, or agree that all these phenomena are the expressions of a qualitative shift in the decadence of capitalism, of a whole phase or period which cannot be reversed except by the proletarian revolution. This opposition to the concept of decomposition often takes the form of diatribes against the “apocalyptic” tendencies of the ICC, since we talk about it as the terminal phase of capitalism, or against our “idealism”, since although we see the long-drawn out economic crisis as a key factor behind decomposition, we do not see purely economic factors as the decisive element in the onset of the new phase. Behind these objections is a failure to understand that capitalism, as the last class society in history, is doomed to this kind of historical impasse by the fact that, unlike previous class societies when they entered into decline, capitalism cannot give rise from within itself to a new and more dynamic mode of production, while the only road to a higher form of social life must be built not on any automatic working out of economic laws, but on a conscious movement of the immense majority of humanity, which is by definition the hardest task ever undertaken in history.

13. Decomposition was the product of the stalemate in the battle between the two major classes. But has also revealed itself as an active factor in the increasing difficulties of the class since 1989. The very well-orchestrated campaigns about the death of communism which accompanied the fall of the Russian bloc – which showed the ability of the ruling class to use the manifestations of decomposition against the exploited – was a very important element in further undermining the self-confidence of the class and its capacity to renew its historic mission. Communism, marxism, even the class struggle itself, were declared over, no more than dead history. But the enormous and long lasting negative effects of the events of 1989 on the consciousness, combativeness and identity of the working class is not only the result of the gigantic scale of the anti-communist campaign.  The effectiveness of this campaign must itself be explained. It can only be understood in the context of the specific development of revolution and counter-revolution from 1917 onwards. With the failure of the military counter-revolution against the USSR itself and at the same time the defeat of the world revolution, a completely unexpected, unprecedented constellation arose: that of a counter-revolution from within the proletarian bastion, and of a capitalist economy in the Soviet Union without any historically developed capitalist class. What resulted from this was not the expression of any higher historical necessity, but an historical aberration: the running of a capitalist economy by a counter-revolutionary bourgeois state bureaucracy completely unqualified and not adapted for such a task. Although the Stalinist command economy proved effective in getting the USSR through the ordeal of World War II, it completely failed, in the long run, in generating competitive national capitals.

Although the Stalinist regimes were particularly reactionary forms of decadent bourgeois society, not a relapse into any kind of feudal or despotic regime, they were in no sense of the term “normal” capitalist economies. A capitalist economy in which inefficient companies cannot be punished through elimination, and where workers cannot be laid off, cannot be a bourgeois success. To an important degree, it was thanks to this understanding of the specificities of Stalinism as an unexpected product of the counter-revolution that the ICC was able to understand the events of 1989; for instance that Stalinism had not been brought down by workers’ struggles, but by an economic and political implosion, and that the collapse in the east was not the harbinger of a pending similar collapse in the west. At the level of the balance of class forces, we understood that the demise of what in many ways was the worst enemy of the proletariat, would, for a considerable length of time, not be to the benefit of the working class. With its collapse, it rendered a last great service to the ruling class. Above all, its campaign about the death of communism seemed to find a confirmation in reality itself. The deviations of Stalinism from a properly functioning capitalism were so grave and far reaching that it indeed appeared to people not to have been capitalist. Prior to this, and as long as it was able to maintain itself, it appeared to prove that alternatives to capitalism are possible. Even if this particular alternative was anything but attractive for most workers, its existence nonetheless left a potential breach in the ideological armoury of the ruling class. The resurgence of the class struggle in the 1960s was able to profit from this breach to develop the vision of a revolution which would be at once anti-capitalist and anti-Stalinist and based, not on a state bureaucracy or a party state, but on workers’ councils. During the 1960s and 70s, if, to many, the world revolution was seen as an unrealisable utopia, as “pie in the sky”, it was because of the immense power of the ruling class, or what was seen as the inherent egoistic and destructive streak in our species. Such feelings of hopelessness however could and sometimes did find a counter-weight in the massive struggles and solidarity of the proletariat.  After 1989, with the collapse of the “socialist” regimes, a qualitatively new factor emerged: the impression of the impossibility of a modern society not based on capitalist principles. Under these circumstances, it is more difficult for the proletariat to develop, not only its class consciousness and class identity, but even its defensive economic struggles, since the logic of the needs of the capitalist economy weigh much heavier if they appear to be without any alternative.

In this sense, although it is certainly not necessary that the working class as a whole become marxist, or develop a clear vision about communism, in order to make a proletarian revolution, the immediate situation of the class struggle is altered considerably, and is dependent on whether or not wide sectors of the class see capitalism as something which can be put in question.

14. But working in a more underhand manner, the advance of decomposition in general and “by itself” gnawed away at the working class, its class identity and its class consciousness.  This was particularly evident among the long-term unemployed or partially employed layers “left behind” by the structural changes introduced by the 1980s: whereas in the past, the unemployed had been in the vanguard of the workers’ struggle, in this period they were far more vulnerable to lumpenisation, gangsterism, and the spread of nihilistic ideologies like jihadism or neo-fascism. As the ICC predicted in the immediate aftermath of the events of 89, the class was about to enter into a long period of retreat. But the length and depth of this retreat have proved even greater than we ourselves expected. Important movements of a new generation of the working class in 2006 (the anti-CPE movement in France) and between 2009 and 2013 in numerous countries across the world (Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Greece, USA, Spain…), together with a certain re-emergence of a milieu interested in communist ideas, made it feasible to think that the class struggle was once again taking centre stage and that a new phase in the development of the revolutionary movement was about to open up. But a number of developments over the last decade have shown just how profound are the difficulties facing the world proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard.

15. The struggles around 2011 were explicitly linked to the effects of the deepening economic crisis, their protagonists frequently referring, for example, to the precariousness of employment and the lack of opportunities for young people even after several years of university education. But there is no automatic link between the aggravation of the economic crisis and the qualitative development of the class struggle – a key lesson of the 1930s when the Great Depression tended to further demoralise an already defeated working class. And given the long years of retreat and disorientation that had preceded it, the financial earthquake of 2007-8 was to have a largely negative impact on the consciousness of the proletariat.

An important element in this was the proliferation of the very credit system that had been at the heart of the economic expansion of the 90s and 2000s but whose inbuilt contradictions now precipitated the crash. This process of “financialisation” now operated not only at the level of great financial institutions, but also in the lives of millions of workers. At this level, the situation is very different from that of the 1920's and 1930's, when for the most part the so-called middle classes (small property owners, the liberal professions etc.) but not the workers had savings to lose; and where the state insurances were barely enough to prevent the workers from starving. If, on the one hand therefore, the immediate material situation of many workers in such countries is still less dramatic than it was eight or nine decades ago, on the other hand millions of workers precisely in such countries find themselves in a predicament which hardly existed in the 1930s: they have become debtors, often on an important scale. During the 19th century, and still to a large extent before 1945, the only creditors workers had were the local pub or café and the grocery store. They had to rely on their own class solidarity in times of particular hardship. The crediting of proletarians began on a large scale with housing and building credits, but then exploded in recent decades with the development of mass-scale consumer credits. The ever more refined, cunning and treacherous development of this credit economy for a large part of the working class has extremely negative consequences for proletarian class consciousness. The expropriation of working class income by the bourgeoisie is hidden and appears incomprehensible when it takes the form of devaluation of savings, the bankruptcy of banks or of insurance schemes, or the forfeiting of house ownership on the market. The increasing precariousness of “welfare state” insurances and their financing makes it easier to divide the workers between those who pay for these public systems, and those who are maintained by them without paying in equivalently.  And the fact that of millions of workers have fallen into debt is a new, additional and powerful means of the disciplining of the proletariat.

Even though the net result of the crash has been austerity for the many and an ever more shameless transfer of wealth to a small minority, the overall result of the crash has not been to sharpen or extend an understanding of the workings of the capitalist system: resentment against growing inequality has been to a great extent directed against the “corrupt urban elite”, a theme that has become a major selling point of right wing populism. And even when the reaction to the crisis and its attendant injustices gave rise to more proletarian forms of struggle, such as in the Occupy movement in the USA, the latter were also to a considerable extent weighed down by a tendency to put the blame on the greedy bankers or even on secret societies who had deliberately engineered the crash to strengthen their control over society.

16. The revolutionary wave of 1917-23, like previous insurrectionary movements of the class (1871, 1905), was sparked off by imperialist war, leading revolutionaries to consider that war provided the most favourable conditions for the proletarian revolution. In reality, the defeat of the revolutionary wave showed that war could create profound divisions in the class, in particular between those of the ‘victor’ and ‘vanquished’ nations. Furthermore, as the events at the end of World War Two demonstrated, the bourgeoisie has drawn the necessary lessons from what happened in 1917, and has shown its capacity to limit the possibilities of proletarian reactions to imperialist war, not least by developing strategies and forms of military technology that make fraternisation between opposing armies increasingly difficult.

Contrary to the promises of the western ruling class after the fall of the Russian imperialist bloc, the new historic phase it opened up was by no means one of peace and stability, but of spreading military chaos, of increasingly intractable wars that have ravaged whole swathes of Africa and the Middle East and even shook the gates of Europe. But while the barbarity displayed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda and now Yemen and Syria has certainly aroused horror and indignation among sizeable sectors of the world proletariat – including those in the capitalist centres whose own bourgeoisies have been directly implicated in these wars – the wars of decomposition have only very rarely given rise to proletarian forms of opposition. In the countries most directly affected, the working class has been too weak to organise itself against the local military gangsters and their imperialist sponsors. This is most evident in the current war in Syria, which has seen not only the merciless decimation of the population by aerial and other forms of bombardment, above all by the official forces of the state, but also the derailing of an initial social discontent by the creation of military fronts and the enrolment of opponents of the regime into a myriad of armed gangs, each one more brutal than the next. In the capitalist centres, such appalling scenarios have mainly produced feelings of despair and helplessness – not least because it can seem as though any attempt to rebel against the present system can only end in an even worse situation. The grim fate of the “Arab spring” can easily be used as a new argument against the possibility of revolution. But the savage dismemberment of entire countries on the peripheries of Europe has over the past few years begun to have a boomerang effect on the working class in the centres of the system. This can be summarised by two questions: on the one hand, the world-wide and increasingly chaotic development of a refugee crisis which is truly planetary in its scope; and on the other, by the development of terrorism.

17. The trigger moment of the refugee is crisis in Europe was the opening of the borders of Germany (and Austria) to refugees from the “Balkan route” in summer 2015. The motives for this decision of chancellor Merkel were twofold. Firstly the economic and demographic situation of Germany (a thriving industry faced with the prospect of a shortage of qualified and “motivated” labour power). Secondly the danger of the collapse of law and order in south-east Europe through the concentration of hundreds of thousands of refugees in countries unable to manage them. The German bourgeoisie however had miscalculated the consequences of its unilateral decision on the rest of the world, in particular Europe. In the Middle East and in Africa, millions of refugees and other victims of capitalist misery started to make plans to set off for Europe, in particular Germany. In Europe, EU regulations such as “Schengen” or the “Dublin Refugee Pact” made Germany's problem that of Europe as a whole. One of the first results of this situation, therefore, was a crisis of the European Union – perhaps the most serious in its history to date.

The arrival of so many refugees to Europe was met initially with a spontaneous wave of sympathy within broad sectors of the population – an impulse which still is strong in countries like Italy or Germany. But this impulse was soon smothered by the rise of xenophobia in Europe. It was led not only by the populists, but also by the security forces and the professional defenders of bourgeois law and order, who were alarmed by the sudden and uncontrolled influx of often not identified persons. The fear of an influx of terrorist agents went hand in hand with the fear that the arrival of so many Muslims would enforce the development of immigrant sub-communities within Europe not identifying with the nation state of the country they live in. These fears were reinforced by the increase of terrorist attacks in France, Belgium and Germany. In Germany itself, there was a sharp increase of right wing terror attacks against refugees. In parts of the former GDR, a veritable pogrom atmosphere developed. In western Europe as a whole, after the economic crisis, the “refugee crisis” became the second major factor (augmented by fundamentalist terror) fanning the flames of right wing populism. Just as the economic crisis after 2008 opened up serious divisions within the bourgeoisie about how best to manage the world economy, summer 2015 marked the beginning of the end of its consensus on immigration. The basis of this policy, until now has been the principle of the semi-permeable border. The Wall against Mexico which Donald Trump wants to build, already exists, as does the one around Europe (also in the form of military patrol boats or airport prisons). But the purpose of the present walls is to slow down and regulate immigration, not prevent it. Making immigrants enter illegally criminalises them, thus obliging them to work for a pittance under abominable conditions without any social benefit rights. Moreover, by obliging people to risk their lives to gain admission, the frontier regime becomes a kind of barbaric selection mechanism, where only the most daring, determined and dynamic get in

Summer 2015 was in fact the beginning of the collapse of the existing immigration system. The disequilibrium between the ever-growing number seeking access on the one hand, and the shrinking demand for wage labourers in the country they are entering on the other (Germany is something of an exception) has become untenable. And as usual, the populists have an easy solution to hand: the semi-permeable border must be made impermeable, whatever the levels of violence required. Here again, what they propose seems very plausible from the bourgeois point of view. It amounts to nothing more or less than the application of the logic of “gated communities” at the scale of entire countries..

Here again, the effects of this situation for the consciousness of the working class are, for the moment, very negative. The collapse of the eastern bloc was presented as proof of the ultimate triumph of western democratic capitalism. In face of this, there was hope, from the point of view of the proletariat, that the development of the crisis of capitalist society, at all levels, would eventually help to undermine this image of capitalism as the best possible system. But today – and in spite of the development of the crisis – the fact that many millions of people (not only refugees) are ready to risk their lives to gain access to the old capitalist centres which are Europe and North America, can only enforce the impression that these zones (at least in comparison) are, if not a paradise, at least islands of relative prosperity and stability.

Unlike during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the breakdown of the world economy was centred on the USA and Germany, today, thanks to a global state capitalist management, the central capitalist countries seem likely to break down last. In this context, a situation resembling that of a besieged fortress has arisen in particular (but not only) in Europe and the United States. The danger is real that the working class in these zones, even if it is not actively mobilised behind the ideology of the ruling class, seeks protection from its “own” exploiters (“identification with the aggressor”, to use a psychological term) against what is perceived as being a common danger coming from outside.

18. The “blow-back” of terrorist attacks from the wars in the Middle East began well before the current refugee crisis. The attacks by Al Qaida on the Twin Towers in 2001, followed by further atrocities on the transport systems of Madrid and London, already showed that main capitalist states would reap the whirlwind they had sown in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the more recent spate of murders attributed to Islamic State in Germany, France, Belgium, Turkey, the USA  and elsewhere, despite often having an apparently more amateurish and even random character, in which it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish a trained terrorist “soldier” from an isolated and disturbed individual, and occurring in conjunction with the refugee crisis, has further intensified feelings of suspicion and paranoia among the populations, leading them to turn to the state for protection from an amorphous and unpredictable “enemy within”. At the same time, the nihilistic ideology of Islamic State and its emulators offers a brief moment of glory to disaffected immigrant youths seeing no future for themselves in the semi-ghettoes of the big western cities. Terrorism, which in the phase of decomposition has more and more become a means of warfare between states and proto-states, also makes the expression of internationalism much more difficult.

19. The current populist upsurge has thus been fed by all these factors – the 2008 economic crash, the impact of war, terrorism and the refugee crisis – and appears as a concentrated expression of the decomposition of the system, of the inability of either of the two major classes in society to offer humanity a perspective for the future. From the point of view of the ruling class, it signifies the exhaustion of the “neo-liberal” consensus which has enabled capitalism to maintain and even extend accumulation since the onset of the open economic crisis in the 70s, and in particular the exhaustion of the Keynesian policies which had presided over the post-war boom. In the wake of the 2008 crash, which widened the already immense wealth gap between the very rich few and the vast majority, deregulation and globalisation, the “free movement” of capital and labour in a framework devised by the world’s most powerful states, has been called into question by a growing section of the bourgeoisie, typified by the populist right, even though it can simultaneously put forward neo-liberalism and neo-Keynesianism in the same campaign speech. The essence of populist politics is the political, administrative and judicial formalisation of the inequality of bourgeois society. What the 2008 crisis in particular helped to make clear, is that this formal equality is the real basis of an ever more glaring social inequality. In a situation in which the proletariat is unable to put forward its revolutionary solution – the establishment of a society without classes – the populist reaction is to want to replace the existing hypocritical pseudo-equality by an open and “honest” system of legal discrimination. This is the kernel of the “conservative revolution” advocated by president Trump’s adviser, Steve Bannon.

 A first indication of what is meant by slogans such as “America First” is given by the “France d'abord” electoral programme of the Front National. It proposes to privilege French citizens, at the levels of employment, taxation and social benefits, in relation to people from other European Union countries, who in turn would have priority over other foreigners. There is something of a similar debate in Britain about whether or not, after Brexit, EU citizens should be given an intermediate status between natives and other foreigners. In the UK, the main argument put forward in favour of Brexit was not objections to the EU trade policies, or any British protectionist impulses towards continental Europe, but the political will to “regain national sovereignty” regarding immigration and the national labour market. The logic of this argumentation is that, in the absence of a longer-term perspective of growth for the national economy, the living conditions of the natives can only be more or less stabilised by discriminating against everybody else.

20. Instead of being an antidote to the long and deep reflux of class consciousness, class identity and combativeness after 1989, the so-called finance and euro crisis had the opposite effect. In particular, the pernicious effects of the loss of solidarity within the ranks of the proletariat were increased significantly. In particular, we are seeing the rise of the phenomenon of scapegoating, of ways of thinking which blame persons – onto whom all of the evil of the world is projected – for whatever goes wrong in society. Such ideas open the door to the pogrom. Today populism is the most striking, but far from being the only manifestation of this problem, which tends to permeate all social relations. At work and in the everyday life of the working class, it increasingly weakens cooperation, and favours atomisation and the development of mutual suspicion and of mobbing.

The marxist workers’ movement has long defended the theoretical insights which help to counter-weigh this tendency. The two most essential insights were a) that under capitalism exploitation has become non-personal, since it functions according to the “laws” of the market (law of value). The capitalists themselves are obliged to obey these laws; b) despite this machine- like character, capitalism is a social relation between classes, since this “system” is based and maintained by an act of will of the bourgeois state (the creation and enforcement of capitalist private property). The class struggle, therefore, is not personal but political. Instead of combating persons, it is directed against a system - and the class which embodies it - in order to transform social relations. These insights never immunised even the more class conscious layers of the proletariat against scapegoating. But it made it more resilient. They partly explain why, even in the midst of the counter-revolution, and even in Germany, the proletariat resisted the upsurge of anti-semitism more and for longer than other parts of society. These proletarian traditions continued to have positive effects, even where the workers no longer in any conscious manner identified with socialism. The working class remains the only real barrier to the spread of this kind of poison, even if certain parts of the class have been seriously affected by it.

21. All of this has led to a changing political disposition of bourgeois society as a whole; one however which, for the moment, is not at all in favour of the proletariat. In countries like the United States or Poland, where populists are now in government, large scale protests on the streets have above all been in defence the existing capitalist democracy and its “liberal” regulations. Another issue mobilising masses is the struggle against corruption Brazil, South Korea, Romania or Russia. The Five Star movement in Italy is mainly animated by the same issue. Corruption, endemic in capitalism, assumes epidemic proportions in its terminal phase. To the extent that this hampers productivity and competitiveness, those who struggle against it are among the best defenders of the interests of the national capital. The masses of national flags on display at such protests are thus no coincidence. There is also a renewal of interest in the bourgeois electoral process. Some parts of the working class fall prey to voting for the populists, under the influence of the retreat of solidarity, or as a kind of protest against the established political class. One of the barriers to the development of the cause of emancipation today is the impression these workers have that they can shock and pressurise the ruling class more through a populist vote than by proletarian struggle. The perhaps biggest danger however is that the most modern and globalised sectors of the class, at the heart of the production process, might out of indignation against vile populist exclusionism, and out of a more or less clear understanding that this political current puts in danger the stability of the existing order, fall for the trap of defending the reigning democratic capitalist regime.

22. The rise of populism, and of anti-populism, has certain similarities with the 1930s, when the working class was caught between the vice of fascism and antifascism. But despite these similarities, the present historic situation in not the same as in the 1930's. At that time, the proletariat in the Soviet Union and in Germany had suffered not only a political reverse but also a physical defeat. As opposed to this, the situation today is not one of counter-revolution. For this reason, the likelihood that the ruling class would even try to impose a physical defeat on the proletariat is, at the present time, remote.

There is another difference with the 1930: the ideological adherence of proletarians to populism or anti-populism is not at all definitive. Many workers who today vote for populist candidates can from one day to the next find themselves struggling alongside their class brothers and sisters, and the same goes for workers caught up in anti-populist demonstrations.

The working class today, above all in the old centres of capitalism, is not ready to sacrifice its life for the interests of the nation, despite the increased influence of nationalism on certain sectors of the class; nor has it lost the possibility of fighting for its own interests, and this potential continues to come to the surface, even in a much more dispersed and ephemeral manner than in the 68-89 period and the struggles between 2006 and 2013. At the same time, a process of reflection and maturation among a minority of proletarians continues despite difficulties and set-backs, and this in turn reflects a more subterranean process taking place among wider layers of the proletariat.

In these conditions, the attempt to terrorise the class would be politically dangerous and most probably counter-productive. It would strongly dent the existing illusions of the workers in democratic capitalism, which constitutes one of the most important ideological advantages of the exploiters.

For all of these reasons, it is much more in the objective interest of the capitalist class to use the negative effects of decomposing, dead-end capitalism to weaken the working class.

Part III: 1917, 2017 and the perspective of communism

23. One of the main lines of attack by the “liberal” bourgeoisie against the October revolution of 1917 has been, and will continue to be, the alleged contrast between the democratic hopes of the February uprising and the October “coup d’Etat” by the Bolsheviks, which plunged Russia into disaster and tyranny. But the key to understanding the October revolution is that it was based on the necessity to break the imperialist war front, which was maintained by all factions of the bourgeoisie not least its “democratic” wing, and thus strike the first blow for the world revolution. It was the first clear answer of the world proletariat to capitalism’s entry into its epoch of decline, and it is at this level above all that October 1917, far from being a ruin from a lost age, is the signpost to humanity’s future.

Today, after the all the counter-blows it has received from the world bourgeoisie, the working class may seem very far away from recapturing its revolutionary project. And yet “In a sense the question of communism is at the very heart of the predicament of humanity today. It presently dominates the world situation in the form of the void it has created through its absence” (Report on the World Situation, 22nd ICC Congress).  The multiple barbarisms of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Hiroshima and Auschwitz to Fukushima and Aleppo are the heavy price humanity has paid for the failure of the communist revolution all those decades ago; and if, at this late hour in the decadence of bourgeois civilisation, the hopes of revolutionary transformation are definitively dashed, the consequences for the survival of human society will be even more grave. And yet we are convinced that these hopes are still alive, still founded on real possibilities.

On the one hand, they are based on the objective possibility and necessity for communism, which is contained in the sharpening clash between the forces of production and relations of production. This clash has grown more acute precisely because capitalism in decadence decomposition, in contrast to previous class societies which endured whole epochs of stagnation, has not stopped expanding globally and penetrating every pore of social life.  This can be seen at several levels:

• In the contradiction between the potential contained in modern technology and its actual use under capitalism: the development of information technology and artificial intelligence, which could be used to help free mankind from drudgery and greatly shorten the working day, has led to the decimation of employment on the one hand, and the prolonging of the working day on the other
• In the contradiction between the world-wide, associated character of capitalist production, and its private ownership, which on the one hand highlights the participation of millions of proletarians in producing social wealth and its appropriation by a tiny minority whose arrogance and wastefulness becomes an affront to the stagnating living conditions or outright impoverishment facing the vast majority. The objectively global character of labour association has increased in a spectacular manner in recent decades, in particular with the industrialisation of China and other Asian countries.  These new proletarian battalions, which have often showed themselves to be extremely militant, potentially constitute a vast new source of strength for the global class struggle, even if the proletariat of western Europe retains the key to the political maturation of the working class towards a revolutionary confrontation with capital.
• In the contradiction between use value and exchange value, which expresses itself above all in the crisis of overproduction and all the means capitalism uses to overcome it, in particular the massive recourse to debt. Overproduction, that unique absurdity of capitalism, points simultaneously to the possibility of abundance and the impossibility of achieving it under capitalism. Again an example of technological development highlights this absurdity: the internet has made it possible to distribute all kinds of goods free of charge (music, books, films etc) and yet capitalism, because of the need to maintain the profit system, has to create a huge bureaucracy to ensure that any such free distribution is curtailed or operates mainly as a forum for advertising commodities. Moreover, the crisis of overproduction results in continuous attacks on the living standards of the working class and the impoverishment of the mass of humanity.
• In the contradiction between capital’s global extension and the impossibility of going beyond the nation state. The particular phase of globalisation that began in the 1980s has brought us ever closer to the point predicted by Marx in the Grundrisse: “the universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognised as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own overcoming”[1]. This contradiction, of course, could already be perceived by revolutionaries at the time of the First World War, since the war itself was the first clear expression that while the nation state has outlived itself, capital cannot really go beyond it. And today we know that the overcoming – in fact, the downfall - of capital will not take a purely economic form: the closer it gets to an economic dead-end, the greater will be the drive towards “survival” at the expense of others through military means. The openly nationalist belligerence of the Trumps, Putins et al signifies that capitalist globalisation, far from unifying mankind, is pushing us ever closer to self-destruction, even if this descent into the abyss may not necessarily take the form of a world war
• In the contradiction between capitalist production and nature, which was considered a “free gift” from the onset of capitalism (Adam Smith), and has reached unprecedented levels in the phase of decomposition. This is most obviously expressed in the open vandalism of the climate change deniers in control of the US, and in the rise of their arch-enemy, China, where the feverish hunt for growth at any cost has given birth to cities where the air cannot be breathed, greatly added to the danger of run-away global warming, and  - in a bizarre combination of ancient superstition and modern gangster capitalism – accelerated the destruction of entire species in Africa and elsewhere, prized for the magical healing properties of their horns or skin.  Capitalism cannot exist without this mania for growth but it is incompatible with the health of the natural environment in which mankind lives and breathes. Thus the very perpetuation of capitalism threatens the existence of the human species not only at the military level, but also on the level of its interchange with nature.

The unbearable sharpening of the contradictions cited above all point to one solution: associated world production for use not profit, an association not only between human beings but also between human beings and nature. Perhaps the main expression of the potential for this transformation is that, within the central and most modern sectors of the world proletariat, the young generation, although increasingly aware of the seriousness of the historical situation, no longer shares the “no future” hopelessness of the previous decades. This confidence is based on the awareness of one's own associated productiveness: on the potential represented by scientific and technological progress, on the “accumulation” of knowledge and of the means of access to it, and on the growth of a more profound and critical understanding of the inter-action between humankind and the rest of nature. At the same time, this part of the proletariat – as we saw in the movements in Western Europe in 2011, which at their height raised the slogan of “world revolution” – is much more aware of the international character of labour association today, and thus better able to grasp the possibilities of the international unification of struggles. 

But the global unification of the proletariat is a solution which capital must avoid at all costs, even when it must adopt means which show the inherent limits of production for exchange. The development of state capitalism in the decadent epoch is in a sense a kind of a desperate search for a way of trying to hold a society together by totalitarian means, an attempt by the ruling class to exert control over economic life in a period in which the unfolding of the “natural laws” of the system push towards its own collapse.

24. While capitalism cannot conjure away the necessity for communism, we know that this new mode of production cannot arise automatically, but requires the conscious intervention of the revolutionary class, the proletariat. Despite the extreme difficulties facing the working class today, its apparent inability to renew its “ownership” of the communist project, we have already outlined our reasons for insisting that this renewal, this reconstitution of the proletariat as the class for communism, is still possible today. Because just as it cannot conjure away the objective need for communism, neither can it ever entirely suppress the subjective longing for a new society, or the search to understand how to achieve it, among the class of association, the proletariat.

The memory of what Red October really meant, and indeed the memory that the German revolution and the world-wide revolutionary wave set in motion by October ever happened at all, cannot entirely disappear. It has been, so to speak, repressed, but all repressed memories are fated to reappear when the conditions are ripe. And there is always, within the working class, a minority who have sustained and elaborated the real story and its lessons on a conscious level, ready to fertilise the reflection of the class when it recovers the need to make sense of its own history.

The class cannot reach this level of inquiry on a mass scale without going through the hard school of practical struggles. These struggles in response to the growing attacks of capital are the granite basis for the development of the self-confidence and unrestricted solidarity which are generated by the reality of associated labour.

But the impasse reached in the proletariat’s purely defensive, economic battles since 1968 also necessitates, on the one hand, a theoretical struggle, a quest to understand its “deep” past and its possible future, a quest which can only point to the need for the class movement to pass from the local and national to the universal, from the economic to the political, from the defensive to the offensive. While the immediate struggle of the class is more or less a fact of life in capitalism, there is no guarantee that this next vital step will be taken. But it is indicated, in no matter how limited and confused a manner, by the struggles of the present generation of proletarians, above all in movements like that of the Indignados in Spain which was indeed an expression of a genuine indignation against the entire system – an “obsolete” system as demonstrators proclaimed on their banners, of a desire to understand how this system works, and what might replace it; and, at the same time, to discover the organisational means which may be used to break out of the institutions of the existing order. And lo and behold, these means were not essentially new: the generalisation of the mass assemblies, the election of mandated delegates, was a clear echo from the days of the soviets in 1917. This was a clear demonstration of the workings of the “Old Mole” deep in the underground of social life.

It also gave a first glimpse of a potential for the development of what we can call the political-moral dimension of the proletarian struggle: the emerging of a deep seated rejection of the existing way of life and behaviour on the part of wider sectors of the class. The evolution of this moment is a very important factor of the preparation and maturation both of massive struggles on a class terrain, and of a revolutionary perspective.

At the same time, the failure of the Indignados movement to restore a real class identity points to the necessity to link this incipient politicisation on the streets and the squares to the economic struggle, to the movement in the workplaces where the working class still has its most distinct existence. The revolutionary future lies not in a “negation” of the economic struggle as the modernists proclaim, but in a true synthesis of the economic and the political dimensions of the class movement, as observed and advocated in Luxemburg’s Mass Strike.

25. In developing this capacity to see the link between the economic and political dimensions of their movement, communist political organisations have an indispensable role to play, and this is why the bourgeoisie will do all it can to discredit the role of the Bolshevik party in 1917, presenting it as a conspiracy of fanatics and intellectuals interested only in winning power for themselves. The task of the communist minority is not to provoke struggles, or organise them in advance, but to intervene within them in order to elucidate the methods and goals of the movement.

The defence of Red October also of course demands the demonstration that Stalinism, far from representing any continuity with it, was the bourgeois counter-revolution against it. This task is all the more important today in face of the weight of ideas that the collapse of Stalinism proved the economic unfeasibility of communism. The negative effects of this on politically searching minorities – the unstable milieu between the communist left and the left of capital – are considerable. Whereas before 1989 confused but recognisably anti-capitalist ideas, for instance of a councilist or autonomist variety, were relatively influential in such circles, since then there has been an important advance of conceptions based on forming networks of mutual exchange at the local level, on preserving and extending areas of subsistence economy or the still existing “commons”. The advance of such ideas indicates that even the more politicised layers of the proletariat today are often unable to even imagine a society beyond capitalism. Under these circumstances, one of the necessary factors preparing the emergence of a future generation of revolutionaries is that the existing revolutionary minorities today expound in the most profound and convincing manner possible (without falling into utopianism) why communism today is not only a necessity, but a very real and practicable possibility.

Given the extremely reduced and dispersed nature of today’s communist left, and of the enormous difficulties faced by a wider milieu of elements searching for political clarity, it is evident that a huge distance has to be travelled between today’s small revolutionary movement and any future capacity to act as an authentic vanguard in massive class movements. The revolutionaries and the politicised minorities are not purely passive products of this situation, since their own confusions serve to further aggravate their disunity and disorientation. But fundamentally, the weakness of the revolutionary minority is an expression of the weakness of the class as a whole, and no organisational recipes or activist slogans will be able to overcome this.

Time is no longer on the side of the working class, but it cannot leap beyond its shadow. Indeed, it is compelled today to retrieve much of what it has lost not only since 1917, but also from the struggles of 1968-89. For revolutionaries, this demands a long-term, patient work of analysing the real movement of the class and the perspectives revealed by the crisis of the capitalist mode of production; and on the basis of this theoretical effort, providing answers to the questions posed by those elements edging towards communist positions. And the most important aspect of this work is that must be seen as part of the political and organisational preparation of the future party, when the objective and subjective conditions once again pose the problem of the revolution. In other words, the tasks of the revolutionary organisation today are similar to those of a communist fraction, as elaborated most lucidly by the Italian Fraction of the Communist left in the 1930s.

ICC, April 2017