The thick tissue of lies which covers up the criminal acts of the main imperialisms of the planet in this war has been torn a little bit more, revealing the sordid interests which really motivate them.

For the workers, especially those in Europe, the disquiet caused by all this butchery should not be a reason for impotent lamentations but must feed the development of their consciousness about the responsibility of their own governments, about the hypocrisy of the sermons of the ruling class; but also about the fact that the working class of the main industrial powers is the only force capable of putting an end to this war and to all wars.

The women, children and old people who, in Sarajevo as in many other towns in ex-Yugoslavia, are forced to hide in cellars and basements, without water and electricity, to escape the shells and the snipers' bullets; the young people who in Bosnia as in Croatia or Serbia are being forcibly mobilized to risk their lives at the front - do any of these people have anything to hope for from the latest massive influx of "soldiers of peace"? The 2,000 American marines who have accompanied the aircraft carrier Roosevelt dispatched to the Adriatic in May, the 4,000 French and British troops who have already begun to arrive with tons of new weapons - have they come, as their governments claim, to lighten the sufferings of a population which has already seen 250,000 dead and three and a half million people "displaced" in this war?

The UN Blue Berets look like benefactors when they escort convoys of food to the besieged cities, when they interpose themselves between the belligerents. They look like victims when, as recently, they are taken hostage by the local armies. But behind this appearance is the reality of the cynical policies of the ruling classes of the great powers which command them, and for whom the population of ex-Yugoslavia is just cannon- fodder in a war in which they are fighting each other to win spheres of influence in this strategically vital part of Europe. The latest aggravation of the war is a striking confirmation of this. The Croatian army's offensive which began in May in western Slavonia, the Bosnian offensive launched at the same moment following the end of the "truce" signed last December, but also the masquerade of the UN hostage crisis, are not local incidents determined by the logic of merely local confrontations. They are actions prepared and carried out with the active participation, and even at the initiative, of the great imperialist powers.

As we have shown in all the articles we have written in this Review about the war over the past four years, the five powers who constitute the so-called "Contact Group" (the USA, Russia, France, Germany, Britain), an entity which is supposed to be looking for ways to end this conflict, have actively supported one or other of the local camps. And the present aggravation of the war cannot be understood outside this logic, outside the action of the gangsters at the head of these powers. It was Germany, by pushing Slovenia and Croatia to declare their independence from the old Yugoslavia, which brought about the break-up of the country and played a primordial role in the unleashing of the war in 1991. In response to this thrust by German imperialism. The other four powers supported and encouraged the counter-offensive of the Belgrade government. This was the first phase of the war, a particularly murderous one. It led to the point in 1992 when Croatia saw nearly a third of its territory under the control of Serb armies and militias. Under the cover of the UN, France and Britain then sent the biggest contingent of Blue Berets who, under the pretext of preventing further confrontations, systematically maintained the status quo in favor of the Serbian army. In 1992 the US government pronounced itself in favor of the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina and supported the Muslim sector of this province in a war against the Croatian army (still supported by Germany) and the Serbs (supported by Britain, France and Russia). In 1994, the Clinton administration managed to set up a confederation between Bosnia and Croatia, an agreement against Serbia; at the end of the year, under the guidance of ex-President Carter, the US obtained a truce between Bosnia and Serbia. At the beginning of 1995 the main fronts in Croatia and Bosnia thus seemed to be relatively quiet. And Washington did not hesitate to present this state of affairs as the triumph of the peacemaking efforts of the great powers, especially its own. In reality all this was a partial respite to allow the rearmament of Bosnia, essentially by the USA, in order to prepare a counter-offensive against the Serb armies. After four years of war, the latter, with the support of Britain, France and Russia, still controlled 70% of Bosnia's territory and over a quarter of Croatia's. The Belgrade government itself recognized that its camp, which includes the recently "reunified" "Serb republics" in Bosnia and Croatia (Krajina), had to give, ground. But, despite the negotiations in which all the differences between the big powers came out[1], no agreement was reached. What could not be obtained through negotiation could thus only be won through military force. So what we are seeing today is the logical, premeditated follow-up to a war in which the great powers have played the preponderant role, although in an underhand way.

Contrary to what is hypocritically claimed by the great powers' governments, who present their increased involvement in the conflict as being aimed at limiting the violence of the new confrontations, the latter are in fact a direct product of their war-mongering activity.

The invasion of part of western Slavonia by Croatia, at the beginning of May, as well as the renewed fighting at various points along the 1,200 kilometer front between the Zaghreb government and the Krajina Serbs; the unleashing, at the same moment, of the Bosnian army's offensive around the Bihac pocket, in the region of the Serb corridor of Breko, and also around Sarajevo, aimed at reducing the pressure of the Sarajevo siege - none of this took place separately from the will of the big powers, and still less against a unified wish for peace on the latters' part. It is clear that these actions were undertaken with the agreement and initiative of the American and German governments[2].

The reaction of the opposing camp was no less significant of the commitment of the other powers, Britain, France and Russia, to the Serbian side. But here things were less obvious. Of the powers allied to Serbia, only Russia openly admits its involvement. France and Britain, by contrast, have always claimed to be "neutral" in this conflict. On numerous occasions, their governments have even made loud declarations of hostility to the Serbs. This has never stopped them assisting their allies both on the military and the diplomatic terrain.

The facts are well known. Following the Croatian-Bosnian offensive, the Serb army replied by intensifying the bombardments in Bosnia, especially against Sarajevo. NATO, ie essentially the Clinton government, carried out two air raids in reprisal, against a munitions depot close to Pale, the Serb capital in Bosnia. The Pale government replied by taking as hostages 343 Blue Berets, the majority of them French and British.

Some were placed as "human shields", chained up close to military installations at risk of being bombed. Immediately a huge media operation got underway, complete with photos of the chained-up soldiers. The French and British governments denounced this "odious terrorist action" against the UN forces, and in the first place against the countries who were supplying the most number of soldiers to the Blue Berets: Britain and France. The Milosevic government in Belgrade declared that it was not in agreement with the action of the Bosnian Serbs, while at the same time denouncing the NATO air raids. But very quickly, what at the beginning might have looked like a weakening of the Franco-British alliance with Serbia, as a verification of the neutral, humanitarian, and not pro-Serb role of the UN forces, showed its real face: that of yet another masquerade serving both the Serb governments and their big power allies.

For the governments of these two powers, the "hostage crisis" had two major advantages for their action in this war. First, in an immediate way, it forced NATO, ie the USA, to stop any further air raids against their Serb allies. At the beginning of the crisis, the French government was forced to accept the first air raid, but it openly and vigorously criticized the second. The Serb government's use of the hostages as shields made it possible to solve this problem straight away. Secondly, and above all, the taking of hostages, presented as an "unbearable humiliation" served as an excellent pretext to justify the immediate dispatch by the two powers of thousands of new troops to ex-Yugoslavia. Britain alone announced that its forces would be trebled. The play-acting was done very well. On the one side, the British and French governments demanded to be able to send in new forces in order to "save the honor and dignity of our soldiers humiliated by the Bosnian Serbs"; on the other, Karadzic, the head of the Pale government, justified his attitude by the necessity to protect his troops against NATO bombings; in the middle of all this, Milosevic, head of the Belgrade government, played the part of "mediator". The result was spectacular. Whereas for weeks the British and French governments had been "threatening" to withdraw their troops from ex-Yugoslavia if the UN didn't grant them greater freedom of action (in particular, the possibility of regrouping in order to "defend themselves" more effectively), now they had decided to increase massively the number of their ground forces[3].

At the beginning of the masquerade, at the moment when the first hostages were taken, the press suggested that the hostages might be tortured. A few days later, when the first French hostages were freed, some of them gave their testimonies: "we did weight training and played table tennis (...) we visited the whole of Bosnia, went for walks (...) The Serbs did not see us as enemies" (Liberation, 7.6.95). Equally eloquent is the conciliatory attitude taken by the French commander of the French UN forces on the ground, a few days after the French government had shouted from the rooftops about how firm it was being with the Serbs: "We will strictly apply the principles of peacekeeping until we get any new orders (...) We can try to establish contacts with the Bosnian Serbs, we can try to take food through and to supply our troops" (Le Monde, 14.6.95). The French paper Le Monde was openly shocked: "Calmly, while 144 UN soldiers were still hostages to the Serbs, UNPROFOR solemnly claimed to be paralyzed". And it cited an UNPROFOR officer: "For several days we have had the feeling that things are easing up. The emotion provoked by the images of the human shields is settling down, and we are afraid that our governments are going to say no more about it, in order to avoid a confrontation". If the Bosnian Serbs didn't consider the French "hostages" to be their enemies, if this UNPROFOR officer had the impression that the French and British governments wanted to avoid a confrontation, it is simply because, whatever problems may blow up between Serb troops and UN troops on the ground, their governments are allies in this war and the "hostage crisis" was just one more chapter in the book of lies and manipulations written by the ruling class to hide its murderous and barbaric work.

The main result of this farce was the formation of the Rapid Reaction Force. The definition of the function of this new Franco-British military corps, supposedly formed to assist the UN forces in ex-Yugoslavia, has varied during the weeks in which the two governments have tried, not without difficulty, to get their "partners" on the UN Security Council to accept its existence and to finance it[4]. But whatever the diplomatic formulations used in this debate between hypocrites, what is important is the profound significance of this initiative. This must be understood on two levels: on the one hand, the will of the great powers to reinforce their military involvement in this conflict; on the other hand, the necessity for these powers to disengage themselves, or at least to take their distance, from the framework of the "humanitarian" "UN" masquerade, which puts such limitations on their capacity for action.

The French and British bourgeoisies know that their pretension to continue playing a role as world powers depends, to a large extent, on their capacity to affirm their presence in this strategically crucial zone. The Balkans, like the Middle East, is a major stake in the planet-wide contest between the great powers. Being absent from this region means giving up any great power status. The reaction of the German government to the formation of the RRF is particularly significant of this concern, common to all the European powers: "Germany could not ask its French and British allies to do the dirty work for very long, while it remains a spectator in the Adriatic and at the same time lays claim to a global political role. It must also take some of the risks itself" (Liberation, 12.6.95). This declaration from Bonn government circles is particularly hypocritical: as we have seen, since the beginning of the war in ex-Yugoslavia, German capital has played a big part in the "dirty work" of the great powers. But it also shows up what really motivates the so-called "humanitarian peacemakers" when they set up a RRF to "come to the aid" of the civil population in the Balkans.

The other important aspect of the RRF's formation is the great powers' concern to give themselves the means to ensure the defense of their specific imperialist interests. Thus, at the end of May, a spokesman of the British Ministry of Defense, interviewed about whether the RRF would be under the control of the UN, replied that "the special reinforcements will be under UN command", but he added that "they will also have their own commanders" (Liberation, 31.5.95). At the same moment, French officers were saying that these forces would have "their own colors and battle insignia", that they would no longer be wearing blue berets and that their vehicles would not necessarily be painted white. At the time of writing, the question of the colors to be worn by the soldiers of the RRF remains in the air. But the significance of the constitution of this new military force is perfectly clear: the imperialist powers are affirming more clearly than before the autonomy of their imperialist acts.

No, the population of ex-Yugoslavia, which for four years has been subjected to the horrors of war, has nothing positive to expect from the arrival of these new "peacekeeping forces". The latter have come only to continue and intensify the bloody and barbaric work that the great powers have been carrying out since the conflict began.

All the governments in ex -Yugoslavia are now engaged in escalating the war. Izetbegovic, the head of the Bosnian government, has clearly announced the breadth of the offensive that his army has launched: Sarajevo must not go through another winter besieged by the Serb armies. UN experts have estimated that an attempt to break this siege would cost the Bosnian forces 15,000 men. Equally clearly, the Croatian government has stressed that the offensive in western Slavonia is only the beginning of an operation which will be extended throughout the front with the Krajina Serbs, especially on the Dalmatian coast. As for the government of the Bosnian Serbs, it has declared a state of war in the zone around Sarajevo and has mobilized the whole population. In mid-June, while the American diplomats were negotiating with the Serb governments to try to get them to recognize Bosnia, Slavisa Rakovic, one of the advisers to the Pale government coldly asserted that he was "pessimistic in the short term" and that he believed" there is more chance of the war flaring up than the negotiations succeeding, because summer is ideal for fighting" (Le Monde, 14.5.95).

The Bosnian Serbs are obviously not fighting alone. The "Serb Republics" of Bosnia and Krajina have just proclaimed their unification. As for the Belgrade government, which is supposed to be applying an arms embargo ion the Bosnian Serbs, it is well known that it has never done so and that whatever the more or less real divergences that may exist between the different Serb parties in power, their military cooperation against the Bosnian and Croatian armies is unquestioned[5].

But the antagonisms between the different nationalisms in ex-Yugoslavia would not be enough to fuel and intensify the war if the great imperialist powers were not fuelling and intensifying it, if their "pacifist" speeches were not just an ideological cover for their own imperialist policies. The worst enemy of peace in ex-Yugoslavia is none other than the pitiless war between the great powers. All of them, to different degrees, have an interest in maintaining the war in the Balkans. Apart from the geo-strategic positions which each one defends or is trying to conquer, they are there above all to prevent or destroy alliances between other rival powers: "In such a situation of instability, it is easier for each power to make trouble for its adversaries, to sabotage alliances that it objects to, than to develop solid alliances and ensure stability in its own spheres" (Resolution on the international situation, XIth Congress of the ICC).

For German and French capital, this war has been a powerful tool for breaking the alliance between the USA and Britain, and for sabotaging the structures of NATO, American capital's weapon of domination over the former members of the western bloc. A high official of the American State Department recognized this explicitly recently: "The war in Bosnia has caused the gravest strains in NATO since Suez" (International Herald Tribune, 13.6.95). Parallel to this, for Washington, the war is a means to prevent the consolidation of the European Union around Germany. Santer, the new president of the Commission of the European Union complained bitterly about this, at the beginning of June, when commenting on the evolution of the situation in the Balkans.

The present aggravation of military barbarism in ex-Yugoslavia is thus the concretization of the advance of capitalist decomposition, which exacerbates all the antagonisms between fractions of capital, imposing the reign of "every man for himself' and "each against all".

The war in ex-Yugoslavia is the bloodiest conflict in Europe since the Second World War. For half a century Europe was spared the numerous wars between the imperialist powers, all the "national liberation struggles" which ravaged the countries of the ‘Third World'. Europe was a "haven of peace" during this period. The war in ex-Yugoslavia, by bringing this period to an end, thus has a major historic significance. For the European proletariat, war is less and less an exotic reality which happens thousands of miles away, where you follow the developments on TV at dinner time.

Up till now this war has only been a minor preoccupation for the workers of the industrialized countries of Western Europe. The European bourgeoisies have been able to present this conflict as another "far off" war, where the "democratic" powers are undertaking a "humanitarian", "civilizing" mission, trying to bring peace to "ethnic" groups who are slaughtering each other for no reason. Even if four years of manipulated media images have not hidden the savage and sordid reality of this war, even if in the workers' minds this war is one of the horrors now emerging all over the planet, the predominant sentiment among the exploited has been a relatively resigned indifference. Without any great enthusiasm, they have accepted more or less the official speeches about the "humanitarian missions" of the UN and NATO soldiers.

The present evolution of the conflict, the new attitude that the main powers involved in it have had to adopt, are about to change this state of affairs. The fact that the French and British governments have decided to send in thousands of new troops; the fact that the latter are being sent not only as representatives of an international organization like NATO, but as soldiers bearing the uniform and the flag of their country, all this is giving a new dimension to the way this war is being perceived. The great powers' active participation in the conflict is being exposed to the light of day. The "humanitarian" cover used by the great powers is being ripped apart, revealing the sordid imperialist motives underneath.

The current aggravation of the war in ex-Yugoslavia is taking place at a time when the perspectives for the world economic situation are getting worse and worse, heralding new attacks on working class living conditions, especially in the most industrialized countries. War and economic crisis, barbarism and poverty, chaos and pauperization - more than ever, the bankruptcy of capitalism, the disaster that this decomposing system has become, will place the world proletariat in front of its historic responsibilities. The qualitative aggravation of the war in ex-Yugoslavia will in this context become a supplementary factor in the development of the proletariat's awareness of this responsibility. And it is up to revolutionaries to contribute to this process with all their might, because they are an indispensable part of it.

In particular, they must show that understanding the real role played by the big powers in this war makes it possible to fight against the feeling of impotence about the conflict that the ruling class has from the beginning tried to instill in the workers. The governments of the great industrial and military powers can only make war because the working class of these countries allows them to so, because they have not managed to unify consciously against capital. The proletariat of these countries, because of its historical experience, because the bourgeoisie has not succeeded in mobilizing it ideologically to the point where it could send it off to another world war, is the only force that can put an end to all this military barbarity, to capitalist barbarity in general. This is the message that the aggravation of the war in ex-Yugoslavia must bring home to the workers.

19.6.95

[1] It is particularly significant that the negotiations with the different Serb governments over the recognition of Bosnia have been carried out not through Bosnian representatives, but through diplomats from Washington, Equally telling about the involvement of the big powers in this war alongside this or that belligerent are the positions defended by each one of the former with regard to these negotiations, One of the deals proposed to the Milosevic government is that he should recognize Bosnia in exchange for a lifting of the international economic sanctions which are still in force against Serbia, But when it comes to defining how the sanctions will be lifted, there are big differences between the powers: the USA wants it to be entirely conditional, so that it can be suspended at any moment depending on the actions taken by the Serb government; France and Britain want it to be guaranteed for a period of at least six months; Russia wants it to be unconditional and without any time limit. 

[2] On 6th March this year, a military agreement was signed between the Croatian and Bosnian governments to "defend themselves against a common aggressor". However, this accord between Croatia and Bosnia, and parallel to that between the USA and Germany, to wage a counter-offensive against the Serb armies, can only be temporary and provisional. In the part of Bosnia controlled by Croatia, the two armies are face to face and conflict could resume at any moment, as during the first years of the war. The situation in the town of Mostar, the most important of the region, and the object of particularly bloody clashes between Croats and Muslims, is highly eloquent in this respect. Although it is supposed to be run by a joint Croatian-Bosnian government, with the active presence of members of the European Union, the town remains divided into two distinct parts and Muslim men of fighting age are strictly forbidden from entering the Croatian sector. But above all, the antagonism between American and German capital, in ex-Yugoslavia as in the rest of the world, is the main line of fissure in inter-imperialist tensions since the collapse of the eastern bloc (see "Each against all", International Review no 80) 

[3] The demand by France and Britain that UN forces on the ground should regroup in order to "defend themselves better against the Serbs" is also a hypocritical maneuver. Far from expressing any action against the Serbs, such a measure would mean the Blue Berets abandoning practically all the enclaves encircled by the Serbs in Bosnia (with the exception of the three main ones). This would give them every chance of taking them over once and for all, while making it possible to concentrate the Blue Berets' "aid" in the most important zones.

[4] The discussion on this point between the French president Chirac, when he went to the G7 summit in June, and the speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, was described as "direct" and "vigorous". The Russian government only accepted the principle after openly expressing its opposition and distrust.

[5] The Belgrade government had obtained an easing of the international economic embargo against Serbia in exchange for a commitment not to go on supplying arms to the Pale government. But the salaries of Serb officers in Bosnia are still being paid by Belgrade. The latter has not stopped secretly supplying arms to its "brothers" in Bosnia, while the anti-aircraft radar system of the two "republics" is still connected up.

IR82, 3rd Quarter 1995
 

The IBRP has responded, in the International Communist Review no 13, to our polemical article “The IBRP’s Conception of Decadent Capitalism” which appeared in no. 79 of our International Review.

The IBRP clearly expound their positions. Thus the article is a contribution to the necessary debate that must exist between the organisations of the Communist Left, which have a decisive responsibility in the struggle for the formation of the proletariat’s communist party.

The debate between the IBRP and the ICC is situated inside the framework of the Communist Left:

- it is not an academic or abstract debate, but constitutes a militant polemic in order to develop clear positions, free from any ambiguity or concession to bourgeois ideology, especially on the questions of the nature of imperialist wars and the fundamental conditions necessary for the communist revolution.

- it is a debate between supporters of the analysis of the decadence of capitalism: since the beginning of the century the system has entered into a permanent crisis which contains a growing threat of the annihilation of humanity and the planet.

Within this framework, the IBRP’s article of response insists on its vision of imperialist war as a means of the devaluation of capital and the renewal of the cycle of accumulation and explains this position by an explanation of the historic crisis of capitalism based on the tendency of falling rate of profit.

These two questions are the object of our response [1] [3].

What unites us with the IBRP

In a polemic between revolutionaries and precisely because of its militant character we begin from what unites us in order to approach what separates us within a global framework. This is the method that the ICC has always applied, following Marx, Lenin, Bilan etc, and which we used to polemicise with PCI (Programma) [2] [4] about the same question that we are now taking up with the IBRP. For us it is very important to underline this, because in the first place, polemics between revolutionaries always have as their guiding thread the struggle for clarification and regroupment within the perspective of the constitution of the world party of the proletariat. In the second place, because between the IBRP and the ICC, without denying or relativising the implications of the our disagreements about the understanding of the nature of imperialist war, what we share is much more important:

1. For the IBRP imperialist wars do not have objective limits but are total wars whose consequences far surpass anything that could have arisen in those of the ascendant period.

2. Imperialist wars unite the economic and political factors in an inseparable knot.

3. The IBRP rejects militarism and arms production as a means of the “accumulation of capital” [3] [5].

4. As the expression of the decadence of capitalism, imperialist wars contain the growing threat of the destruction of humanity.

5. There now exist in capitalism important tendencies to chaos and decomposition (although as we will see the IBRP does not give them the same importance that we do).

These elements of convergence express the common capacity that we have for denouncing and combatting imperialist wars as the supreme moments of the historic crisis of capitalism, calling on the proletariat not to choose between the different imperialist wolves, and calling for the world proletarian revolution as the only solution to the bloody impasse that capitalism has led humanity into, combating to the end the pacifist opium and denouncing the capitalist lies about how “we are moving out of the crisis”.

These elements, expressions of the common tradition of the Communist Left, make it necessary and possible that when confronted with events of the magnitude of the Gulf War or Yugoslavia, the groups of the Communist Left produce joint manifestoes which express the united voice of revolutionaries in front of the class. Therefore we proposed in the framework of the International Conferences of 1977-80 to make a joint declaration faced with the Afghan war and we regret that neither Battaglia Comunista nor the Communist Workers’ Organisation (who since have formed the present IBRP) did not accept this initiative. Far from this being a proposal for “circumstantial and opportunist union” such initiatives are tools in the struggle for clarification and delimitation of positions within the Communist Left because they establish a concrete and militant framework (an obligation to the working class confronted with important situations of historical evolution) within which seriously to debate divergences. This was the method of Marx or Lenin: at Zimmerwald despite the existence of divergences of greater importance than could exist today between the ICC and the IBRP, Lenin agreed to sign the Zimmerwald Manifesto. Likewise, when the 3rd International was constituted there were important disagreements between the founders not only on the analyses of imperialist war but on questions such as the utilisation of parliament or the unions; nevertheless this did not stop them uniting in order to struggle for the unfolding world revolution. This common struggle was not the framework for silencing divergences but, on the contrary, the militant platform within which they could be seriously confronted and not in an academic way nor according to sectarian impulses.

The function of imperialist war

The divergences between the IBRP and the ICC are not about the general causes of imperialist war. Adhering to the common tradition of the Communist Left we both see imperialist war as the expression of the historic crisis of capitalism. However the divergence arises when it comes to seeing the role of war within the progress of decadent capitalism. The IBRP thinks that imperialist war fulfils an economic function: allowing the massive devaluation of capital and, as a consequence, opening the possibility of capitalism embarking on a new cycle of accumulation.

This appreciation appears to be logically consistent: have there not been generalised crises before a war, as for example that of 1929? When there is a crisis of overproduction of men and goods is imperialist war not a “solution” because of the large-scale destruction of workers, machines and buildings? Isn’t there reconstruction after the war, and with this the overcoming of the crisis? However, this vision, apparently so simple and coherent, is extremely superficial. It takes - as we will see - a part of the problem (the fact that decadent capitalism goes through an infernal cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction-new crisis...) however, it does not pose the root of the problem: on the one hand, war is much more than a simple means of re-establishing the cycle of capitalist accumulation and, on the other hand, this cycle is profoundly degenerated and corrupted and is far from beginning the classical cycle of the ascendant period.

This superficial vision of imperialist war has important militant consequences that the IBRP is not capable of grasping. In fact, if war permits the re-establishing of the mechanism of capitalist accumulation, this amounts to saying that capitalism will always be able to get out of the crises through the painful and brutal mechanism of war. This is basically the vision that the bourgeoisie poses to us: war is a terrible thing that no government wants, but it is the inevitable means that will permit a new era of peace and prosperity.

The IBRP denounces such lies but does not comprehend that this denunciation is undermined by its theory of war as “the means of devaluation of capital”. In order to understand the dangerous consequences that its position has it should examine this declaration of the IBRP of the PCI (Programma): “The origin of the crisis lies in the impossibility of continuing accumulation, an impossibility which manifests itself when the growth of the mass of production can no longer compensate for the fall in the rate of profit. The mass of surplus labour is no longer sufficient to ensure a profit on the capital advanced, to reproduce the condition for a return on the investment. By destroying constant capital (dead labour) on a grand scale, war then plays a fundamental economic role (our emphasis): to the dreadful destruction of the productive apparatus, it permits a gigantic expansion of production later on to replace what has been destroyed, and thus a parallel expansion of profit, of the total surplus value, i.e. the surplus labour which is the source of capital. The conditions for the revival of the accumulation process have been re-established. The economic cycle picks up again... The world capitalist system enters into the war aged, but there receives a bath of blood which gives it a new lease of life and it comes out with the vitality of a robust new-born child” (Programma Comunista No 90 page 24, quoted in our polemic in International Review No 77 page 20).

To say that capitalism gains “a new lease of life” each time it emerges from a World War has clear revisionist consequences: World War could not make the Proletarian Revolution the order of the day but the reconstitution of capitalism which has returned to its beginnings. This uproots the IIIrd International’s analysis, which clearly says “A new epoch is born. The epoch of the disintegration of capitalism, of its internal collapse. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”. Purely and simply, it means a break with a fundamental position of marxism: capitalism is not an eternal system but a mode of production whose historic limits impose on it an epoch of decadence in which the communist revolution is the order of the day

In International Review no’s 77/78 we quote and criticise this declaration in our polemic dealing with the PCI’s (Programma) concept of war and decadence. This is ignored by the IBRP who in their reply appear to defend the PCI (Programma) when they affirm that: “Their (the ICC’s) debate with the Bordigists centres on the latter’s apparent view that there is a mechanical causal relation between war and the cycle of accumulation. We say “apparent” because typically the ICC doesn’t actually quote anything to show that the Bordigists view history so schematically. We are even less inclined to accept the assertions about Programme Communiste when we see the way they interpret our views” (Their reply “The Material Basis of Imperialist War” International Communist Review No.13).

The quotation that we have given in International Review no 77 speaks for itself, and reveals that there is a little more than “schematism” to the PCI’s position: if the IBRP avoids the issue by whining about our “misinterpretations”, it is because although they do not dare repeat the PCI’s aberrations, their own ambiguities lead them in the same direction: “We say that the economic function (emphasis in the original) of world war (i.e. its consequences for capitalism) is to devalue capital as the necessary prelude to a possible new cycle of accumulation” (International Communist Review No.13).

This view of the “economic function of imperialist war” comes from Bukharin. He puts it forward in a book he wrote in 1915 (Imperialism and the World Economy) which constitutes a contribution on such questions as state capitalism and national liberation, nonetheless slips into an important error, seeing imperialist war as an instrument of capitalist development: “Thus if war cannot halt the general development of world capital, if, on the contrary, it expresses the greatest expansion of the centralisation process... War in many aspects recalls to mind industrial crises, differing from the latter only by a greater intensity of social convulsions and devastations” (page 148, English edition).

Imperialist war is not a means to “devalue capital” but an expression of the historic process of destruction and sterilisation of the means of production and life, that globally characterises decadent capitalism.

The destruction and sterilisation of capital is not the same as the devaluation of capital The ascendant period of capitalism entailed periodic crises that led to the periodic devaluation of capital: “Simultaneously with the fall in the rate of profit, the mass of capital grows, and this is associated with a devaluation of existing capital, which puts a stop to this fall and gives an accelerating impulse to the accumulation of capital value... The periodic devaluation of the existing capital, which is a means, immanent to the capitalist mode of production, for delaying the fall in the profit rate and the accelerating the accumulation of capital value by the formation of new capital, disturbs the given conditions in which the circulation and reproduction process of capital takes places, and is therefore accompanied by sudden stoppages in the production process” (Capital Vol 3, part 3, chapter XV, part 2).

Capitalism, due to its nature, since its origins, as much in the ascendant period as in decadence, has constantly fallen into overproduction and, in this context, these periodic bleedings of capital were necessary in order to restart its normal movement of production and circulation of commodities with more force. In the ascendant period, each stage of devaluation of capital led to the expansion of the capitalist relations of production on a larger scale. And this was possible because capitalism encountered new pre-capitalist territories that could be integrated into its sphere submitting them to its wage and trade relations. For this reason: “The crises of the 19th century which Marx described were still crisis of growth, crises from which capitalism came out strengthened... After each crisis, there were still new outlets to be conquered by the capitalist countries” (“Theories of Crisis, from Marx to the Communist International”. International Review No 22, page 14).

In the decadent period these crises of the devaluation of capital continue and have become more or less chronic (see our polemical article with the IBRP in International Review no 79, the section “The nature of “cycles of accumulation” in capitalist decadence”). However, this inherent and consubstantial feature of capitalism, superimposes itself on another characteristic of its decadent epoch, which is the fruit of the extreme aggravation of the contradictions carried within this epoch: the tendency to the destruction and sterilisation of capital.

This tendency arises from the situation of historical blockage that determines the decadent epoch of capitalism: “What is imperialist world war?. It is the struggle by violent means, that the different capitalist groups are obliged to unleash, not in order to conquer new markets and sources of raw materials, but in order to divide up the already existing ones, a division from which some gain at the expense of others. The unfolding war has its roots, in the general and permanent economic crisis that has broken out, indicating that the capitalist regime has reached the end of its developmental possibilities” (“The Renegade Vercesi”. May 1944 in the International Bulletin of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left No 5). In the same sense, “Decadent capitalism is the phase in which production can continue only as a condition (underlined in the original) for products and means of production to take a material form that does not bring about the development and expansion of production but its restriction and destruction” (Idem)

In decadence, the nature of capitalism has not changed at all. It continues to be a system of exploitation, it is still affected (to a much greater degree) by the tendency to the depreciation of capital (a tendency that has become permanent). However, the essence of decadence is the historical blockage of the system which has given birth to a powerful tendency towards self-destruction and chaos: “In the absence of a revolutionary class presenting the historic possibility of generating and presiding over the establishment of an economic system corresponding to historical necessity, society and its civilisation is driven into an impasse, where collapse and internal disintegration, are inevitable. Marx gave as an example the similar historic impasse of the Roman and Greek civilisations of antiquity. Engels applied this thesis to bourgeois society, coming to the conclusion that the absence, or the incapacity of the proletariat to solve, through overcoming it, the antithetical contradictions that arise in capitalist society, can have no other result than a return to barbarity” (Idem)

The position of the Communist International on imperialist war

The IBRP ridicules our insistence on this feature of decadent capitalism: “For the ICC everything is just “chaos” and “decomposition” and we need not trouble ourselves too much with a detailed analysis of anything. This is the crux of their position” (their reply, page 30). We will return to this question, but we want to make clear that this accusation of ‘simplism’ which in their opinion represents a negation of Marxism as a method of analysing reality, should also be directed at the 1st Congress of the Communist International, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.

The aim of this article is not to deal with the limitations of the CI’s positions [4] [6] but to support its clear points. Examining the founding documents of the Communist International we can see in them clear indications of a rejection of the idea of war as a “solution” to the capitalist crisis and the vision that capitalism would return to “normal” functioning in line with the cycles of accumulation of its ascendant period.

“Thus its “peace policy” conclusively reveals the essence of Entente imperialism, and of imperialism in general, to the international proletariat. It also shows that the imperialist governments are unable to conclude a just and stable peace and that finance capital is not capable of restoring the ruined economy. The continued rule of finance capital will lead either to the complete destruction of civilised society or to an unprecedented increase in the level of exploitation, and enslavement, to political reaction and a policy of armament, and eventually to new destructive wars” (“The International Situation and the Policy of the Entente” in Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International, page 58).

The CI made it clear that capital could not re-establish the ruined economy, that is to say, it could not re-establish, after the war, a “normal” cycle of accumulation and health, in short it could not become, “a new born child” as the PCI (Programma) said. More than this, a return to such a “re-establishment” would be profoundly corrupted and altered by the development of an “increase in levels of exploitation... political reaction and a policy of armament”.

In the Manifesto of the 1st Congress, the CI declared that: “The distribution of raw materials, the utilisation of Baku or Romanian oil, Donbas coal, Ukrainian wheat, the fate of German locomotives, freight cars and automobiles, the rationing of relief for starving Europe - all these fundamental questions of the world’s economic life are not being regulated by free competition, nor by associations of national and international trusts and consortiums, but by the direct application of military force, for the sake of its continued preservation. If the complete subjection of the state power of finance capital had led mankind into the imperialist slaughter, then through this slaughter finance capital has succeeded in completely militarising not only the state but also itself; and it is no longer capable of fulfilling its basic economic functions otherwise than by means of blood and iron” (Idem pages 29/30).

The perspective laid out by the CI is one of the “militarisation of the economy” a question that all Marxists in their analysis show to be an expression of the aggravation of the contradictions of capitalism and not as their alleviation or relativisation no matter how temporary (the IBRP in their reply, page 33, reject militarism as a means of accumulation). The CI also insisted that the world economy could not return either to the liberal period or to that of the trusts and, finally, expressed a very important idea that “capitalism is no longer capable of fulfilling its basic economic functions other than by means of blood and iron” This can only be interpreted as meaning: that after the world war the mechanism of accumulation could no longer function normally, in order to continue it needed “blood and iron”.

The CI pointed out that the perspective for the post-war period was one of the aggravations of wars: “The opportunist, who before the World War summoned the workers to practice moderation for the sake of the gradual transition to socialism, and who during the war demanded class docility in the name of civil peace and national defence, are again demanding self-renunciation of the proletariat - this time for the purpose of overcoming the terrible consequences of the war. If such preaching was to find acceptance amongst the working masses, capitalist development in new, much more concentrated and monstrous forms would be restored on the bones of several generations - with the perspective of new and inevitable world war” (Idem, page 30, our emphasis).

It was an historic tragedy that the CI was unable to develop this clear body of analysis and, furthermore, that in its stage of degeneration it openly contradicted this with positions that insinuated the concept of capitalism “returning to normality” reducing its analysis of the decline and barbarity of the system to mere rhetorical proclamations. Nevertheless, the task of the Communist Left is to deepen and detail the general lines arrived at by the CI and it is clear from the above quotes that this cannot lead to an orientation that goes in the direction of capitalism going through a constant cycle of accumulation-crisis-war devaluation-new accumulation... but rather in the sense of a profoundly altered world economy, incapable of returning to the conditions of normal accumulation and leading to new convulsions and destruction.

The irrationality of imperialist war

This underestimation of the CI’s (and Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin’s) fundamental analysis becomes clear in the IBRP’s rejection of our notion of the irrationality of war: “But the ICC article alters the issue by its next comment [on the function of war] that this means we are “according an economic rationality to the phenomenon of war”. Now this implies that we see the destruction of capital values as the capitalist’s aim i.e. that this is a direct cause [emphasis in the original] of war. But causes are not the same as consequences. The ruling classes of imperialist states do not consciously go to war to devalue capital” (their reply page 29).

In the ascendant period of capitalism the cyclical crises were not deliberately caused by the ruling class. Nevertheless, the cyclical crises had an “economic rationale”: allowing capital to devalue and, as a consequence, renewing capitalist accumulation at a new level. The IBRP think that the world wars of decadence fulfil the role of the devaluation of capital and the renewal of accumulation. That is to say, they attribute to them an economic rationality of a similar nature to that of the cyclical crises of the ascendant period.

This is precisely the central error that we pointed out to the IBRP 16 years ago in our article, “Economic Theories and the Struggle for socialism”: “We can see Bukharin’s error repeated in the analysis of the CWO: “Each crisis leads (through war) to a devaluation of constant capital, thus raising the rate of profit and allowing the cycle of reconstruction- boom, slump, war - to be repeated again” [a quote from the CWO taken from its publication Revolutionary Perspectives, No 6 page 18, its article “The accumulation of Contradictions”]. Thus, for the CWO, the crises of decadent capitalism are seen, in economic terms, as the cyclical crises of ascendant capitalism repeated at a higher level” (International Review, No. 16, page 15).

The IBRP situates the difference between ascendancy and decadence solely at the level of the magnitude of the periodic interruptions of the cycle of accumulation: “The causes of war stem from the bourgeoisie’s efforts to defend those capital values against their rivals. Under ascendant capitalism such rivalry was largely on the economic level and between rival firms. Those who could achieve a greater degree of concentration of capital (capital’s tendency to centralisation and monopoly) would be in a position... to drive their competitors to the wall. This rivalry also led to an over-accumulation of capital which resulted in the decennial crises of the nineteenth century. In these the weaker firms would collapse or be taken over by the more powerful rivals. Capital would be devalued in each crisis and thus a new round of accumulation could begin, but each time capital would become more centralised and concentrated... In the era of monopoly capitalism, however, that concentration has reached the level of the nation state. The economic and political have now become intertwined in the imperialist or decadent stage of capitalism... In this epoch the policies which demand the defence of capital values involve the states themselves and heighten the rivalries between the imperialist powers” (Their reply pages 29-30). As a consequence of this: “imperialist wars have no such limited objectives [ie as in ascendancy]. The bourgeoisie... once embarked upon them there is only a struggle to annihilation, until one nation or bloc of nations is militarily and economically destroyed. The consequences of war are that, not only has capital been physically destroyed, but that there has also been a massive devaluation of existing capital” (their reply).

At the root of this analysis there is a strong “economism” which conceives war only as an immediate and mechanical product of economic evolution. In our article in International Review No 79 we show that imperialist war has a global economic root (the historic crisis of capitalism) but from this we cannot deduce that each war has an immediate and direct economic motive. The IBRP searched for the economic cause of the Gulf War and fell onto the terrain of a very vulgar economism saying that it was a war for oil wells. Likewise they explain the Yugoslavian war as being due to the appetite of the great powers [5] [7] for who knows what markets. It is certain then, that under the pressure of our critique and the empirical evidence, they have corrected their analysis but they have not been able to put into question this vulgar economism which cannot conceive of war without an immediate and mechanical “economic” cause behind it [6] [8].

The IBRP confuses commercial and imperialist rivalries, which are not necessarily the same. Imperialist rivalries have a root cause in the economic situation of the general saturation of the world market, but this is not to say that they have mere commercial competition as their direct origins. Their origins are economic, strategic and military and within this are concentrated historic and political factors.

In the same way, in capitalism’s ascendant period, wars (of national liberation or colonial) had a global economic purpose (the constitution of new nations or the expansion of capitalism through the formation of colonies) that did not arise directly from commercial rivalries. For example, the Franco-German war had dynastic and strategic origins but it did not come out of an insoluble commercial crisis for either of the contenders nor from a particular commercial rivalry. The IBRP is capable of understanding this up to a certain point when it says: “Whilst the post-Napoleonic Wars of the nineteenth century world had their horrors (as the ICC correctly sees) the real difference is that they were fought for specific aims which allowed them to reach rapid and often negotiated solutions. The bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century still had its programmatic mission to get rid of old relics of previous modes of production and create truly national (i.e. bourgeois states)” (their reply page 30). Furthermore, the IBRP sees very well the difference with the decadent period: “The costs of further capitalist development of the productive forces are no longer materially inevitable. Moreover, these costs have reached such a scale that they threaten the destruction of civilised life both in the short term (environmental decay, famines, genocide) and longer term (generalised imperialist war)” (page 31).

We fully share these observations that the IBRP makes. But we have to ask them a very simple question: What are the “total aims” of wars of decadence and what is the cost of maintaining capitalism to the point of posing the destruction of humanity? Can these situations of convulsion and destruction, which the IBRP recognises as being qualitatively different to those of the ascendant period, correspond to an economic situation of normal reproduction and to the renewal of the cycles of accumulation of capital, which would be identical to those of the ascendant period?

The mortal illness of decadent capitalism the IBRP uniquely situates in the moments of generalised wars, but they do not see it in the moments of apparent normality, in the period where, according to them, the cycle of capital accumulation develops. This leads them into a dangerous dichotomy: on the one hand, they see times of the development of normal cycles of capital accumulation where we witness real economic growth, which produce “technological revolutions”, the growth of the proletariat. In these periods of the full operation of the cycle of accumulation, capitalism appears to return to its origins; its growth appears to show an identical situation to that of its youthful period (the IBRP dares not say this, while the PCI (Programma) openly affirms it). On the other hand, there are periods of generalised war in which the barbarity of decadent capitalism is manifested in all its brutality and violence.

This dichotomy is strongly reminiscent of what Kautsky said in his thesis of “super-imperialism”: on the one hand, he recognised that after the First World War capitalism would enter a period which could produce great catastrophes and convulsions, however, and at the same time, it could produce an “objective” tendency towards the supreme concentration of capitalism into a great imperialist trust which would allow a peaceful capitalism to be established. In the Prologue to the above quoted book of Bukharin (The World Economy and Imperialism) Lenin denounces this centrist contradiction of Kautsky: “Kautsky promised to be a Marxist in the coming restless and catastrophic epoch, which he was compelled to foresee and definitely recognise when writing his work in 1909 about the coming war. Now, when it has become absolutely clear that this epoch has arrived, Kautsky again only promises to be a Marxist in the coming epoch of ultra-imperialism, a period which he doesn’t know whether it will arrive or not! In other words, we have any number of his promises to be a Marxist some time in another epoch, but not under the present conditions, not at this moment” (page 13 of the English version).

Far be it from us to suggest that the same thing could happen to the IBRP. They zealously guard the Marxist analysis of the decadence of capitalism in relation to the periods when war breaks out, meanwhile in the periods of accumulation they allow an analysis which makes concessions to the bourgeoisie’s lies about the “prosperity” and “growth” of the system.

The underestimation of the gravity of the process of the decomposition of capitalism

This tendency to defend the Marxist analysis of decadence for the period of generalised war explains the difficulty the IBRP has in understanding the present stage of the historical crisis of capitalism: “The ICC have been consistent since their foundation twenty years ago in dismissing all attempts to analyse how the capitalists have managed the current crisis. Indeed they seem to think that any attempt to look at the historically specific features of the present crisis is tantamount to saying that capitalism has solved the crisis. This is not the case. What is incumbent on Marxists is to actually try to understand why this has been the longest drawn-out crisis in the present capitalist epoch and is now about to surpass that of the Great Depression of 1873-96. But while the latter was a crisis created as capitalism entered its monopoly phase and was still soluble by purely economic devaluation the crisis of today threatens humanity with a far greater catastrophe” (their response page 34).

They seem certain that the ICC has renounced an analysis of the features of the present crisis. The IBRP can convince itself of the contrary by studying the articles that we regularly publish in each issue of the International Review, following the crisis in all its aspects. For us the opening of the crisis in 1967 is the reappearance, in an open manner, of the chronic and permanent crisis of decadent capitalism, it is the manifestation of a profound and increasingly uncontrollable blockage of the mechanism of capitalist accumulation. The “specific features” of the present crisis constitute the different attempts by capital through the reinforcing of state intervention, the flight into debt and monetary and commercial manipulations, to avoid an uncontrollable explosion of its basic crisis and, simultaneously, the evident failure of such potions and their perverse effects of increasingly aggravating the capitalism’s incurable illness.

The IBRP sees explaining the longevity of the present crisis as the “main task” for Marxists. We are not surprised by the impact of the length of the crisis on the IBRP, given that they don’t understand the root of the problem: we are not at the end of the cycle of accumulation but in a situation of the historic prolongation of the blockage, the profound disturbance, of the mechanism of accumulation. A situation, as the CI said, where capitalism cannot assure its essential economic functions other than “by blood and iron”.

This fundamental problem that the IBRP has leads it once again to ridicule our position on the present historical situation of chaos and the decomposition of capitalism: “Whilst we can all agree that there are tendencies of decomposition and chaos (after twenty years of the end of the cycle of accumulation it is difficult to see how there could not be) these should not be used as slogans to avoid a concrete analysis of what is happening” (their reply page 35).

As we can see, that what most preoccupies the IBRP is our supposed “simplism”, a type of “intellectual laziness” that takes refuge in clichéd radical cries about the seriousness and chaos of capitalism’s situation, in order not to get into a concrete analysis of what is happening.

The IBRP’s preoccupation is correct. Marxists are and will have to be concerned (this is one of our duties in the proletariat’s struggle) to analyse events in detail instead of falling into rhetorical generalisations in the style of the Longuet’s “orthodox Marxism” in France, or the anarchist vagueness that comforts many but which in decisive moments leads to serious opportunist ravings when it’s not brazen treachery.

However in order to be able to make a concrete analysis of “what is happening” it is necessary to have a clear global framework and it is here that the IBRP has problems. Since they do not understand the seriousness and depth of the disturbances and the level of degeneration and contradictions of capitalism in the “normal times” of the phase of the cycle of accumulation the whole process of the decomposition and chaos of world capitalism, which has accelerated since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, escapes their grasp and thus they are incapable of understanding it.

The IBRP ought to remember the lamentable stupidities they produced when faced with the collapse of the Stalinist countries: they speculated about the “fabulous markets” that these ruins could offer the countries of the West and believed that they could represent an easing of the capitalist crisis. Since then, overwhelmed by empirical evidence and thanks to our critique, the IBRP have corrected their errors. This is very good and shows their responsibility and seriousness in front of the proletariat. However, the IBRP have to go to the heart of the question: Why such blunders? Why is it that the change had to be brought about by events themselves? What vanguard is it that has to change position by being pulled along by events, always incapable of foreseeing them? The IBRP should study attentively the texts where we put forward the general lines of the process of the decomposition of capitalism [7] [9]. They would see that there is not a problem of “simplism” on our part but slowness and incoherence on their part.

These problems are once again demonstrated in the following speculation by the IBRP: “If further proof of ICC idealism was required their final accusation against the Bureau is that it has “no unitary and global vision of war” which leads to the “blindness and irresponsibility (sic)” of not seeing that the next war would mean “nothing other than the complete annihilation of the planet”. The ICC might be right, although we’d like to know the scientific basis on which they predict it. We ourselves have always said that the next war “threatens the continued existence of humanity”. However there is no certainty about this wiping out everything. The next imperialist war may actually lead to the final destruction of humanity. There have been weapons of mass destruction which have not been used in previous conflicts (e.g. biological and chemical weapons) and there is no guarantee that a nuclear holocaust would envelope the planet next time round. In fact the present war preparations of the imperialist powers include the de-commissioning of weapons of mass destruction whilst developing so-called conventional weapons. Even the bourgeoisie understand that a destroyed planet is of no value to anyone (even if the forces which lead to war and the nature of war are ultimately beyond their control)” (their reply pages 35-36).

The IBRP should learn a little history: in World War I all the gangs employed all the forces of destruction, while desperately searching for ever more lethal devices. In World War II, when Germany was already defeated there were the massive bombing raids on Dresden using incendiary and fragmentation bombs and the United States used the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki when Japan was also already defeated. Since then, in 1971 the weight of bombs dropped on Hanoi in one night surpassed all that dropped on Germany in 1945. In turn, the “carpet bombing” of Baghdad carried out by the “allies” beat Hanoi’s terrible record. In the same Gulf War it is proven that the new chemical and nuclear-conventional type weaponry were tried out on North American soldiers by the US. It has now become known that in the 1950’s the United States carried out experiments on its own population with bacteriological weapons... Yet faced with this mass of evidence, which the IBRP could read in any bourgeois publication, they have the dishonesty and the ignorance to speculate about the bourgeoisie’s level of control, about “their interest” in avoiding a total holocaust. It is suicidal for the IBRP to dream about them using  “less destructive” arms when 80 years of history proves the opposite.

In this senseless speculation the IBRP not only don’t understand the theory but high-handedly ignore the crushing and repeated evidence of the facts. They have to understand the serious and revisionist nature of these stupid illusions of the impotent petty-bourgeois who clutch at the straw of the idea that “Even the bourgeoisie understand that a destroyed planet is of no value to anyone”.

The IBRP have to overcome their centrism, their oscillation between a coherent position on war and the decadence of capitalism and their speculative theorisations that we have criticised, about war as a means of the devaluation of capital and the renewal of accumulation. These errors lead them not to consider or take seriously as a coherent instrument their own analysis that tells us that: “the forces which lead to war and the nature of war are ultimately beyond their [the bourgeoisie’s] control”.

For the IBRP this phrase is a mere rhetorical parenthesis, whereas, if they want to place themselves fully in the ranks of the Communist Left and understand historical reality, it should be their analytical guide, the axis of their thinking in order concretely to comprehend the facts and historical tendencies of capitalism today.

Adalen 27-5-95

1) The recognition by the communists of the historically limited character of the capitalist mode of production, of the irreversible crisis in which the system is plunged today, constitutes the granite foundation upon which the revolutionary perspective of the combat of the proletariat is based. In this sense, all the attempts, such as those that we see at the present moment, on the part of the bourgeoisie and of its agents to make believe that the world economy is "coming out of crisis" or that certain "emerging" national economies can boost the old exhausted economic sectors, constitute a systematic attack against proletarian consciousness.

2) The official speeches on the "recovery" make a big thing out of the evolution of the indicators for industrial production, or the redressment of company profits. While we have indeed, in particular in the Anglo-Saxon countries, seen such a phenomenon recently, the foundation on which this rest must be pointed out:

- the recovery of profits is very often, especially for the big companies, the result of speculative windfalls; its counterpart is a new upsurge of public debts; it also flows from the elimination of "dead wood" by the big companies, in other words of their less productive sectors;

- the progress of industrial production results to a large extent from a very substantial increase in the productivity of labor based on the massive utilization of automation and informatics.

It is for these reasons that one of the major characteristics of the present "recovery" is that it has not been able to create employment, to significantly reduce unemployment or temporary employment, which, on the contrary, can only increase, since capital constantly wants to keep a free hand in order to be able to throw its superfluous work force onto the streets at any moment.

3) While it is above all an attack against the working class, a brutal factor of the development of misery and exclusion, unemployment also constitutes a major indication of capitalism's bankruptcy. Capital lives from the exploitation of living labor: in the same way as the shutting down of entire parts of the industrial apparatus, and indeed even more so, the laying off of a considerable part of labor force constitutes a real self-mutilation on capital's part. It shows the definitive bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, whose historic function was precisely to extend wage labor across the globe. This definitive bankruptcy of capitalism is also illustrated by the dramatic indebtedness of states which in the past years has reached a new crescendo: between 1989 and 1994 the public debt has gone up from 53% to 65% of the gross national product in the United States, from 57% to 73% in Europe, reaching 142% in the case of Belgium. In fact, the capitalist states are defaulting on their debts; if they were to be subjected to the same laws as private companies, they would already have been officially declared bankrupt. This situation only expresses the fact that the capitalist state constitutes the system's response to its impasse, but a response which is in no way a solution and which it cannot use forever.

4) The growth rates, sometimes in two figures, of the famous "emerging economies", do not in any way contradict the judgment on the general bankruptcy of the world economy. They result from a massive influx of capital drawn by the incredibly low cost of labor in these countries, from a ferocious exploitation of proletarians, something the bourgeoisie impudently refers to as "relocating'. This means that this economic development cannot but affect the production of the most advanced countries, whose states, increasingly, protest against the" dishonest commercial practices" of these "emerging" countries. Apart from this, the spectacular performances which they like to point to coincide very often with a wiping out of entire sectors of the economy of these countries: the "economic miracle" of China means more than 250 million unemployed by the year 2000. Finally, the recent financial collapse of another "exemplary" country, Mexico, whose money lost half of its value overnight, necessitating an urgent injection of close to $50 billion of credit (by far the largest "rescue" operation in capitalism's history), sums up the reality of the mirage of the" emergence" of certain Third World countries. The "emerging" economies are not the new hope of the world economy. They are but the very fragile and aberrant manifestation of a system gone mad. And this reality is not going to be contradicted by the situation of Eastern European countries, whose economies were not long ago supposed to be flowering under the sun of liberalism. If a few countries (such as Poland) have been able for the moment to avoid the worst, the chaos unfurling in the Russian economy (a 30% fall in production in two years, a more than 2,000% price rise over the same period) shows conclusively to what extent the talk which went on in 1989 was a lie. The state of the Russian economy is so catastrophic, that the Mafia, which controls a large part of the apparatus, appears, not as a parasite as in certain western countries, but as one of the pillars assuring a minimum of stability.

5) Finally, the state of potential bankruptcy in which capitalism finds itself, the fact that it cannot live forever by borrowing from the future, trying to get round the general and definitive saturation of the market by a headlong flight into debt, makes stronger and stronger the threat to the entire world financial system. The nervousness caused by the collapse of the British Barings Bank in the wake of the acrobatics of a "golden boy", the panic which followed the announcement of the crisis of the Mexican peso, out of all proportion with Mexico's weight in the world economy, are the undeniable indications of the real anguish which grips the ruling class in face of the perspective of a "true world catastrophe" of its finances, according to the words of the head of the IMF. But this financial catastrophe is nothing other than the revelation of the catastrophe into which the capitalist mode of production is plunging, and which hurls the whole world into the greatest convulsions in history.

6) The terrain on which these convulsions are most cruelly manifested is that of imperialist confrontations. Hardly five years have passed since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, since the promises of a "new world order" given by the leaders of the main western countries, and never has the disorder in the relations between states been so striking. Although it was based on the threat of a terrifying confrontation between the nuclear superpowers, and although its two super-powers without cease confronted each other through interposed countries, the "order of Yalta" contained, precisely, a certain element of "order". In the absence of the possibility of a new world war because the proletariat of the central countries is not mobilized, the two world policemen had to maintain imperialist confrontations within an "acceptable" framework. They had to avoid notably the sowing of chaos and destruction in the advanced countries and particularly on the principle terrain of two world wars, Europe. This edifice has fallen apart. With the bloody confrontations in ex-Yugoslavia, Europe has ceased to be a "sanctuary". At the same time, these confrontations have shown how difficult it is to set up a new "equilibrium", a new "division of the world" to succeed that of Yalta.

7) While the collapse of the Eastern Bloc was to a large extent unpredictable, the disappearance of its western rival was not in the least so. One would need to understand nothing of marxism (and follow Kautsky's thesis of "super-imperialism", swept away by the revolutionaries in World War I) to think that a single bloc could maintain itself alone. Fundamentally, all the bourgeoisies are rivals against each other. One can see this clearly in the domain of trade, where "the war of each against all" dominates. Diplomatic and military alliances are but the concretization of the fact that no bourgeoisie can choose to pursue its strategic interests alone against all the others. The common adversary is the only cement of such alliances, not any kind of "friendship between peoples". We can see today how far these are elastic and dishonest, since the enemies of yesterday (such as Russia and the United States) have discovered a sudden "friendship" and a friendship of decades (such as between Germany and the United States) is replaced by dispute.

In this sense, while the events of 1989 signified the end of the division of the world coming out of the Second World War, with Russia ceasing definitively to be able to lead an imperialist bloc, they contain the tendency towards the reconstruction of new imperialist constellations. However, although its economic power and its geographic location designate Germany to be the only country able to succeed Russia in the role of leader of an eventual future bloc opposed to the United States, its military situation is very far from allowing it for the moment to realize such an ambition. And in the absence of any new imperialist alignments able to replace the one swept away by the upheaval of 1989, the world arena is submitted as never before in the past, due to the unprecedented gravity of the economic crisis which kindles military tensions unleashing "each for himself", to a chaos aggravating even more the general decomposition of the capitalist mode of production.

8) The situation resulting from the end of the two blocks of the "cold war" is thus dominated by two contradictory tendencies - on the one hand disorder, instability in aIIiances between states, and on the other the process of the reconstruction of two new blocks - but which nevertheless are complimentary since the second factor cannot but aggravate the first one. The history of these past years illustrates this clearly:

- the crisis and the Gulf war of 90-91, sparked off by the United States, were part of the attempt of the American policeman to maintain its tutelage over its cold war aIlies, a tutelage which the latter are led to put in question with the end of the soviet menace;

- the war in ex -Yugoslavia is the direct result of the affirmation of the new ambitions of Germany, the main instigator of the Slovenian and Croatian secession, setting fire to the powder keg in the region;

- the pursuit of this war sows discord both within the German-French couple associated in the leadership of the European Union (which constitutes the first foundation stone of the edifice of a potential new imperialist bloc), and within the Anglo-American couple, the oldest and most faithful one which the 20th century has seen.

9) Even more than the peckings between the French cock and the German eagle, the extent of the present infidelities between Perfidious Albion and Uncle Sam constitute an irrefutable indication of the state of chaos of the system of international relations today. If, after 1989, the British bourgeoisie at first showed itself to be the most loyal ally of its American colleague, notably at the moment of the Gulf war, the slightness of the advantages it gained from this fidelity, as weIl as the defense of its specific interests in the Mediterranean area and in the Balkans, dictating a pro-Serbian policy, led it to distance itself considerably from its ally and to systematically sabotage the American policy of supporting Bosnia. With this policy, the British bourgeoisie has succeeded in setting up a solid tactical aIliance with the French bourgeoisie, with the objective of enforcing the discord in the German-French tandem, an approach towards which this latter is favorably disposed to the extent that the increase in power of its German ally worries it. This new situation is notably concretized by an intensification of the military collaboration between the British and the French bourgeoisie, for example with the proposed creation of a common air force unit and above all with the agreement creating an inter-African force "to maintain peace and prevent crises in Africa", which constitutes a spectacular revision of the British attitude after its support for the American policy in Ruanda aimed at banishing French influence in that country.

10) This evolution of the attitude of Britain towards its great ally, whose discontent was expressed with particular vigor on 17 March when Clinton welcomed Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein, is one of the major events of the last period in the world arena. This reveals the scale of the defeat for the United States represented by the evolution of the situation in ex-Yugoslavia, where the direct occupation of the terrain by the British and French armies in the uniform of UNPROFOR has greatly contributed to thwarting American attempts to take position solidly in the region, via its Bosnian ally.

It is a significant fact that the first world power encounters more and more difficulties in playing its role of world gendarme, a role supported less and less by the other bourgeoisies who are trying to exorcise the past, when the soviet menace obliged them to submit to the orders corning from Washington. There exists today a serious weakening, even a crisis of American leadership which is confirmed throughout the world, and the image of which is given by the pitiful departure of the GI's from Somalia, 2 years after their spectacular, mediatized arrival. This crisis of leadership of the United States permits us to explain why certain other powers have permitted themselves to come and tease it in its Latin American backyard:

- the attempt of the French and Spanish bourgeoisies to promote a "democratic transition" in Cuba with Castro, and not without him, as Uncle Sam would like;

- the Peruvian bourgeoisie's rapprochement with Japan, confirmed by the re-election of Fujimori;

- the support of the European bourgeoisie, notably through the Church, for the Zapatista guerilla in Mexico.

11) In fact, this serious weakening of American leadership is expressed through the fact that the dominant tendency, at the present moment, is not the one towards a new bloc, but towards "every man for himself". For the first world power, equipped with overwhelming military superiority, it is much more difficult to master a situation marked by generalized instability, the precariousness of alliances in all corners of the globe, than by the obligatory discipline of states under the threat of the great imperialist powers and nuclear apocalypse. In such a situation of instability, it is easier for each power to stir up trouble for its adversaries, to sabotage the alliances that threaten it, than to develop for their own part solid alliances, and to assure stability on their own ground. Such a situation evidently favors the game of secondary powers, to the extent that it is always easier to stir up trouble than to maintain order. This reality is accentuated even more by the plunging of capitalist society into generalized decomposition. That is why the United States itself is called on make abundant use of this kind of policy. That is how we can explain, for instance, American support for the recent Turkish offensive against the Kurdish nationalists in northern Iraq, an offensive which the traditional ally of Turkey, Germany, has considered to be a provocation, and has condemned. It is not a kind of "overthrow of the alliance" between Turkey and Germany, but a (large) spanner thrown in the works of this "alliance", which reveals the importance of a country like Turkey for the two imperialist godfathers. Similarly, it is a sign of the state of the world situation today, that the USA should be led, in a country like Algeria for example, to use the same weapons as a Gadhafi or a Khomeini: support for terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism. This said, in this reciprocal practice of destabilizing each other's positions by the US and the other countries, there is no equality: while American diplomacy can allow itself to intervene in the internal political game of countries like Italy (support for Belusconi), Spain (the GAL scandal stirred up by Washington), Belgium (the Augusta affair) or Britain (the opposition to Major by the "Eurosceptics"), the opposite is not the case. In this sense, the trouble which may appear within the American bourgeoisie faced with its diplomatic failures, or the internal debates about delicate strategic choices (eg over its alliance with Russia) cannot be put on the same level as the political convulsions which may affect other countries. Thus, for example, the dissensions which appeared over the sending of US troops to Haiti were essentially the result of a division of labor between bourgeois sectors and not of real divisions.

12) Despite its enormous military superiority and the fact that this can no longer be used to the same degree as in the past, despite the fact, owing to its budget deficits, that it has been obliged to reduce somewhat its military spending, the US has not given up the modernization of its armaments, developing ever more sophisticated weapons, notably by carrying on with the" Star Wars" project. The use or threat of brute force is now the main means at the US disposal to make its authority respected (even though it does not hesitate to use the weapons of economic war: pressure on international institutions such as the WTO, trade sanctions, etc). The fact that that this weapon has proved to be impotent, or even a factor that increases chaos, as could be seen after the Gulf war and as Somalia has illustrated more recently, can only confirm the insurmountable the capitalist world. The considerable reinforcement we are now seeing of the military capacities of powers like China and Japan, who are competing with the US in South East Asia and the Pacific, can only push the US to develop and to make use of its weaponry.

13) The bloody chaos in imperialist relations which characterizes the world situation today has a privileged place in the peripheral countries, but the example of ex-Yugoslavia a few hundred kilometers from the big industrial concentrations of Europe proves that this chaos is approaching the central countries also. To the tens of thousands of deaths provoked by the troubles in Algeria in the last few years, to the million corpses in Rwanda can be added the hundreds of thousands killed in Croatia and Bosnia. In fact, there are now dozens of bloody confrontations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, witness to the indescribable chaos which decomposing capitalism is engendering in society. In this sense, the more or less general complicity over the massacres in Chechnya perpetrated by the Russian army, which is trying to prevent the break-up of Russia in the wake of the dislocation of the old USSR, reveals the anxiety of the ruling class about the prospect of intensifying chaos. It has to be said clearly: only the overthrow of capitalism by the proletariat can prevent this growing chaos leading to the destruction of humanity.

14) More than ever, the struggle of the proletariat represents the only hope for the future of human society. This struggle, which revived with great power at the end of the 60s, putting an end to the most terrible counter-revolution the working class has ever known, went into a major retreat with the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, the ideological campaigns which accompanied them, and all the events which followed (Gulf war, war in Yugoslavia). The working class suffered this reflux in a massive way at the level both of its combativity and its consciousness, without this putting the historic course towards class confrontation into question, as the ICC affirmed already at the time. The struggles waged by the proletariat in recent years confirm this. Particularly since 1992 these struggles have been testimony to the proletariat's capacity to get back onto the path of struggle, thus confirming that the historic course has not been overturned. They are also testimony to the enormous difficulties which it is encountering on this path, owing to the breadth and depth of the reflux. The workers struggles are developing in a sinuous, jagged manner full of advances and retreats.

15) The massive movements in Italy in the autumn of 92, those in Germany in 93 and many others showed the huge potential combativity growing in the workers' ranks. Since then, this combativity has expressed itself slowly, with long refuted. The massive mobilizations in Italy in the autumn of 94, the series of strikes in the public sector in France in the spring of 95, are expressions, among others, of this combativity. However, it is important to show that the tendencies towards going beyond the unions, which appeared in 1992 in Italy, have not been confirmed - far from it. In 1994 the "monster" demonstration in Rome was a masterpiece of union control. Similarly, the tendency towards spontaneous unification, in the street which appeared (although only embryonically) in autumn 1993 in the Ruhr in Germany, has since given way to large scale union maneuvers, such as the engineering "strike" of early 1995, which have been entirely controlled by the bourgeoisie. By the same token, the recent strikes in France, in fact union days of action, have been a success for the latter.

16) Apart from the depth of the reflux that began in 1989, the difficulties facing the workers today in their efforts to move forward are the result of a whole series of further obstacles set up or exploited by the enemy class. These difficulties have to be put in the context of the negative weight exerted by the general decomposition of capitalism on the consciousness of the workers, sapping the proletariat's confidence in itself, and in the perspectives of its struggle. More concretely, although it is an indisputable sign of the bankruptcy of capitalism, a major effect of the massive and permanent unemployment developing today has been to provoke a strong feeling of demoralization and despair in important sectors of the working class, some of whom have been plunged into social exclusion and even lumpenisation. This unemployment is also used by the bourgeoisie as an instrument to threaten and repress sectors of the class who still have a job. Similarly, the sermons about the "recovery", and the few positive results shown by the economies of the main countries (in terms of profits and growth rates), have been amply exploited to justify union talk about "the bosses can pay". This talk is especially dangerous in that it strengthens the reformist illusions of the workers, making them much more vulnerable to union containment; at the same time it contains the idea that if the bosses 'can't pay' there's no use struggling. This is another factor of division (apart from the one between employed and unemployed) between the different sectors of the working class working in branches unequally affected by the crisis.

17) These obstacles have allowed the unions to get their grip on the workers' combativity, channeling them towards "actions" entirely under union control. However, the unions' present maneuvers have also, and above all, a preventative aim: that of strengthening their hold on the workers before the latter display a lot will necessarily result from their growing anger faced with the increasingly brutal attacks demanded by the crisis. In the same way, we have to underline the recent change in the way the ruling class has been talking. Whereas the first years after the fall of the eastern bloc were dominated by campaigns about the death of communism, the impossibility of the revolution, we are now to the extent seeing that it has again become fashionable to talk in favor of marxism, revolution, and communism on the part of the leftists - obviously - and even elsewhere. This again is a preventative measure on the part of the bourgeoisie, aimed at derailing the reflection that is tending to develop in the working class faced with the increasingly obvious bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production. It is up to revolutionaries, in their intervention, to denounce with the greatest vigor both the rotten maneuvers of the unions and these so-called "revolutionary" speeches. It falls to them to put forward the real perspective of the proletarian revolution and communism, as the only way out capable of saving humanity, and as the final outcome of the workers' struggle.

In the article in the last International Review we showed that the working class' response developed more forcefully as the First World War went on. At the beginning of 1917 - following two and a half years of barbarism - the working class managed to develop an international balance of forces that subjected the bourgeoisie to increasing pressure. In February 1917 the workers in Russia rose up and overthrew the Tsar, but they could only put an end to the war after they had deposed the bourgeois government and seized power in October 1917. Russia had shown that it was impossible to bring peace without overthrowing the ruling class. The victorious seizure of power was to encounter a powerful echo in the working class in other countries. For the first time in history the working class had managed to take power in a country. This was bound to act as a beacon for the workers of other countries, in particular those of Austria, Hungary and the whole of central Europe, and above all in Germany.

In fact, after the initial wave of patriotic chauvinism, the working class in Germany struggled increasingly against the war. Spurred on by the revolutionary development in Russia and in the wake of several precursory movements, a mass strike broke out in April 1917. In January 1918 about a million workers threw themselves into a new strike movement and formed a workers' council in Berlin. Under the influence of the Russian events combativity on the military fronts crumbled more and more throughout the summer of 1918. The factories were at boiling point; more and more worker gathered in the streets to strengthen the response to the war. The ruling class in Germany was aware that the Russian revolution was reaching out toward the workers and did their utmost to raise a barrier against the extension of the revolution - in order to save their own hides.

Learning from the revolutionary events in Russia, when faced with a very strong movement of workers' struggles, the army forced the Kaiser to abdicate (at the end of September) and installed a new government. But the working class' combativity forged ahead and there was no let-up in the agitation.

On 28th October there began in Austria, in the Czech and Slovak provinces as well as in Budapest, a wave of strikes which led to the overthrow of the monarchy. Workers' and soldiers' councils in the image of the Russian soviets sprang up everywhere.

The ruling class, and also the revolutionaries, prepared for the decisive phase in the confrontations. The revolutionaries prepared for the uprising. Although the majority of the Spartakist leaders (Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Jogiches) were in prison, and in spite of the fact that the party's illegal printing press had been paralyzed for some time by a police raid, the revolutionaries nevertheless continued to prepare the insurrection around the Spartakus group.

At the beginning of October the Spartakists held a conference with the Linksradikale of Bremen and other towns. This conference recognized the beginnings of open revolutionary confrontations, drafted an appeal and distributed it widely throughout the country as well as at the front. The main ideas defended in it were: the soldiers have begun to free themselves from their yoke, the army is crumbling; but this first step of the revolution meets with a counter-revolution that is ready at its post, As the means of repression of the ruling class was weakening, the counter-revolution tried to staunch the movement by reconciling the "democratic" pseudo-right wing. The aim of parliamentarianism and the new voting system was to make the proletariat go on putting up with its situation.

"During the discussion on the international situation it was pointed out that the Russian revolution had given a fundamental moral support to the movement in Germany. The delegates decided to convey their gratitude, solidarity and fraternal sympathy to their comrades in Russia and promised to confirm that solidarity not in words but in deeds that followed the Russian example.

We must support in every way the mutinies of the soldiers, go on to the armed insurrection, broaden the armed insurrection into a struggle to transfer power to the workers and soldiers and ensure victory through the workers' mass strikes. This is the task of the coming days and weeks".

We can see that from the beginning of these revolutionary confrontations the Spartakists also exposed the political maneuvers of the ruling class. They stripped bare the lie of democracy and unhesitatingly identified the steps that were vital if the movement were to advance: to prepare the insurrection was to support the working class in Russia not only in words but also in deeds. They understood that the solidarity of the working class in this new situation could not be restricted to declarations, that it was necessary for the workers to go into struggle themselves. This lesson forms a red thread throughout the history of the workers' movement and its struggles.

The bourgeoisie too refurbished its arms. On 3rd October 1918 they deposed the Kaiser and replaced him with a new prince, Max von Baden; they also included the SPD in the government.

The leadership of the SPD (a party that was founded in the previous century by the working class itself) had betrayed in 1914 and had excluded the internationalists, regrouped around the Spartakists and the Linksradikalen, as well as the centrists. From that time on the SPD harbored no proletarian life whatsoever within it. From the beginning of the war it supported an imperialist policy. It was also to act against the revolutionary upsurge of the working class.

For the first time the bourgeoisie included in the government a party that came from the working class and had recently passed into the camp of capital, in order to protect the capitalist state in this revolutionary situation. Although many workers still had illusions, the revolutionaries immediately understood the new role that fell to the social-democracy. In October 1918 Rosa Luxemburg wrote: "By entering the ministry, governmental socialism is putting itself forward as capitalism's defender and is barring the way to the mounting proletarian revolution".

From January 1918, when the first workers' council appeared during the mass strike in Berlin, the "revolutionary Delegates" (Revolutionare Oblate) and the Spartakists met regularly and secretly. The Delegates were very close to the SPD. On the basis of the growing combativity, the disintegration of the front and the fact that the workers were pushing for action, at the end of October they began to discuss concrete plans for an insurrection in the context of an action committee formed after the conference mentioned above.

On 23rd October Liebknecht was freed from prison. More than 20,000 workers came to greet him when he arrived in Berlin.

After the German government had expelled the members of the Russian embassy from Berlin at the insistence of the SPD, and after the demonstrations of support for the Russian revolution organized by the revolutionaries, the action committee met to discuss the situation. Liebknecht insisted on the need for the general strike and mass, armed demonstrations. At the "Delegates" meeting of 2nd November he even proposed a date - the 5th - with the slogan: "Peace at once and the removal of the state of siege, the socialist German republic, the formation of a government of workers' and soldiers' councils" (Drabkin, pg 104).

The "Delegates" who thought that the situation was not ripe enough pleaded that it was necessary to wait longer. During this time the members of the USPD in the various towns waited for new instructionsbecause no one wanted to go into action before Berlin. However the news of an imminent uprising spread to other towns of the Reich. All this was to be accelerated by the events in Kiel.

When on 3rd November the fleet in Kiel was to go to sea to continue the war, the sailors mutinied. Soldiers' councils were created and workers' councils followed in the same wave. The army high command threatened to bomb the town but, realizing that they could not stem the mutiny through violence, they sent for their Trojan horse, the SPD leader Noske. The latter turned up there and succeeded fraudulently in getting himself onto the workers' council.

But this movement of workers' and soldiers' councils had already sent out a signal to the whole proletariat. The councils formed massive delegations of workers and soldiers that made their way to other towns. Enormous delegations were sent to Hamburg, Bremen, Flensburg, to the Ruhr and even as far as Cologne. They addressed assemblies of workers and called for the formation of workers' and soldiers' councils. Thousands of workers travelled from towns in the north of Germany to Berlin and other towns in the provinces. A number of them were arrested by soldiers remaining loyal to the government (more than 1,300 arrests in Berlin alone on 6th November) and were retained in the barracks - where they continued agitating however.

Within a week workers' and soldiers' councils appeared in the main towns in Germany and the workers themselves took control of the extension of their movement. They did not leave it in the hands of the unions or parliament. They no longer fought by branch, isolated from each other, with demands specific to their sector; on the contrary in each town they united and formulated common demands. They acted on their own initiative and sought to unite with workers in other towns[1].

Less than two years after their brothers in Russia, the German workers demonstrated their capacity to direct their struggle themselves. Up until 8th November workers' and soldiers' councils were set up in almost every city, except Berlin.

On 8th November the "men of confidence" of the SPD made this report: "It is impossible to stop the revolutionary movement; if the SPD were to try and oppose the movement it would be swept away by the current".

When the first news from Kiel reached Berlin on 4th November, Liebknecht made a proposal to the executive committee for an insurrection on 8th November. Although the movement was spreading spontaneously throughout the country it was clear that an uprising in Berlin (the seat of government) made it necessary for the working class to have an organized trajectory and be clearly oriented towards one objective: to gather together all its forces. But the executive committee continued to hesitate. It was only after the arrest of two of its members who were in possession of the proposal for the insurrection that it decided in favor of action for the following day. On 8th November 1918 the Spartakists published the following appeal:

"Now that the moment to act has arrived there must be no hesitation. The same "socialists" who have spent four years supporting the government and in its service (...) are now doing all they can to weaken your struggle and undermine the movement.

Workers and soldiers! What your comrades have managed to do in Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, Lubeck, Rostock, Flensburg, Hanover, Magdeburg, Brunswick, Munich and Stuttgart you too must do. Because the victory of your brothers there, and the victory of the proletariat of the whole world depends on the height that your struggle is able to reach, its tenacity and success. Soldiers! Do what your comrades of the fleet have done; unite with your brothers in workmen's clothes. Don't let yourselves be used against your brothers, don't obey the orders of your officers, don't fire on those who are fighting for freedom. Workers and soldiers! The immediate aims of your struggle must be:

1) The freeing of all civilian and military prisoners.

2) The abolition of all states and the elimination of all dynasties.

3) The election of workers' and soldiers' councils, the election of delegates in all factories and all military units.

4) The immediate establishing of relations with other workers' councils and German soldiers.

5) The government to be controlled by the commissars of the workers' and soldiers' councils.

6) Immediate liaison with the international proletariat and particularly with the Russian Workers' Republic.

Long live the socialist Republic!
Long live the International!"

The "International" group (Spartakus group), 8th November.

The events of 9th November

In the early hours of 9th November the revolutionary uprising began in Berlin.

"Workers, soldiers, comrades!

The moment of decision has come! We must be up to our historic task...

We aren't simply demanding the abdication of one man, we're demanding the republic!

The socialist republic and all that it entails. Forward with the struggle for peace, freedom and bread.

Come out of the factories! Come out of the barracks! Hold out your hands! Long live the socialist republic" (Spartakus leaflet).

Hundreds of thousands of workers answered the call of the Spartakus group and the executive committee, stopped work and surged towards the city center in huge processions. At their head marched groups of armed workers. The great majority of the troops united with the demonstrating workers and fraternized with them. By midday Berlin was in the hands of the revolutionary workers and soldiers. A column of demonstrators made their way to the residence of the Hohenzollern. Liebknecht addressed them: "Capitalist domination, that has transformed Europe into a cemetery, is now broken. (...) We mustn't think that our task is finished because the past is dead. We must use all our strength to build the workers' and soldiers' government (...) We hold out our hands to the workers of the whole world and invite them to make the world revolution (...). I proclaim the free socialist republic of Germany" (Liebknecht, 9th November).

In addition he warned the workers not to make do with what they had achieved, and called on them to seize power and for the international unification of the working class.

The old regime did not use force on 9th of November to defend itself. However this was not because it hesitated to shed blood (it had millions of dead on its conscience) but because the revolution had disorganized the army by withdrawing a large number of soldiers who could have fired on the people. Just as in Russia in February 1917, when the soldiers sided with the workers in struggle, the reaction of the German soldiers was an important factor in the balance of class forces. But it was only because the working class organized itself, came out of the factories to "occupy the street" and unified en masse that the crucial question of the workers in uniform could be resolved. By convincing them of the need to fraternize the workers showed that it was they who had the leading role!

In the afternoon of 9th November thousands of delegates met at Cirque Busch. R. Muller, one of the main leaders of the revolutionary "Delegates" made an appeal that "the election of workers' and soldiers' councils be organized in every factory and military unit on 10th November. The councils elected must hold an assembly at Cirque Busch at 17:00 hours to elect a provisional government. The factories must elect one member to the workers' council for every 1,000 workers (male and female). Likewise the soldiers must elect one member to the soldiers' council per battalion. The smaller factories (less than 500 workers) must each elect a delegate. The assembly insists that an organ of authority be nominated by the assembly of councils".

In this way the workers took the first steps to create a situation of dual power. Would they manage to go as far as their class brothers in Russia?

The Spartakists, for their part, were in favor of strengthening the pressure and initiatives emanating from the local councils. The living democracy of the working class, the active participation of the workers, general assemblies in the factories, the designation of delegates who are responsible to these and are revocable; this is what the practice of the working class must be!

The revolutionary workers and soldiers occupied the print works of the Berliner-Lokal-Anzeiger on the evening of 9th November and printed the first issue of the newspaper Die rote Fahne; which promptly warned that: "There is no community of interests with those who have betrayed you for the last four years. Down with capitalism and its agents! Long live the revolution! Long live the International!".

The question of the seizure of power by the working class: the bourgeoisie stands to its guns

The first workers' and soldiers' council in Berlin (called the Executive) soon saw itself as an organ of authority; in its first proclamation on 11th November it declared itself to be the supreme unit of control over the whole of the public administration of the districts, the Lander and the Reich as well as the military administration.

But the ruling class did not cheerfully cede territory to the working class. On the contrary, it was to put up a most bitter resistance.

In fact, when Liebknecht declared the socialist republic in front of the Hohenzollern residence, the prince Max von Baden abdicated and handed over government affairs to Ebert as chancellor. The SPD proclaimed the "free republic of Germany".

So the SPD took official charge of governmental affairs; they called "for calm and order" and announced the holding of early ''free elections"; they realized that they could only oppose the movement by sapping it from within.

They set up their own workers' and soldiers' council that was composed entirely of SPD functionaries and upon which no-one had conferred any sort of legitimacy. Following this the SPD announced that the movement would be directed by itself and the USPD in unison.

Since then this tactic of encircling the movement and destroying it from within has been re-used constantly by the leftists with their bogus, self-proclaimed strike committees and their co-ordinations. Social-democracy and its successors, the groups on the extreme left of capital, specialize in placing themselves at the head of the movement and giving the impression that they are its legitimate representatives.

While trying to cut the ground from beneath the feet of the Executive by acting directly within it, the SPD announced the formation of a government including the USPD. The latter accepted but the Spartakists (who were still members of the USPD at the time) declined the offer. Although the difference between the USPD and the Spartakists was not very clear to the vast majority of workers, the Spartakists nevertheless were correct on the formation of the government. They sensed the trap and understood that you should not get into the same boat as the class enemy.

The best way to combat the workers' illusions in the left parties is not, as the Trotskyists and other leftists repeat unceasingly today, to put them into power and let them unmask themselves. What is necessary for the development of the class' consciousness is an absolutely clear and strict demarcation between classes, nothing less.

On the evening of 9th November the SPD and the leadership of the USPD proclaimed themselves the people's commissars and the government invested by the Executive Council.

The SPD demonstrated all its dexterity. It could now act against the working class from the government benches as well as in the name of the Executive of the councils. Ebert was both chancellor of the Reich and commissar of the people elected by the Executive of the councils; in this way he could seem to be on the side of the revolution. The SPD already had die confidence of the bourgeoisie but to succeed so skillfully in winning that of the workers, it demonstrated its ability to maneuver and mystify. There is a lesson for the working class here too: about the deceitful way the left forces of capital work.

Let us examine more closely how the SPD worked, specifically at the assembly of the workers' and soldiers' council on 10th November where there were about 3, 000 delegates present. No control over the mandates was exercised which meant that the soldiers' representatives were in the majority.

Ebert was the first to speak. According to him "the old fratricidal dispute" had ended now that the SPD and the USPD had formed a common government, it was now a matter of "undertaking the development of the economy together on the basis of socialist principles. Long live the unity of the German working class and the German soldiers". In the name of the USPD Haase celebrated "the refound unity": "We want to consolidate the victories of the great socialist revolution. The government will be a socialist government".

"Those who only yesterday were against the revolution are no longer against it" (E. Barth, 10th November 1918). "Everything must to done to prevent the coming of a counter-revolution".

So while the SPD did all in its power to mystify the working class, the USPD helped serve as a cover for its maneuvers. The Spartakists were aware of the danger; during this assembly Liebknecht stated: "I must water down the wine of your enthusiasm. The counter-revolution is already on the march, it's already in action ... I tell you this: the enemy is all around you! (He listed the counter-revolutionary aims of social-democracy). I realize how disagreeable this disturbance is to you, but even if you shoot me I'll say what I think it's essential to say".

So the Spartakists warned against the presence of the class enemy and insisted on the need to overthrow the system. For them what was at stake was not a change of personnel but the overthrow of the system itself.

On the other hand the SPD, with the USPD in its wake, worked to keep the system in place, pretending that by changing the leaders and installing a new government the working class had obtained a victory.

Here too the SPD have provided a lesson for the defenders of capital; a lesson on how to turn to anger of the workers against individual leaders in order to prevent it from being directed against the system as a whole. This way of working has been constantly used since then[2].

The SPD hammered this home in its newspaper of 10th November where it wrote, under the title "Unity and not a fratricidal struggle":

Capital's two weapons of political sabotage

From this moment on, the SPD threw a whole arsenal of weapons into the campaign against the working class. Alongside the "call to unity", it injected the poison of bourgeois democracy. According to the SPD, the introduction of "universal, direct, equal and secret suffrage for all men and women was presented both as the revolution's most important political conquest, and as the means to transform the order of capitalist society into socialism, by the will of the people and following a methodical plan". The SPD made believe that the goal had been reached, with the proclamation of the republic and the appointment of its own ministers; and that the Kaiser's abdication and Ebert's nomination as Chancellor meant the creation of a free People's State. In reality, all that had happened was the elimination of an unimportant anachronism, since the bourgeoisie had long been the politically dominant class; now the head of state was no longer a monarch, but a bourgeois. That did not change things much ... Moreover it is clear that the call for democratic elections was aimed directly against the workers' councils. The SPD bombarded the working class with an intensive, lying and criminal propaganda:

"Whoever wants bread, must want peace. Whoever wants peace, must want the Constituant, the freely elected representation of the whole German people. Whoever goes against the Constituant, or hesitates, is taking peace, bread and liberty away from you, is robbing you of the immediate fruits of the victory of the revolution: he is a counter-revolutionary.

Socialization will and must take place (...) by the will of the working people who, fundamentally, want to abolish this economy driven by the individual search for profit. But it will be a thousand times easier to impose if it is decreed by the Constituant, than ordered by the dictatorship of some revolutionary committee or other (...)

If we cite the SPD at such length, it is only to get an idea of the cunning and specious arguments used by Capital's left wing.

This reveals a classic characteristic of the bourgeoisie's action against the class struggle in highly industrialized countries: when the proletariat expresses its strength and aspires to its own unification, it is always the left forces who intervene with the most adroit demagogy. It is they who pretend to act in the interest of the workers, and try to sabotage the struggle from the inside, preventing the movement from taking its decisive steps.

In Germany, the revolutionary working class confronted a far stronger adversary than had the Russian workers. To deceive the class, the SPD adopted a radical language, supposedly in the interest of the revolution, and took the head of the movement when in reality it was the main agent of the bourgeois state. It acted against the working class, not as a party outside the state, but as its spearhead.

The first days of revolutionary confrontation had already shown the general nature of the class struggle in highly industrialized countries: a bourgeoisie versed in every cunning ruse confronted a strong working class. It would be an illusion to think that the class could gain a victory so easily.

As we will see later, the unions acted as Capital's second pillar, and collaborated with the bosses immediately after the movement's outbreak. After organizing military production during the war, they intervened with the SPD to defeat the movement. A few concessions were made, including the eight-hour day, in order to prevent any further radicalization of the working class.

But even political sabotage and the SPD's undermining of the working class' consciousness were not enough: the traitor party simultaneously made an agreement with the army for military action.

Repression

General Groener, the army Chief of Staff, who had collaborated daily with the SPD and the unions throughout the war, explained:

"We allied ourselves to fight Bolshevism. It was impossible to restore the monarchy (...) I had advised the Feldmarschall not to combat the revolution by force, because given the state of mind of the troops, it was to be feared that such a method would end in failure. I proposed that the military high command should ally with the SPD, since there was no party with enough influence among the people, and the masses, to rebuild a governmental force with the military command. The parties of the right had completely disappeared, and it was out of the question to work with the radical extremists. In the first place, we had to snatch power from the hands of the Berlin workers' and soldiers' councils. An undertaking was planned with this aim in view. Ten divisions were to enter Berlin. Ebert agreed (...) We had worked out a program which planned, after the arrival of the troops, to clean up Berlin and disarm the Spartakists. This was also agreed with Ebert, to whom I was especially grateful for his absolute love for the fatherland (...) This alliance was sealed against the Bolshevik danger and the system of councils" (October-November 1925, Zeugenaussage).

With this aim in view, Groener, Ebert and their accomplices maintained a daily telephone contact between 11: 00 at night and 1:00 in the morning, on secret telephone lines, and met to concert their action.

Contrary to October in Russia, where power fell into the workers' hands with scarcely a drop of blood shed, the German bourgeoisie immediately prepared, alongside its political sabotage, to unleash civil war. For the very first day, it began gathering the means necessary for military repression.

The intervention of revolutionaries

To evaluate the intervention of revolutionaries, we need to examine their ability to analyses correctly the movement of the class, the evolution of the balance of class forces, what had been achieved, and their ability to put forward the clearest perspectives. What were the Spartakists saying?

"The revolution has begun. What is called for now is not jubilation at what has been accomplished, not triumph over the beaten foe, but the strictest self-criticism and iron concentration of energy in order to continue the work we have begun. For our accomplishments are small and the foe has not been beaten.

What has been achieved? The monarchy has been swept away, supreme governing power had been transferred into the hands of the workers' and soldiers' representatives. But the monarchy was never the real enemy; it was only a facade, the frontispiece of imperialism (...)

The abolition of the rule of capitalism, the realization of the social order of socialism

- this and nothing less is the historical theme of the present revolution. This is a huge work which cannot be completed in the twinkling of an eye by a few decrees from above; it can be born only of the conscious action of the mass of workers in the cities and in the country, and brought successfully through the maze of difficulties only by the highest intellectual maturity and unflagging idealism of the masses of the people.

The path of the revolution follows clearly from its ends, its method follows from its task. All power in the hands of the working masses, in the hands of the workers' and soldiers' councils, protection of the work of the revolution against its lurking enemies - this is the guiding principle of all measures to be taken by the revolutionary government.

Every step, every act by the government must, like a compass, point in this direction:

- re-election and improvement of the local workers' and soldiers' councils so that the first chaotic and impulsive gestures of their formation are replaced by a conscious process of understanding the goals, tasks and methods of the revolution;

- regularly scheduled meetings of these representatives of the masses and the transfer of real political power from the small committee of the Executive Council into the broader basis of the workers' and soldiers' councils;

- immediate convocation of the national council of workers and soldiers in order to establish the proletariat of all Germany as a class, as a compact political power, and to make them the bulwark and impetus of the revolution;

- immediate organization, not of the "farmers ", but of the agrarian proletariat and smallholders who, as a class, have until now been outside the revolution;

- formation of a proletarian Red Guard for the permanent protection of the revolution, and training of a workers' militia in order to prepare the whole proletariat to be on guard at all times;

- suppression of the old organs of administration, justice and the army of the absolutist militarist police state;

- immediate confiscation of dynastic property and possessions, and of landed property as initial temporary measures to guarantee the people's food supply, since hunger is the most dangerous ally of the counter-revolution;

- immediate convocation of a World Labour Congress in Germany in order to emphasize clearly and distinctly the socialist and international character of the revolution, for only in the International, in the world revolution of the proletariat, is the future of the German revolution anchored" (Rosa Luxemburg, "The Beginning", Die Rote Fahne, 18th November 1918).

Destruction of the counter-revolution's positions of political power, erection and consolidation of the proletarian power, these were the two tasks that the Spartakists put to the fore with remarkable clarity.

"The result of the first week of the revolution is as follows: in the state of the Hohenzollerns, not much has basically changed; the workers' and soldiers' government is acting as the deputy of the imperialist government that has gone bankrupt. All its acts and omissions are governed by fear of the working masses (...)

The reactionary state of the civilized world will not become a revolutionary people's state within twenty-four hours. Soldiers who yesterday, were murdering the revolutionary proletariat in Finland, Russia and the Ukraine, and workers who calmly allowed this to happen, have not become in twenty-four hours supporters of socialism or clearly aware of their goals" (Luxemburg, op cit).

The Spartakists' analysis, that this was no bourgeois revolution but the counter-revolution already on the march, their ability to analyze the situation clearly and with a grasp of the overall situation, show how vital for the class' movement are its revolutionary political organizations.

The workers' councils, spearhead of the revolution

As we have said above, in the great cities workers' and soldiers' councils were formed everywhere during the first days of November. Although the councils appeared "spontaneously", this came as no surprise to the revolutionaries. They had already appeared in Russia, and also in Austria and Hungary. As Lenin said in March 1919, speaking for the Communist International: "This form is the Soviet regime with the dictatorship of the proletariat: these words were "Greek" to the masses until recently. Now, thanks to the system of Soviets, this Greek has been translated into all the world's modern languages; the practical form of the dictatorship has been discovered by the working masses" (Speech at the opening of the first Congress of the Communist International).

The appearance of the workers' councils reflects the determination of the working class to take its own destiny in hand. The workers' councils can only appear when there is a massive activity throughout the class, and a massive and profound development of class consciousness is under way. This is why the councils are no more than the spearhead of a profound global movement within the class, and why they are so strongly dependent on the activity of the class as a whole. If the class' activity in the factories weakens, if its combativity and its consciousness retreat, this necessarily affects the life of the councils. They are the means of centralizing the class struggle; they are the lever whereby the class lays claim to and imposes its power in society.

In many towns, the councils did indeed begin to take measures to oppose the bourgeois state. As soon as the councils came into existence, the workers tried to paralyze the bourgeois state apparatus, to take decisions themselves in the place of the bourgeois government, and to put them into practice. This was the beginning of the period of dual power, just as it had been in February 1917 in Russia. This happened everywhere, but it was most visible in Berlin, the seat of government.

Bourgeois sabotage

Because the workers' councils are the lever for centralizing the workers' struggle, because all the initiative of the masses converges within them, it is vital for the class to keep control of them.

In Germany, the capitalist class used a real Trojan horse against the councils, thanks to the SPD. A workers' party up until 1914, the SPD fought the councils, then sabotaged them from inside and turned them away from their real objective, all in the name of the working class.

The SPD used every trick imaginable to get its own delegates into the councils. The Berlin Executive Council was at first composed of six delegates each from the SPD and USPD, and a dozen soldiers' delegates. And yet, in Berlin the SPD used the pretext of a necessary parity of votes and unity of the working class to introduce many of its own men into the Executive Council, without any decision being taken by any kind of workers' assembly. Thanks to this tactic of insisting on "parity of votes between the parties", the SPD received more delegates than its real influence in the class warranted. In the provinces, things were much the same: out of 40 major cities, about 30 workers' and soldiers' councils were under the dominant influence of the SPD and USPD leaders. Only in those towns where the Spartakists had more influence did the workers' councils take a more radical direction.

As far as the councils' tasks were concerned, the SPD tried to sterilize them. Whereas the councils by their very nature tend to act as a counter-power to that of the bourgeois state, and even to destroy the latter, the SPD managed to weaken the class' organs, and subject them to the bourgeois state. It did so by spreading the idea, first that the councils should consider themselves as transitional organs, until the elections for the national assembly, but also, to strip them of their class character, that they should be opened to the whole population, to all strata of the population. In many towns, the SPD created "committees of public safety", which included all sections of the population - from peasants and small shopkeepers to the workers - with the same rights in these organisms.

From the outset, the Spartakists pushed for the formation of Red Guards, to impose the councils' decisions by force if necessary. The SPD torpedoed this initiative in the soldiers' councils on the pretext that it "expressed a lack of confidence in the soldiers".

In the Berlin Executive Council, there were constant confrontations on the measures to be adopted and the direction to be taken. Although it cannot be said that all the workers' delegates were sufficiently clear or determined on every question, the SPD did everything it could to undermine the council's authority from both inside and out:

- as soon as the Executive Council gave one set of orders, others would be imposed by the Council of People's Commissars (led by the SPD);

- the Executive never disposed of its own press, and had to beg for space in the bourgeois press in order to publish its own resolutions. The SPD delegates did everything to keep it this way;

- when, in November and December, strikes broke out in the Berlin factories, the Executive Committee under the influence of the SPD took position against them, although they expressed the strength of the working class, and could have made it possible to correct the errors of the Executive Council;

- finally, the SPD - as a leading force in the bourgeois government - used the threat of the Allies, supposedly ready to intervene militarily and occupy Germany to prevent its "Bolshevization", to make the workers hesitate, and put a break on the movement. For example, they put it about that if the workers' councils went too far, then the USA would stop the delivery of food supplies to the starving population.

Whether through the threat of outside intervention, or by internal sabotage, the SPD used every possible means against the working class in movement.

From the outset, the SPD did everything in its power to isolate the councils from their base in the factories.

In every enterprise, the councils were made up delegates elected by the general assemblies, and responsible to them. If the workers were to lose their power of decision in the general assemblies, or if the councils became detached from their roots, their base in the factories, then they would themselves be weakened and would inevitably fall victim to the bourgeois counter-offensive. This is why, from the outset, the SPD pushed for the councils to be constituted by sharing out seats proportionally among the political parties. The assemblies' power to elect and revoke their delegates is no formal principle of workers' democracy, but the lever whereby the proletariat can - from its most basic component - direct and control its struggle. The experience in Russia had already shown how essential was the activity of the factory committees. If the workers' councils were no longer required to account for themselves before the class, before the assemblies which elected them, and if the class is no longer capable of exercising its control over them, then this means that its movement is weakening, and that power is slipping from its hands.

In Russia, Lenin had made this clear:

"To control, it is necessary to hold power (...) If I put control to the fore, masking this fundamental condition, then I am telling an untruth and playing the game of the capitalists and imperialists (...) Without power, control is a hollow petty-bourgeois phrase which hinders the march and development of the revolution" (Lenin, "Report on the Present Situation" to the April Conference).

Whereas in Russia, from the very first weeks the councils based on the workers and soldiers disposed of real power, the Executive of Berlin Councils had none. As Rosa Luxemburg rightly said: "The Executive of the united Russian councils is - whatever may be written against it - something else again from the Berlin executive. One is the head and brain of a powerful revolutionary proletarian organization, the other is the fifth wheel on the carriage of a crypto-capitalist governmental clique; the first is the inexhaustible fountain of total proletarian power, the other is without strength and without orientation; the first is the living spirit of the revolution, the other is its tomb" (Rosa Luxemburg, 12th December 1918).

The national Congress of councils

On 23rd November, the Berlin Executive called a national congress of councils, to be held ill Berlin on 16th December. This initiative was supposed to unite all lie forces of lie working class: in fact, it would be used against them. The SPD imposed the election, in the different regions of the Reich, of one worker delegate per 200,000 inhabitants and one soldier delegate per 100,000 soldiers, whereby the workers' representation was diminished, while that of the soldiers was increased. Instead of reflecting the strength and activity of the class in the factories, this congress, under the impetus of the SPD, was to slip from the workers' control.

Moreover, according to these same saboteurs, only "workers' delegates", of the "workers by hand or brain" should be elected. All the SPD bureaucrats were present, under the pretext of their original trades; by contrast, the members of the Spartakus League, who appeared in the open, were excluded. By pulling every imaginable string, the forces of the bourgeoisie managed to impose themselves, whereas the revolutionaries who acted openly were prevented from speaking.

When the Congress of councils met on 16th December, it began by rejecting the participation of delegates from Russia. "The general assembly meeting on 16th December does not deal with international deliberations, but only with German affairs in which foreigners cannot of course participate (...) The Russian delegation is nothing other than a representative of the Bolshevik dictatorship". This was the justification given in Vorwarts (no 340, 11th December 1918). By getting this decision adopted, the SPD immediately stripped the conference of what should have been its most fundamental character: as an expression of the world proletarian revolution which had begun in Russia.

In the same logic of sabotage and derailment, the SPD got the Congress to vote the call for the election of a constituent assembly for the 19th January 1919.

The Spartakists understood the maneuver, and called for a mass demonstration in front of the Congress. More than 250,000 demonstrators gathered under the slogan: "For the workers' and soldiers' councils, no to the national assembly!".

As the Congress acted against the interests of the working class, Liebknecht addressed the demonstrators: "We demand that the Congress take all political power into its hands to bring in socialism, and that it should not transfer it to the constituent assembly, which will not be in any way a revolutionary organ. We demand that the Congress of councils stretch out its hand to our class brothers in Russia, for them to join in the work of this Congress. We want the world revolution and the unification of all the workers in every country, in the workers' and soldiers' councils" (17th December 1918).

The revolutionaries understood the vital necessity of mobilizing the working masses, of putting pressure on their delegates, of electing new ones, of developing the initiative of the general assemblies in the factories, of defending the councils' autonomy against the bourgeois national assembly, and of insisting on the international unification of the working class.

Yet even after this massive demonstration, the congress continued to refuse the participation of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, on the pretext that they were not workers, while the bourgeoisie had already managed to get its own men into the councils. During the Congress, the SPD representatives took the defense of the army, to prevent its further disintegration by the soldiers' councils. The congress also decided not to receive any more delegations from workers and soldiers, so as not to be put under pressure by them.

At the end of its sessions, the congress made the confusion still worse by blathering on about the so-called first measures of socialization, when the workers had not even taken power. "Carrying out socio-political measures in isolated, individual companies is an illusion, as long as the bourgeoisie still hold political power in its hands" (IKD, Der Kommunist). The central questions of disarming the counter-revolution and overthrowing the bourgeois government were pushed aside.

What should the revolutionaries do against such a development?

On 16th December in Dresden, Otto Ruhle - who had meanwhile moved towards councilism - threw in the towel as soon as the town's social-democrats got the upper hand in the local workers' and soldiers' councils. The Spartakists, however, did not abandon the battlefield to the enemy. After denouncing the national congress of councils, they called for the initiative of the working class: "The congress of councils has overstepped its powers, it has betrayed the mandate it was given by the workers' and soldiers' councils, it has cut away the ground on which its existence and authority were based. The workers' and soldiers' councils must henceforth develop their power and defend their right to exist with tenfold energy. They will declare null and void the counter-revolutionary work of their unworthy men of confidence" (Rosa Luxemburg, Ebert's Janissaries, 20th December 1918).

The revolution's lifeblood is the activity of the masses

The Spartakists' responsibility was to push forward the masses' initiative, to intensify their activity. This is the orientation that they were to put forward ten days later at the founding Congress of the KPD. We will deal with the work of this congress in a later article.

The Spartakists had understood that the pulse of the revolution beats in the councils; the proletarian revolution is the first to be carried out by the great majority of the population, by the exploited class. Unlike the bourgeois revolutions which could be carried out by minorities, the proletariat can only be victorious if the revolution is constantly fed and pushed forward by the activity of the whole class. The councils, and the council delegates, are not a separate pan of the class which can isolate themselves from the rest, or even protect themselves from it, or maintain the rest of the class in a state of passivity. No, the revolution can only advance through the conscious, vigilant, active and critical activity of the entire class.

For the working class in Germany, this meant entering into a new phase, where it would have to increase the pressure coming from the factories. As for the Communists, the absolute priority was their agitation in the local councils. The Spartakists thus followed the policy that Lenin had already advocated in April 1917, when the situation in Russia was comparable to that now in Germany:

"The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers' Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.

As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticizing and exposing errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers' Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience" (Lenin, April Theses no 4).

We cannot properly understand the dynamic in the councils unless we analyze closely the role of the soldiers.

Liebknecht reported: "this had the effect of destabilizing the army. But as soon as the bourgeoisie put an end to the war, a split appeared within the army. The mass of soldiers is revolutionary against militarism, against the war and against the open representatives of imperialism. With regard to socialism, they are still undecided, hesitant and immature" (Liebknecht, 19th November 1918). While the war continued and the troops remained mobilized, soldiers' councils were formed.

"The soldiers' councils are the expression of a mass composed of all the classes in society, within which the proletariat is by far the largest, but certainly not the proletariat conscious of its aims and ready for the class struggle. Often they are formed directly from above, on the initiative of officers and circles of the high nobility, who by adapting adroitly seek to keep their influence over the soldiers by getting themselves elected as the latter's representatives" (Liebknecht, 21st November 1918).

As such, the army is a classic instrument of repression and imperialist conquest, controlled and led by officers under the exploiting state. In a revolutionary situation, where thousands of soldiers are in effervescence, where normal hierarchical relations are no longer respected, but where the workers in uniform take decisions collectively, all this can lead to the disintegration of the army, especially since they are armed. But to arrive at such a situation, it is necessary that the working class, by its activity, should provide a sufficiently strong reference point for the soldiers.

This dynamic existed during the final phase of the war. And this is why the bourgeoisie, feeling the danger rising, stopped the war to prevent a still further radicalization in the army. The new situation that was thus created allowed the ruling class to "calm" the soldiers and to separate them from the revolution, while the movement of the working class was not itself strong enough to attract the majority of the soldiers to its own side. This allowed the bourgeoisie all the better to manipulate the soldiers in its own favor.

The weight of the soldiers was important during the movement's ascendant phase - and indeed was vital in putting an end to the war; but their role was to change when the bourgeoisie began its counter -offensive.

The revolution can only be carried out internationally

The capitalists had fought for four years, sacrificing millions of human lives, but no sooner had the revolution broken out in Russia, and above all when the German proletariat began to move, than they all united against the working class. The Spartakists understood the danger that could result from the isolation of the working class in Germany and Russia. On 25th November, they raised the following call: "To the proletarians of all countries! The hour has struck to settle accounts with capitalist rule. But this great task cannot be carried out by the German proletariat alone. It can only struggle and win by calling on the solidarity of the proletarians of the entire world. Comrades of the belligerent nations, you know our situation. You know that your governments, because they have gained the victory, are blinding many elements of the people with the sparkle of victory (...) Your victorious capitalists are ready to drown in blood our revolution, which they fear as much as yours'. "Victory" has not made you more free, it has only enslaved you more. If your ruling classes succeed in stifling the revolution in Russia and Germany, they will turn against you with redoubled ferocity (...) Germany is giving birth to the social revolution, but only the international proletariat can build socialism" (To the proletarians of all countries, Spartakusbund, 25th November 1918).

While the SPD did everything it could to separate the German workers from those in Russia, the revolutionaries committed all their strength to unify the working class.

In this respect, the Spartakists were aware that "Today there naturally reigns among the peoples of the Entente a strong intoxication of victory; and the jubilation at the ruin of German imperialism and the liberation of France and Belgium makes so much noise that we cannot expect for the moment a revolutionary echo from the working classes in those countries which were our enemies until yesterday" (Liebknecht, 23rdDecember 1918). They knew that the revolution had created a serious split in the ranks of the working class. Capital's defenders, and in particular the SPD, began to set the workers in Germany against those in other countries. They even brandished the threat of foreign intervention. All this has often been used since by the ruling class.

The bourgeoisie learnt the lessons of Russia

Under the SPD's leadership, the bourgeoisie signed the armistice putting an end to the war on 11th November for fear that the working class would continue its radicalization, and go down "the Russian road". This ushered in a new situation.

As R Muller, one of the leading revolutionary "Delegates", put it: "The whole war policy, with all its effects on the workers' situation, the Sacred Union with the bourgeoisie, everything that had provoked the workers' anger, was forgotten".

The bourgeoisie had learnt its lesson from Russia. If the Russian bourgeoisie had put an end to the war in April of March 1917, the October Revolution would certainly have been either impossible, or at the least far more difficult. It was therefore necessary to stop the war, in the hope of cutting the ground from under the feet of the revolutionary class movement. Here also, the German workers faced a different situation from that confronting their class brothers in Russia.

"If we place ourselves on the terrain of historical development, then we cannot expect, in a Germany which has given us the frightful spectacle of 4th August and the four years that followed, a sudden upsurge, the 9th November 1918, of a grandiose class revolution conscious of its goals; what we experienced on 9th November, was three quarters the collapse of the existing imperialism, rather than the victory of a new principle. It was simply that for imperialism, a colossus with feet of clay, rotten from within, its time had come, it had to collapse; what followed was a more or less chaotic movement, without any battle plan, and with very little consciousness; the only coherent link, the only constant and liberating principle was summed up in one slogan: creation of workers' and soldiers' councils" (R Luxemburg at the founding Congress of the KPD).

This is why we should not confuse the beginning of the movement with its final goal, for "no proletariat in the world, not even the German proletariat, can rid itself overnight of the stigmata of thousands of years of servitude. The proletariat's situation does not reach its highest level, either politically or spiritually, on the first day of the revolution. It is only the struggle of the revolution that will, in this sense, raise the proletariat to its complete maturity" (R Luxemburg, 3rd December 1918).

The weight of the past

The Spartakists were right to seek the causes of these great difficulties of the class, in the weight of the past. The confidence that many workers still had in the policies of the SPD was a serious weakness. There were many who thought that the party's war policy had been due to a passing confusion. Worse, many saw the war being solely due to the ignoble machinations of the governmental clique which had just been overthrown. Remembering the more or less tolerable situation prior to the war, they hoped to escape soon and for good, from the misery of the present. Moreover, US President Wilson's promises of the unity of nations and democracy seemed to offer guarantee against new wars. The democratic republic they were "offered" appeared, not as the bourgeois republic, but as the soil where socialism could blossom. In short, the pressure of democratic illusions, and the lack of experience in confronting the sabotage of the unions and the SPD were determining.

"In all previous revolutions, the combatants confronted each other openly, class against class, program against program, shield against sword (...) [Beforehand] it was always the supporters of the system under threat or overthrown who took counter-revolutionary measures in the hope of saving it (...) In the revolution today the troops defending the old order are drawn up, not under their own flag and in the uniform of the ruling class, but under the flag of the social-democratic party (...) Bourgeois class rule is today fighting its last historic world struggle under a foreign flag, under the flag of the revolution itself. It is a socialist party, in other words the most original creation of the workers' movement and the class struggle, which has transformed itself into the most important instrument of the bourgeois counter-revolution. The basis, the tendency, the politics, the psychology, the method, are all capitalist to the core. All that remains is the flag, the apparatus and the phraseology of socialism" (R Luxemburg, A Pyrrhic VIctory, 21st December 1918).

The SPD's counter-revolutionary character could not be more clearly described.

This is why the Spartakists defined the next stage of the movement as follows:

"The passage from the predominantly soldiers' revolution of 9th November 1918 to a specifically workers' revolution, the passage from a superficial, purely political upheaval, to the long-term process of a general economic confrontation between Capital and Labor, demands of the working class quite another degree of political maturity, education and tenacity than that which has sufficed for the first phase of the beginning" (R Luxemburg, 3rd January 1919).

Certainly, the movement at the beginning of November was not solely a "soldiers' revolution", for without the workers in the factories the soldiers would never have reached such a level of radicalization. The Spartakists saw the perspective of a real step forward when in late November and early December, strikes broke out in the Ruhr and Upper Silesia. This revealed the activity of the working class in the factories and a diminution in the weight of the war and the role of the soldiers. With the end of hostilities, the economic collapse led to a still greater deterioration in the working class' living conditions. In the Ruhr many miners stopped work, and to impose their demands they would travel to other mines to seek the solidarity of their class brothers, and so build a powerful front. The struggles were thus to develop, then retreat, then go forward again with new strength.

Once the bourgeoisie had put an end to the war under the pressure of the working class, and had passed onto the offensive to counter the proletariat's first attempts to take power, the movement entered a new phase. Either the factory workers were to prove capable of developing a new thrust, to pass to a "specifically workers' revolution", or the bourgeoisie would be able to continue its counter-offensive.

In the next article, we will look at the question of the insurrection, the fundamental conceptions of the workers' revolution, the role that revolutionaries must and did, play in it.

DV

[1] The revolutionary movement was especially strong in Cologne. Within the space of 24 hours, on 9th November, 45,000 soldiers refused to obey their officers and deserted. On 7th November the revolutionary soldiers from Kiel were already on the way to Cologne. The future chancellor K. Adenauer, who was at that time the city's mayor, and the leadership of the SPD took measures to "calm the situation".

[2] From that time on capital has repeatedly used the same tactic: in 1980, when Poland was in the grip of a workers' mass strike, the bourgeoisie changed the government. The list of examples, where the dominant class has changed personnel to prevent the workers' anger being directed against capitalist domination, is endless.

In April, the ICC held its 11th International Congress. In so far as communist organizations are a part of the proletariat, a historic product of the class and an active factor in its struggle for emancipation, their Congresses, which are their supreme body, are extremely important to the working class. This is why communists have to give an account of this essential moment in the life of their organization.

Organizational problems in the history of the workers' movement...

The historic experience of the revolutionary organizations of the proletariat demonstrates that questions regarding their functioning are political questions in their own right and need to be looked at with considerable attention and depth.

There are many examples in the workers' movement of this importance of the organizational question, but we can speak more particularly here of the IWMA (International Working Men's Association, later known as the 1st International), and of the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), held in 1903.

The IWMA was founded in September 1864 in London, on the initiative of a number of French and English workers. It adopted a centralized structure straight away, with a central Council, which after the 1866 Geneva Congress was known as the General Council. Marx was to play a leading role within the Council, since it fell to him to write a large number of its basic texts, such as the IWMA's founding address, its statutes, and the address on the Paris Commune (The Civil War in France, May 1871). The IWMA (or "The International", as the workers called it) quickly became a "power" in the advanced countries (above all in Western Europe). Up till the 1871 Paris Commune, it regrouped a growing number of workers and was a leading-factor in the development of the proletariat's two essential weapons: its organization and its consciousness. This is why, indeed, the International was subjected to increasingly bitter attacks by the bourgeoisie: slander in the press, infiltration by informers, persecution of its members, etc. But the IWMA ran the greatest danger from the attacks of some of its own members against the International's very mode of organization.

Already, when the IWMA was founded, the provisional rules were translated by the Parisian sections, strongly influenced by Proudhon's federalist conceptions, in a way which considerably weakened the International's centralized character. But the most dangerous attacks were to come later, with the entry into its ranks of the "Alliance de la democratic socialiste" founded by Bakunin. This latter was to find fertile ground within important sections of the International, due to its own weaknesses which were in turn the result of the weaknesses of the proletariat at the time, a proletariat which had still not disengaged itself from the weaknesses of its previous stage of development.

Against the whimsical and antagonistic organizations of the sects, the International is a real, militant organization of the proletarian class of every country, linked together in their common struggle against the capitalists, the landowners, and their class power organized in the state. The statutes of the International therefore only recognize simple workers' societies, all pursuing the same aim, and all accepting the same program which limits itself to sketching the main traits of the proletarian movement, leaving the theoretical elaboration to the impulse given by the demands of the practical struggle, by the exchange of ideas in the sections, admitting all socialist convictions in their publications and congresses.

Just as, in any new historical phase, the old mistakes reappear for an instant only to disappear soon afterwards, so in the International we have seen the rebirth of sectarian sections within it ..." (The fictitious splits in the International, chapter IV, Circular of the General Council of 5th March 1872)

This weakness was especially marked in the most backward sectors of the European proletariat where it had only just emerged from the peasant and artisan classes. Bakunin, who entered the International in 1868 after the collapse of the "League for Peace and Liberty" (which regrouped bourgeois republicans, and of which he was a leading member), used these weaknesses to try to subject the International to his anarchist conceptions, and to bring it under his control. The tool for this operation was to be the "Alliance de la democratic socialiste"; which he had founded as a minority in the "League for Peace and Li berry". The AIIiance was both a public and a secret society, which in fact intended to form an International within the International. Its secret structure and the collusion this allowed amongst its members was supposed to ensure its "influence" over as many of the IWMA's sections as possible, especially those where anarchist conceptions encountered the greatest echo. In itself, the existence of several different trends of thought within the IWMA did not pose any problem[3]. By contrast, the activity of the Alliance, aimed at replacing the official structure of the International, was a serious factor of disorganization, and endangered the latter's very existence. The Alliance first tried to take control of the International at the Basle Congress in September 1869. With this aim in view, its members, in particular Bakunin and James Guillaume, warmly supported an administrative resolution strengthening the powers of the General Council. Failing in this, however, the Alliance (which itself had adopted secret statutes based on an extreme centralization[4] began a campaign against the "dictatorship" of the General Council, which it aimed to reduce to the role of a "statistical and correspondance bureau" to use the Alliancists terms, or to a mere "letter-box" as Marx answered them. Against the principle of centralization as an expression of the proletariat's international unity, the Alliance preached "federalism", the complete "autonomy of the sections", and the non-obligatory nature of Congress decisions. In fact, the Alliance wanted to do whatever it liked in the sections which had come under its control. The way would be open to the complete disorganization of the IWMA.

IWMA out of the hands of the Alliance, they also proposed that the General Council be moved to New York, far from the conflicts that were dividing the International. This was also a means for allowing the International to die a natural death (confirmed by the 1876 Philadelphia Conference), without its prestige being hijacked by the Bakuninist intriguers.

The latter, and the anarchists have perpetuated this legend, claimed that Marx and the General Council excluded Bakunin and Guillaume because of their different vision of the question of the state5] (when they did not explain the conflict between Marx and Bakunin by questions of personality). In short, Marx was supposed to have wanted to settle a disagreement on general theoretical questions with administrative measures. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Hague Congress took no measures against the members of the Spanish delegation, who shared Bakunin's ideas and had belonged to the Alliance, but who declared that they no longer did so. Similarly, the "anti-authoritarian" IWMA formed after the Hague Congress from the Federations which refused to accept its decisions was not made up solely of anarchists, since it also included the German Lassalleans, who were great defenders of "state socialism" to use Marx's words. In fact, the real struggle within the IWMA was between those who stood for the unity of the workers' movement (and therefore the binding nature of Congress decisions), and those, who demanded the right to do whatever they pleased, each isolated from the others, treating the Congresses as mere assemblies, where everyone could exchange "points of view" without taking any decisions. With this informal mode of organization, it would fall to the Alliance to carry out, in secret, a real centralization of the Federations, as indeed Bakunin's correspondence explicitly stated. Putting these "anti-authoritarian" conceptions to work in the International would have been the best way to deliver it up to the intrigues, and the hidden and uncontrolled power of the Alliance, in other words the adventurers who led it.

The 2nd Congress of the RSDLP was the occasion for a similar confrontation between the defenders of a proletarian conception of the revolutionary organization, and the petty-bourgeois conception.

There are similarities between the situation in the West European workers' movement at the time of the IWMA, and the movement in Russia at the turn of the century. In both cases, the workers' movement was still in its youth, the separation in time being due to Russia's late industrial development. The IWMA's purpose was to regroup in a united organization, the different workers' societies that the proletariat's development had created. Similarly, the aim of the RSDLP's 2nd Congress was to unite the different committees, groups and circles of the social democracy which had developed in Russia and in exile. Following the disappearance of the Central Committee which had been formed by the RSDLP's 1st Congress in 1897, there had been almost no formal links between these different formations. The 2nd Congress thus saw, as with the IWMA, a confrontation between a conception of the organization representing the movement's past, that of the "Mensheviks" ("minorityites") and a conception expressing the requirements of the new situation, that of the "Bolsheviks" ("majorityites"):

"Under the name of the "minority" heterogeneous elements are regrouped in the Party who are united by the desire, conscious or not, to maintain the relations of a circle, the previous organizational form to the Party. Certain eminent militants of the most influential old circles, not having the habit of organizational restrictions that the Party must impose, are inclined to mechanically confuse the general interests of the Party and their circle interests, which can coincide in the period of circles" (Lenin, One step forward, two steps back).

Like the anarchists after the Hague Congress, the Mensheviks refused to recognize and apply the decisions of the 2nd RSDLP Congress, declaring that "the Congress is not divine" and that "its decisions are not sacred". In particular, just as the Bakuninists went to war against the principle of centralization and the "dictatorship of the General Council" after failing to take control of it, one reason that the Mensheviks began to reject centralization after the Congress was the fact that several of them had been removed from the central organs elected by the Congress. There are even likenesses in the way the Mensheviks campaigned against the Lenin's "personal dictatorship" and "iron fist", which echo Bakunin's accusations of Marx's "dictatorship" over the General Council.

"When I consider the approach of the friends of Martov after the Congress (...) I can only say that this is an insane attempt, unworthy of Party members, to tear the Party apart (...) And why? Solely because one is discontented at the makeup of the central organs, because objectively this is the only question which separated us, since the subjective appreciations (such as offence, insults, expulsions, pushing aside, casting slurs, etc) were nothing but the fruit of wounded pride and a sick imagination. This sick imagination and wounded pride lead straight to the most shameful gossiping: without waiting to find out about the activity of the new centers, nor having seen them in action, some go about spreading gossip about their "inadequacy" or about the "iron glove" of Ivan Ivanovitch, or the "fist" of Ivan Nikiforovitch, etc (...) Russian social-democracy still has a difficult step to take, from the circle spirit to the party spirit from a petty-bourgeois mentality to a consciousness of its revolutionary duty; gossip and the pressure of circles considered as a means of action, against discipline" (Lenin, Report on the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP).

Given the examples of the IWMA and the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP, we can see the importance of questions linked to the mode of organization of revolutionary formations. In fact, these were the questions which were to produce the first decisive decantation between the proletarian current on the one hand, and the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois currents on the other. This importance is no accident. It springs precisely from the fact that one of the main channels for the infiltration of ideologies foreign to the proletariat - bourgeois or petty-bourgeois - is precisely that of their functioning.

The history of the workers' movement is full of examples like this. We have only spoken of these two cases here, partly of course for reasons of space, but also because, as we will see later, there are striking similarities in the circumstances in which the IWMA, the RSDLP, and the ICC were formed.

... and in the history of the ICC

The ICC has already had to pay close attention to such questions on a number of occasions. This was the case for example, at its Founding Conference in January 1975, where it examined the question of international centralization (see "Report on the question of organization in our current", International Review no 1). A year later, at its First Congress, our organization returned to this question, adopting its statutes (see "The statutes of the revolutionary organization of the proletariat", International Review no 5). Finally, in January 1982, the ICC held an extraordinary international conference on this question following the crisis it had been through in 1981[6]. The I CC did not hide from the working class and the proletarian political milieu the difficulties it had faced at the beginning of the 80s. This is how they were described in the resolution adopted by its 5th Congress, cited in International Review no 35:

"Since its Fourth Congress, the ICC has been through the most serious crisis in its existence[7]. A crisis which wasn't limited to the vicissitudes of the "Chenier affair" and which profoundly shook the organization, very nearly making it fall apart, resulting, directly or indirectly in the departure of forty members and cutting in half the membership of its second largest section. A crisis which took the form of a blindness and disorientation the like of which the ICC has not seen since its creation. A crisis which demanded the mobilization of exceptional methods if it was to be overcome: the holding of an extraordinary international conference, the discussion and adoption of basic orientation texts on the functions and functioning of the revolutionary organization, the adoption of new statutes."

Such a transparent attitude vis-à-vis the difficulties encountered by our organization has nothing to do with any 'exhibitionism' on our part. The experience of communist organizations is an integral part of the experience of the working class. This is why Lenin devoted an entire book, One step forward, two steps back to the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP. By giving an account of its organizational life, the ICC is thus doing nothing other than assuming its responsibility in the face of the working class.

Obviously, when a revolutionary organization publicizes its problems and internal discussions, this is a choice dish for all the adversaries waiting to denigrate it. This is also, and even especially the case for the ICC. Certainly, we won't find any jubilation in the bourgeois press over the difficulties that our organization is going through today: the ICC is still too small, both in its size and in its influence amongst the working masses, for the bourgeoisie to have any interest in talking about it and trying to discredit it. It is preferable for the bourgeoisie to erect a wall of silence around the positions and even the existence of revolutionary organizations. This is why the work of denigrating them, and sabotaging their intervention, is undertaken by a whole series of groups and parasitic elements whose function is to drive away individuals who are coming towards class positions, to disgust them with any participation in the difficult task of developing a proletarian political milieu.

time sympathizers of the organization, whom the organization decided not to integrate, judging their clarity inadequate, or who gave up of themselves for fear of losing their "individuality" within the collective framework (this is the case, for example, with the late" Alptraum collective" in Mexico, or with Kamunist Kranti in India). In every case, they are elements whose frustration at their own lack of courage, flabbiness and impotence has been converted into a systematic hostility towards our organization. Obviously, these elements are absolutely incapable of building anything whatever. By contrast, they are often very effective, with their petty agitation and their concierge's chatter, at discrediting and destroying what the organization is trying to build.

However, it is not the wriggling of the parasites that will prevent the ICC from setting before the whole proletarian milieu the lessons of its own experience. In the preface to One step forward .... in 1904, Lenin wrote:

"They [our adversaries] exult and grimace at the sight of our discussions; obviously, they will try, to serve their own purposes, to brandish my pamphlet devoted to the defects and weaknesses in our Party. The Russian social-democrats are sufficiently tempered in battle not to be troubled by such pinpricks, and to continue in spite of everything with their task of self-criticism, mercilessly unveiling their own weaknesses, which will be overcome necessarily and without fail by the growth of the workers' movement. Let our adversaries try to give us an image of the situation in their own "parties" which comes close to that presented by the minutes of our 2nd Congress!".

It is in exactly the same spirit that we put before our readers substantial extracts from the resolution adopted at our XIth Congress. This is not a sign of the ICC's weakness, but on the contrary a testimony to its strength.

The problems faced by the ICC in the recent period

- "The 11th Congress thus clearly affirms: the ICC was in a situation of latent crisis, a crisis much deeper than the one which hit the organization at the beginning of the 80s, a crisis which, if the roots of the weaknesses weren't identified, threatened the very life of the organization." (Activities resolution, point I)

- "The causes of this grave illness threatening the organization are numerous, but we can highlight the main ones:

- the fact that the extraordinary conference of January 1982, which had the task of setting the organization back on its feet after the crisis of 1981, did not go far enough in analyzing the weaknesses that affect the ICC;

- even more, the fact that the ICC had not fully assimilated the acquisitions of this conference (...);

- the reinforcement of the destructive pressure of capitalist decomposition on the class and its communist organizations.

In this sense the only way the ICC could effectively deal with the mortal danger it faced was:

- to identify the importance of this danger (... );

- to mobilize the whole ICC, its militants, sections and organs around the priority of the defense of the organization;

- to reappropriate the acquisitions of the 1982 conference;

- to deepen these acquisitions on the basis of the framework they had provided." (ibid, point 2)

The struggle to redress the ICC began in autumn 1993 when we opened a discussion throughout the organization on an orientation text which recalled and updated the lessons of 1982 while going further into the historical origins of our weaknesses. The following concerns were at the center of this approach: the reappropriation of the acquisitions of our own organization and of the workers' movement as a whole, the continuity with the struggles of the movement, especially the fight against the penetration of alien ideologies, bourgeois and petty bourgeois.

"The framework of analysis the ICC adopted for laying bare the origins of its weaknesses was in continuity with the historic struggle waged by marxism against the influence of petty bourgeois ideology that weighed on the organization of the proletariat. More precisely, it referred to the struggle of the General Council of the IWMA against the activities of Bakunin and his followers, and of Lenin and the Bolsheviks against the opportunist and anarchistic conceptions of the Mensheviks during and after the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP. In particular, it was vital for the organization to have as its central concern, as it was for the Bolsheviks after 1903, the struggle against the circle spirit and for the party spirit. This was a priority for the ICC given the kinds of weaknesses which weighed on the ICC because of its origin in the circles which appeared in the wake of the historic resurgence of the proletariat and the end of the 60s; circles strongly marked by affinity type conceptions, contestationism, individualism, in a word, the anarchistic conceptions which came with the student revolts that accompanied and polluted the proletarian revival. It is in this sense that becoming aware of the weight of the circle spirit in our origins was an integral part of a general analysis elaborated long before, the one which saw the basis of our weaknesses in the break in the organic continuity with previous communist organizations, the result of the counter-revolution which descended on the working class at the end of the 20s. However, this realization allowed us to go further than we had done before and to go to the deeper roots of our difficulties, In particular, it allowed us to understand the phenomenon - already noted in the past but not sufficiently elucidated - of the formation of clans in the organization: these clans were in reality the result of the decomposition of the circle spirit which kept going long after the period in which circles had been an unavoidable step in the reconstruction of the communist vanguard. In so doing, those clans in turn became an active factor. The best guarantee for the large-scale survival of the circle spirit in the organization." (ibid, point 4).

Here the resolution makes a reference to a point from the autumn 93 orientation text, which highlighted the following question:

"One of the grave dangers which permanently threaten the organization, which put its unity in question and risk destroying it, is the constitution, even if it is not deliberate or conscious, of 'clans'. In a dynamic of the clan, common approaches do not share a real political agreement but links of friendship, loyalty, the convergence of specific personal interests or shared frustrations. Often, such a dynamic, to the extent that it is not founded on a real political convergence, accompanied by the existence of 'gurus', clan leaders, who guarantee the unity of the clan, and who may draw their power from a particular charisma, can even stifle political capacities and the judgment of other militants as a result of the fact they are presented or present themselves, as victims of such or such policy of the organization. When such a dynamic appears, the members or sympathizers of the clan can no longer decide for themselves, in their behavior or the decisions that they take, as a result of a conscious and rational choice based on the general interests of the organization, but as a result of the interests of the clan which tends to oppose itself to those of the rest of the organization."

This analysis was based on previous experiences of the workers' movement (for example, the attitude of the former editors of Iskra grouped around Martov who, unhappy with the decisions of the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP, had formed the Menshevik fraction), but also on precedents in the history of the ICC. We can't go into detail here but what we can say is that the 'tendencies' which have appeared in the ICC (the one which split in 1978 to form the Groupe Communiste International, the 'Chenier tendency' in 1981, the 'tendency' which left the ICC at its 6th Congress to form the 'External Fraction of the ICC') corresponded much more to such a clan dynamic than to real tendencies based on an alternative positive orientation. The principal motor of these 'tendencies' wasn't the divergences their members may have had with the orientations of the organization (these divergences were completely heterogeneous, as the later trajectory of these 'tendencies' proved). Instead they were based on an agglomeration of elements frustrated and discontented with the central organs, of those 'loyal' to individuals who saw themselves as being 'persecuted' or insufficiently recognized.

The recovery of the ICC

While the existence of clans no longer had the same spectacular character as in the past, it still continued to undermine the organizational tissue in a quiet but dramatic way. In particular, the whole ICC (including the militants most directly involved in it) recognized that it was faced with a clan which occupied a particularly important position in the organization and which, while it was not simply an organic product of the ICC's weaknesses, had "concentrated and crystallized a great number of the deleterious characteristics which affected the organization and whose common denominator was anarchism ..." (Activities resolution, point .5).

This is why: "The ICC's understanding of the phenomenon of the clans and their particularly destructive role has allowed it to put its finger on a large amount of the bad functioning which affected most of the territorial sections. (...) It has also allowed it to understand the loss, pointed out by the activities report of the 10th Congress, of the 'spirit of regroupment' which characterized the first years of the ICC." (ibid).

Finally, after several days of very animated debates, in which there was a profound commitment from and a real unity between the delegations, the 11th Congress reached the following conclusions:

"... the Congress notes the overall success of the combat engaged by the ICC in the autumn of 1993 (...) the -sometimes spectacular - redressment of some of the sections with the greatest organizational difficulties in 1993 (...), the deepening that has come from a number of sections in the ICC (...), all these facts confirm the full validity of the combat both in its theoretical bases and its concrete application (...) The Congress emphasizes particularly the organization's deepening in its understanding of a whole series

"On the basis of these elements, the Xlth ICC Congress notes that the ICC is stronger today than it was at the previous Congress, that it is incomparably better armed to confront its responsibilities in future upsurges of the class struggle, although it is obviously still in a state of convalescence." (ibid, point 11).

This recognition of the positive outcome of the combat waged by the organization since the autumn of 1993 did not however lead to any feelings of euphoria in the Congress. The ICC has learned to mistrust any tendency to get carried away, which expresses less a proletarian approach than the penetration into the communists' ranks of petty bourgeois impatience. The combat waged by communist organizations and militants is a patient, long-term, often obscure process, and a real militant enthusiasm is not measured by outbursts of euphoria but the capacity to hold out against storms and stress, to resist the pernicious pressure of the ideology of the ruling class. This is why a recognition that the organization's struggle has been a success has not at all led us into any triumphalism:

"This does not mean that the combat we have conducted to date should come to an end. (...) The ICC will have to continue this combat through a permanent vigilance, the determination to identify every weakness and to confront it without delay. (...) In reality, the history of the workers' movement, including that of the ICC, teaches us, and the debate has fully confirmed this, that the struggle for the defence of the organization is a permanent one, and without respite. In particular, the ICC must remember that the Bolsheviks' struggle for the party spirit and against the circle spirit continued for many years. It will be the same for our organization, which will have to watch for and eliminate any demoralization, any feeling of impotence as a result of the length of the combat." (ibid, point 13).

Before concluding this part on the questions of organization discussed at the Congress, it is important to point out that the debates conducted by the ICC for 18 months did not lead to any splits (contrary, for example, to what happened at the Vlth Congress or in 1981). This is because right from the start the organization expressed an agreement with the theoretical arguments put forward for understanding the difficulties it was encountering. The absence of disagreement on this framework made it possible to avoid the crystallization of any "tendency" or even a "minority" theorizing its own particularities. A great part of the discussions were focused on how this framework should be concretized in the ICC's daily functioning, with a constant concern to attach such concretization to the experience of the workers' movement. The fact that there was no split is a testimony to the I CC's strength, its greater maturity, the determination shown by the majority of its militants to carry on the combat for its defense, and to renew the health of its organizational fabric, to overcome the circle spirit, and all the anarchistic conceptions which consider the organization as a sum of individuals or of little groups based on affinity.

Perspectives of the international situation

Obviously a communist organization does not exist for its own sake. It is an actor, not a spectator, in the struggles of the working class, and the intransigent defense of the organization has precisely the aim of enabling it to carry out its role.

To this end the Congress devoted part of its debates to examining the international situation. It discussed and adopted several reports on this question as well as a resolution which synthesized the latter, which is published in this issue of the International Review. This is why we will not deal at greater length here with this aspect of the Congress. Here, we will simply consider, briefly, the last of the three aspects (evolution of the economic crisis, imperialist conflicts, and the balance of class forces) of the international situation which were discussed at the Congress.

This resolution declares clearly that: "More than ever, the struggle of the proletariat represents the only hope for the future of human society." (point 14).

However, the Congress confirmed what the ICC had already put forward in the autumn of 1989: "This struggle, which revived with great power at the end of the 60s, putting an end to the most terrible counter-revolution the working class has ever known, went into a major retreat with the collapse of the stalinist regimes, the ideological campaigns which accompanied them, and all the events which followed (Gulf war, war in Yugoslavia)." (ibid).

And it is mainly for this reason that today: "The workers' struggles are developing in a sinuous, jagged manner full of advances and retreats." (ibid).

However, the bourgeoisie knows very well that the aggravation of attacks against the working class can only provoke increasingly conscious struggles. It is preparing for this by developing a whole series of union maneuvers as well as entrusting certain of its agents with the task of reviving talk about 'revolution', 'Communism' or 'marxism. This is why: "It is up to revolutionaries, in their intervention, to denounce with the greatest vigor both the rotten maneuvers of the unions and these so-called 'revolutionary' speeches. They have to put forward the real perspective of the proletarian revolution and of communism as the only way of saving humanity and as the ultimate result of the workers' struggles." (point 17).

Having reconstituted and gathered together its forces, the ICC is ready, after its Xlth Congress, to assume this responsibility.

[1] Germany, Belgium, USA, Spain, France, Britain, India, Italy, Mexico, Holland, Sweden, Venezuela.  

[2] We had also planned 10 have an item on the proletarian political milieu which is a permanent concern of our organization. For lack of time, we had to drop this but this in no way means that we will let our attention slip on this question. On the contrary: it is by overcoming our own organizational difficulties that we can make our best contribution to the development of the proletarian milieu as a whole.

[3] "The sections of the working class in various countries being placed in different conditions of development, it necessarily follows that their theoretical opinions, which reflect the real movement, are also different. However, the community of action established by the International Working Men's Association, the exchange of ideas made easier by their publication in the organs of the different national sections, and finally the direct discussions at the General Congresses, will not fail gradually to engender a common theoretical program" (Response by the General Council to the Alliance's request for membership, 9th March 1869). It should be noted that the Alliance first asked to join with its own statutes, where it was planned that it would adopt an international structure parallel to that of the IWMA (with a central committee and Congress held separately from those of the IWMA). The General Council refused this request, pointing out that the Alliance's statutes were contrary to those of the IWMA. It made it clear that it was ready to admit the Alliance sections, if the latter gave up its international structure. The Alliance accepted these conditions, but continued to existence in conformity to its secret statutes.

[4] In an appeal "To the officers of the Russian army", Bakunin boasted the merits of the secret organization "whose strength lies in discipline, in the passionate devotion and abnegation of its members, and in blind obedience to a single Committee which knows everything and is known to nobody".

[6] See 'The crisis of the revolutionary milieu', 'Report on the structure and functioning of the organization of revolutionaries' and 'Presentation of the 5th Congress of the ICC' in International Reviews 28, 33 and 35 respectively.

[7] Chenier, exploiting our organization's lack of vigilance, became a member of the French section in 1978. From 1980, he undertook a whole subterranean work aimed at destroying our organization. To do this, he very skillfully exploited both the ICC's lack of organizational rigor and the tensions that existed in our section in Britain. This situation had led to the formation of two antagonistic clans in the section, blocking its work and leading to the loss of half the section as well as a number of resignations in other sections. Chenier was excluded from the ICC in September 81 and we published in our press a communiqué warning the proletarian milieu against this "shady and dangerous" element. Shortly after this, Chenier began a career in trade unionism, the Socialist Party and the state apparatus for which he had very probably been working for some time.