"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". There are periods when this general truth, which is one of the foundations of marxism, does not apply in an immediate sense. World wars cannot be explained by the confrontation between the ruling class and the proletariat: on the contrary, it is only possible for them to break out when this confrontation has been weakened. But if there is one epoch when these words of the Communist Manifesto apply to immediate reality, it is today's. This is true at the level of the present course of history: as the ICC has already demonstrated, only the working class' struggle and mobilization since capitalism entered its open crisis at the end of the 60's have prevented this system from giving its own answer to its economic collapse: generalized imperialist war. It is true more specifically for the decade which is drawing to a close, where the development and bitterness of class combats since 1983, have forced the ruling class to develop on a grand scale all kinds of ideological campaigns - pacifist campaigns in particular - aimed at hiding from the workers what is really at stake in the present situation. And finally, it is still more true today when the intensification of these campaigns and the use of a multitude of maneuvers within the struggle itself, are among the surest signs of its potential for development.

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Not since the Second World War has the working class in every country been subjected to such a brutal series of attacks. In peripheral coun­tries like Mexico, Algeria or Venezuela, workers living conditions have fallen by as much as half in recent years. In the central countries, the situation is not fundamentally different. Behind the adulterated figures "explaining" that "things are getting better", the "unemployment is de­clining" and such like gross lies, the bourgeoisie cannot hide from the workers the constant de­cline in their living conditions, the falling real wages, the dismantling of "social welfare", the proliferation of insecure, miserably paid jobs, the irresistible increase in absolute pauperization.

For more than 20 years, the world working class has fought back in large-scale struggles against the inexorable decline in its living con­ditions. Those that broke out at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 70s (May 68 in France, the Italian "hot autumn" of 1969, the uprising of Polish workers in December 1970, etc), just as the open crisis of capitalism began to affect working class living conditions, proved unmistakably that the proletariat has emerged from the death-shroud of the counter-revolution in which it had been wrapped since the end of the 1920s. The perspective opened by the capitalist mode of production's intensifying contradictions was not a new imperialist slaughter, as in the 1930s, but widespread class confrontation. Then, the wave of workers' struggles of the late 70s/early 80s (Longwy-­Denain in France, steel and many other branches in Britain, Poland etc), confirmed that the previous wave had not been a mere flash in the pan, but had opened a whole historical pe­riod where the confrontation between bour­geoisie and proletariat could only become more bitter. The brief duration of the reflux in the struggle following the working class' defeat during these combats (marked by the December 81 coup in Poland) bore further witness to this reality. By autumn 1983 the massive struggles in the Belgian state sector opened up a new se­ries of combats whose extent and simultaneity in most of the advanced countries, especially in Europe, were an important expression of the deepening class antagonisms in the most deci­sive countries for the class struggle's develop­ment on a world scale. This series of combats, especially the widespread conflicts in the Belgian state sector during 1986, showed clearly that the increasingly frontal and massive capi­talist attacks already posed the necessity for the unification of the proletarian struggle, in other words not only their geographical exten­sion beyond trades and different branches of industry, but also the workers' ability con­sciously to organize this extension themselves.

At the same time, the various struggles dur­ing this period, especially those that have oc­curred recently in France (on the railways in December 86, in the hospitals during the autumn of 88) and in Italy (in the schools during the spring of 87, on the railways during the summer and autumn of the same year), have highlighted the trade unions' declining ability to put them­selves forward as the ‘organizers' of the work­ers struggles. Even if this has only been obvious in countries where the unions have dis­credited themselves most in the past, it corre­sponds to a general and irreversible historical tendency. All the more so in that it is accom­panied by workers' increasing distrust of left­wing political parties and of bourgeois democ­racy in general; this is clear especially in the rising figures for abstentions in the electoral comedy.

Within this historical context, of a proletarian militancy which has shown no signs of dimin­ishing in 20 years, and of a weakening of the essential structures for controlling the working class, the continuation of ever-deeper capitalist attacks is creating the conditions for still greater upsurges of the class struggle, of still more massive and determined confrontations than those we have seen in the past. This is what is really at stake in the world situation. This is what the bourgeoisie does everything in its power to hide from the workers.

The bourgeoisie reinforces its ideological campaigns

From television, radio, and the newspapers, we "learn" that the most significant elements of to­day's international situation are:

-- the ‘warming' relations between the great powers; principally between the USA and USSR, but also between the latter and China;

-- the ‘real desire' of all governments to build a ‘peaceful' world, to settle the conflicts in various parts of the world by negotiation and to limit the arms race (especially the most ‘barbaric' nuclear and chemical weapons);

-- the fact that the main danger threatening humanity today is the destruction of the envi­ronment, especially of the Amazon rain forests, by the ‘greenhouse effect' which will turn im­mense areas of the planet into desert or by technological disasters of the Chernobyl variety, etc; and that consequently we should mobilize behind the ecologists, and the governments which have now been converted to their ideas;

-- the growing popular aspirations to ‘freedom' and ‘democracy', as interpreted by Gorbachev and his ‘extremists' such as Yeltsin, along with Walesa and his Nobel prize, a George Bush transformed into a scourge of his one-time friends, the Noriega style goons and drug-deal­ers, a Mitterand displaying his bicentennial ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man' to the four corners of the earth, and the Chinese students, to give an exotic ‘popular' flavor to all this fuss;

-- the preparation for Europe in 1992, the mobilization for this ‘unparalleled historic event' which the opening of the member countries' frontiers will represent, and for which the European elections of 18th June are an impor­tant stepping stone;

-- the threat of "islamic fundamentalism', of its grand master Khomeini, which his Rushdicide declarations and his battalions of terrorists.

In the midst of all this din, the working class and the crisis seem strangely silent. As for the first, it is supposed to be in retreat (haven't growth rates returned to the levels of the 1960s?), we should be excited about the ups and downs of the dollar, we are ‘informed' that the powers that be are concerned about third world debt and are ‘doing something'. As far as the second is concerned, if the media talk about it at all (and in general news of the struggle is subjected to the most systematic black-out), it is usually to write its obituary, or to publish alarmist bulletins as to its health: it is dead, or nearly, at all events it is ‘in crisis because trade unionism is in crisis'.

This kind of omnipresent propaganda is not new for capitalism or even for class societies in general. From the beginning, the bourgeoisie ­has used lies to make the exploited classes ac­cept their fate, or to turn them away from the class struggle. But what distinguishes the times in which we live, is the extreme degree of state totalitarianism set up to control how peo­ple think. It does not broadcast just one, offi­cial truth, but fifty competing ‘truths', so that everyone can ‘make his choice', as in a super-market, and which are in reality nothing but fifty variations of the same lie. The questions are lies, even before we get to the answers: for or against disarmament? For or against getting rid of short-range missiles? For or against a Palestinian state? For or against ‘liberalism'? Is Gorbachev sincere? Is Reagan senile? These are the ‘essential' questions for the TV ‘debates' or the opinion polls, unless it is ‘for or against fox-hunting' or ‘for or against the massacre of elephants'.

If the aim of all these lies and media cam­paigns is to set up a smokescreen to hide the real problems confronting the working class, their intensification today simply expresses the bourgeoisie's awareness of the growing danger of explosions of working class militancy, and of the process of developing consciousness throughout the class. For example, as we have already pointed out in these pages (eg, in International Review no 53, ‘War, Militarism, and Imperialist Blocs), one of the reasons behind the replacement of the militarist campaigns of the early decade (Reagan's crusade against the ‘evil empire') by today's pacifist campaign from 1983- 84 onwards, is that the theme of imminent war, while it can increase the demoralization of the working class in a moment of defeat, runs the opposite risk of opening the workers' eyes to what is really at stake in the present period, once they renew the open combat. There has not been any real attenuation in the conflicts between the great imperialist powers, quite the reverse: we need only site the constant growth in military spending, despite its being an ever greater economic burden for all countries. What has changed is that the working class is better placed today to understand that the only force capable of preventing a world war is its own struggle. In these conditions, it was important for the bourgeoisie to ‘show' that it is thanks to the ‘wisdom' of governments that we can hope for a more peaceful world, less menaced by the danger of war.

Similarly, the main aim of the present cam­paigns on the danger to the environment, and the apparent readiness of governments to ‘fight' against these dangers, is to confuse the con­sciousness of the proletariat. These dangers are indeed a real threat to humanity. They are a sign of capitalist society's general decomposi­tion (see the article on ‘The Decomposition of Capitalism' in International Review no 57). But obviously, none of the campaigns intend to put forward this kind of analysis. They aim to ‘show', and in this the bourgeoisie has suc­ceeded in several countries, that world war is not the main threat hanging over humanity. The impact of the pacifist campaigns is rein­forced by this ‘substitute fear' for the anxieties inevitably provoked in the population by the agony of the capitalist world. Amongst other things, the ecological threat appears much more ‘democratic' than the danger of war, where the working class knows very well that it would be the main victim: the polluted air of Los Angeles does not distinguish between the lungs of the workers and the bourgeois, Chernobyl's cloud of radiation affects workers, peasants and bour­geois of the region without distinction (though in reality, even here the workers are far more exposed than the bourgeois). As a result, ‘ecology is everyone's business': here again, the point is to hide from the working class the ex­istence of its own specific interests. It also aims at preventing  the workers from understanding that there is no solution to this kind of problem (like those of growing insecurity, or drugs) within capitalist society, whose irreversible cri­sis cannot but produce still more barbarity. This is the main aim of governments which an­nounce that they are going to deal ‘seriously' with the threat to the environment. Moreover, the extra cost of these ‘ecological' measures (increased taxes, and higher prices for such consumer goods as the ‘clean car') can be used to justify the workings' falling living standards. It is obviously easier to make people accept sacrifices to ‘improve the quality of life' than for arms spending (and then divert the former to the latter).

This attempt to make workers accept further sacrifices in the name of a ‘great cause' reap­pears in the campaigns about ‘building Europe'. Already at the end of the 70s, when the steel­workers rebelled against mass redundancies, ev­ery state used Europe as an excuse: "these job cuts are not the government's fault; it's been decided in Brussels". Today, they're singing the same chorus: the workers must improve their productivity, and be ‘reasonable' in their demands, so that the national economy can be competitive in the ‘Great European market of 1992'. In particular, ‘harmonizing taxation and social security' will be an opportunity to level out the latter - downwards - in other words deal a new blow to the living conditions of the working class.

Lastly, the campaigns on democracy aim to make the workers of the great Western indus­trial centers ‘understand' their ‘good fortune' in enjoying such precious commodities as ‘Freedom' and ‘Democracy', even if their living conditions are more and more difficult. The same message is aimed at workers still deprived of ‘Democracy': their legitimate discontent at the constant and catastrophic decline in their living standards must be turned into support for a policy - ‘democratization' - which will overcome the causes of these calamities (see the article on ‘Glasnost' in this issue).

Special mention should be made here of the extensive media coverage of events in China:

"The only force really capable of defying the government is not the working class but the students" (we've heard this song before, in France in May 68, and then again in December 86). This is the message that must be put over; no opportunity can be missed to try to convince the working class that it ‘doesn't count', or at least to hinder its becoming aware that it is the only class with a future, that its present strug­gles are the preparation for the only perspec­tive able to save humanity, the precondition for the overthrow of this system that grows daily more barbaric.

But the ruling class does not trust merely to its huge media campaigns to achieve this goal. At the same time, it attacks the proletariat's combativity, self-confidence, and developing consciousness on the terrain where they appear most directly: the struggle against the bour­geoisie's increasingly brutal attacks.

The bourgeoisie's maneuvers against the workers' struggles

If the unification of its struggle is currently a vital necessity for the working class, then clearly this is where the bourgeoisie must make its biggest effort. And this is indeed what is happening.

Recent months have seen unfolding a bour­geois offensive aimed at getting ahead of work­ers' militancy, provoking struggles preventively in order to nip in the bud the drive towards a massive movement of solidarity throughout the class. This tactic was already used last summer in Great Britain, dominated by the world's most skilful and experienced bourgeoisie, with the August postal strike. By provoking a movement in a sector as central as the Post Office, but at the worst time of year for spreading the strug­gle, the bourgeoisie took every precaution to keep the movement isolated from other branches of industry. The maneuver's success gave the go-ahead to the bourgeoisie in other West European countries to use this strategy to the hilt, as we saw in September in France with the artificial provocation, planned months in ad­vance, of the nurses' strike. Here again, the bourgeoisie aimed to bring one sector out pre­maturely, on ground that it had prepared in advance, and before the class as a whole was ready for a head-on confrontation (see the arti­cle on ‘France: the coordinations in the lead, to sabotage the struggle' in International Review no 56). In December, the Spanish bourgeoisie, encouraged by the successes in Britain and France, also adopted the strategy, when all the trade unions called for the famous ‘general strike' on 14th December, when not just one in­dustrial branch, but millions of workers from all branches were sent out to battle prematurely, in a fake demonstration of ‘strength'. This is how, in all those countries where major confronta­tions have taken place in the last two years, the bourgeoisie managed to ‘damp the powder' in advance, and so stifle any new upsurge of massive struggle.

In order to carry out this policy of sabo­taging the workers' struggles, the bourgeoisie must strengthen its forces of control on the spot. Faced with the workers' increasing dis­trust of the trade unions, and their tendency to take charge of the struggle themselves, the bourgeoisie has everywhere tried, not only to put the official unions back in control, but also to set up ‘non-union' structures, to take up the needs of the class, the better to empty them of their content and turn them against the work­ers.

So in France, we have seen an extreme ‘radicalization' of the CGT (CP controlled trade union), as well as reshuffles within the other unions to give them a more ‘left' image. In Spain, the workers have confronted a similar radicalization which allowed all the trade unions together to orchestrate the maneuver of 14th December. In particular, we have seen the UGT (union strongly tied to the ruling PSOE) sud­denly take its distance from the PSOE, taking up the ‘fight' alongside the Workers' Commissions (CCOO, the CP controlled union) and the CP against the government's austerity pol­icy.

In recent months, this same radicalization of the official unions has also held back the devel­opment of the struggles in Holland where, as in Spain, the unions have not only tried to polish up their image by talking tough against the government, above all they have been trying to take over the workers' need for unity, in order to mislead it and strip it of any real meaning. In Spain, the 14th December maneuver publicized the unity between the UGT-CCOO-CNT unions, while organizing the demonstrations to prevent any chance of different groups of workers getting together. In Holland, the unions have aimed to mislead this essential need of the class through a fake ‘active solidarity'; to do so, they have set up as early as last autumn, a ‘coordination committee' supposedly designed to ‘organize solidarity' with between struggles in different branches of industry.

In Britain, finally, the bourgeoisie has not been left behind in this ‘radicalization' of its trade unions. In the recent transport strikes around London, the biggest in this sector since 1926, it was the ‘official' unions themselves that took the responsibility of calling an illegal strike.

However, this policy of ‘radicalizing' the offi­cial unions is clearly becoming less and less ca­pable, by itself, of halting the development of the struggle. More and more often, the official, or even the rank-and-file unions are being supported by another structure of control, claiming to be ‘outside the unions' and mostly run by leftists: the self-proclaimed coordina­tions. Since the movement in the French hos­pitals, which starred the ‘nurses' coordination', this has become a model for the whole of the European bourgeoisie. Lately, there have ap­peared new ‘branches' of this coordination, in particular in West Germany where the same kind of coordination was set up in the Cologne hos­pitals in November, before any kind of mobilization developed in the sector. It was also amongst the nurses that Dutch leftists set up a coordination and called a national meeting at Utrecht in February, thus attempting to create a premature centralization, before the workers had really mobilized.

It is no accident that the maneuver used during the nurses' strike in France is now be­ing used as a model, a reference point, by the bourgeoisie in other European countries. Thanks to the nurses' pseudo-victory (the government had already allocated the funds for the hardly-‘won' pay-rise long before), this coordi­nation became the spearhead of the present bourgeois offensive aimed at presenting section­alist struggles as the only ones capable of leading the workers to victory, at playing off different sectors of workers against each other, in order to undermine any attempt at a united counter-attack on the basis of demands common to all workers. This in a number of countries lately, we have seen unions and leftists step up the techniques already used during the rail strikes of 1986 in France and 1987 in Italy (especially through the ‘coordinations') to inject the sectionalist poison systematically into every struggle, by putting forward specific demands, to prevent workers from other branches identi­fying with the struggle, or even to set workers against each other.

In Spain, for example, the grand maneuvers of 14th December were not merely aimed at ‘damping the powder' of workers' discontent. Since then, the unions have begun a huge campaign on the theme: "We must draw the lessons of the 14th December in each industrial branch, since each has its own contract, and its own specific demands". Similarly, wherever the unions are especially distrusted, it is the left­ists and rank-and-file unionists who have been putting forward specific demands for drivers on the railways, or for mechanics in the airlines, for the Teruel miners or the Valencia nurses, etc.

In West Germany, the bourgeoisie has launched a huge media campaign to ‘restore the status of the nursing profession', and so use this particular sector to inject the poison of sectionalism into the working class. On the same basis, the leftists of the Cologne coordina­tion have put forward a demand for 500 DM, but only for nurses, just as in France.

In Holland since the beginning of the year, working class combativity has threatened to break into open struggle against the new aus­terity measures announced by the government; the unions and leftists have exploited their radical image to maintain the isolation of strug­gles that have developed in a number of branches since early 89: at Philips, in Rotterdam docks, amongst teachers, council workers in Amsterdam, the Hoogovens steelworkers, lorry drivers, building workers, etc. The unions' strategy for dispersing the struggle (rotating strikes, one branch after the other, regional meetings, 2 hour walk-outs, ‘action days' called just in one branch, etc) is based essentially on the use of specific demands, so that workers from other branches cannot identify with a par­ticular struggle (the 36 hour week for the steelworkers, overtime payments for the lorry drivers, defense of teaching quality for the teachers, etc).

These are the maneuvers that the bour­geoisie is using today in Western Europe, in other words against the spearhead of the world proletariat. For the moment, this strategy has succeeded in disorientating the working class, and hindering its march towards a united com­bat. But the fact that the ruling class is forced to rely more and more on its ‘leftists', like the intensification of its media campaigns, is a sign of the deep process whereby the condi­tions are ripening for new, more determined and conscious, massive upsurges of the proletarian struggle. In this sense, the huge and extremely combative struggles in recent months, by work­ers in various countries of the capitalist pe­riphery (South Korea, Mexico, Peru, and above all Brazil, where for several weeks more than 2 million workers went well beyond the limits set by the trade unions), are only the forerunners of a new series of major confrontations in the central countries of capitalism. More than ever, it is the working class that holds the key to the present historical situation.

FM : 28-5-89 

The history of the international communist left since the beginning of the century, such as we've begun to relate in our pamphlets on the ‘Communist Left of Italy' isn't simply for historians. It's only from a militant standpoint, the standpoint of those who are committed to the workers' struggle for emancipation, that the history of the workers' movement can be approached. And for the working class, this history isn't just a question of knowing things, but first and foremost a weapon in its present and future struggles, because of the lessons from the past that it contains. It's from this militant point of view that we are publishing as a contribution to the history of the revolutionary movement a pamphlet on the German-Dutch communist left which will appear in French later this year. The introduction to this pamphlet, published below, goes into the question of how to approach the history of this current.

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Franz Mehring, the renowned author of a biography of Marx and of a history of German social democracy, comrade in arms to Rosa Luxemburg, emphasized in 1896 - in the Neue Zeit - how important it was for the workers' movement to be able to reappropriate its own past:

"The proletariat has the advantage over all the other parties of being able to constantly draw new strength from the history of its own past, the better to wage its present-day struggles and to attain the new world of the future."

The existence of a real ‘workers' memory is the expression of a constant effort by the workers' movement, in its revolutionary aspect, to reappropriate its own past. This reappropriation is inseparably linked to the self-development of class consciousness, which is manifested most fully in the mass struggles of the proletariat. And Mehring noted in the same article that "to understand is to go beyond" (aufheben), in the sense of conserving and assimilating those elements of the past which contain the seeds of the future of a historic class, the only historic class today, the bearer of the "new world of the future". Thus, for example, it is impossible to understand the emergence of the Russian revolution of October 1917 without relating it to the experiences of the Paris Commune and of 1905.

Since we consider that the history of the workers' movement can't be reduced to a series of bucolic images, painting a bye-gone epoch in ­rosy hues, and still less to academic studies in which "the past of the movement is so miniturised into the pedantic study of minutiae, so deprived of any general perspective and so isolated from its context that it can only be of the most limited interest" (G Haupt, L'Historien et le mouvement social), we have chosen to approach our work on the history of the Dutch-German revolutionary workers' movement as a form of praxis. We define this in the same way as G Haupt: considered as the expression of a "militant materialism" (Plekhanov), this praxis is defined as "a laboratory of experiences, failures and successes, a field for theoretical and strategic elaboration, demanding a spirit of rigor and critical examination in order to grasp historical reality, and thus discover its hidden elements, to invent and innorate on the basis of a historic moment seen as experience." (Haupt, ibid).

For the revolutionary workers' movement, the history of its own past is not ‘neutral'. It implies a constant questioning and thus a critical examination of its past experience.

The revolutionary transformations in the praxis of the proletariat are always underpinned by profound transformations in class consciousness. Only the critical examination of the past, free of dogmas and taboos can restore to the revolutionary workers' movement this historical dimension which is characteristic of a class which has a final goal: its own liberation and the liberation of humanity. Rosa Luxemburg defined the method used by the workers' movement to investigate its own past in the following way:

"No firmly fixed plan, no orthodox ritual that holds good for all times, shows him the path that he must travel. Historical experience is his only teacher, his Via Dolorosa to freedom is cov­ered not only with unspeakable suffering, but with countless mistakes. The goal of his jour­ney, his final liberation, depends entirely on the proletariat, on whether it understands to learn from its own mistakes." (Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of Social Democracy, cited by Haupt, op cit).

Whereas the history of the workers' movement, as praxis, involves a theoretical and practical discontinuity, brought about by con­tact with new historical experience, it also presents itself as a tradition that plays a mobilizing role in workers' consciousness and that feeds the collective memory. While this tradition has often played a conservative role in the history of the proletariat, it also expresses all that is stable in the theoretical and organizational acquisitions of the workers' movement. Thus, discontinuity and continuity are the two inseparable dimensions of the political and social history of this movement.

The left communist currents which emerged from the IIIrd International, like the ‘Bordigist' Italian Left on the one hand, and the Dutch Left of Gorter and Pannekoek on the other, have not escaped the temptation of situating themselves unilaterally within either the continuity or the discontinuity of the workers' movement. The Bordigist current has resolutely chosen to af­firm the ‘invariance' of marxism and of the workers' movement since 1848, the ‘invariance' of communist theory since Lenin. The ‘councilist' current that goes back to the 1930s in Holland has, on the other hand, opted for denying all continuity in the workers' and revolutionary movement. Its theory of a New Workers' Movement has meant throwing the ‘old' workers' movement into the dustbin, its whole experience having been judged negative for the future. Between these two extreme attitudes we can sit­uate the KAPD of Berlin, and above all Bilan, the review of the Italian Fraction in exile in France and Belgium during the 30s. The two currents, German and Italian, while both were theoretical innovators who marked the discontinuity be­tween the new revolutionary movement of the 20s and 30s and the one which preceded it in­side social democracy and during the war of 1914-18, also affirmed their continuity with the original marxist movement. All these hesitations show the difficulty in grasping the continuity and the discontinuity of the left communist cur­rents - ie, in conserving and going beyond their heritage.

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The difficulties of writing a history of the left communist and council communist movement aren't limited to this problem of assimilating and going beyond their acquisitions. They are above all the product of a tragic history which for nearly sixty years has seen the disappearance of the revolutionary traditions of the workers' movement, traditions that culminated in the rev­olutions in Russia and Germany, A sort of col­lective amnesia seemed to descend on the work­ing class under the blows of successive and re­peated defeats that culminated in the second world war, that destroyed for a whole genera­tion the experience of having lived through a revolutionary struggle and that wiped out the fruits of decades of socialist education. But it is above all Stalinism, the most profound counter­revolution the workers' movement has ever known, which, following the defeat of the Russian revolution, has done the most to rubout this collective memory , which is an indissol­uble part of class consciousness. The history of the workers' movement, and above all of the revolutionary left current in the IIIrd International, became a gigantic enterprise of ideological falsification in the service of Russian state capitalism, then of the states built on the same model after 1945. This history became the cynical glorification of the party in power and its police state apparatus. Under the cover of ‘internationalism', official history, ‘revised' con­tinuously to take in the latest ‘turn' or settling of scores, became a form of nationalist, statist sermonizing, a justification for imperialist war and terror, for the lowest, most morbid in­stincts, cultivated on the rotten soil of counter­revolution and war.

On this point it's worth again citing the historian Georges Haupt, who died in 1980, and was known for the seriousness of his works on the IInd and IIIrd Internationals:

"With the aid of unprecedented falsifications, treating the most elementary historical realities with contempt, Stalinism has methodically rubbed out, mutilated, remodeled the field of the past in order to replace it with its own representations, its own myths, its own self-glorification. The history of the international workers' movement gets frozen into a series of dead images, images that have been tampered with and emptied of any substance, trumped-up copies in which the real past can hardly be recognized. The func­tion which Stalinism assigns to what it considers and declares to be history, the validity of which is imposed without any regard to credibility, expresses a profound fear of historical reality, which it tries systematically to mask, truncate, and deform in order to turn it into something as conformist and as docile as possible. With the aid of an imaginary and fetishised past that has been deprived of any elements that might bring reality to mind, the power structure aims not only to obstruct any view of reality but to in­fest the faculty of perception itself. Thus the permanent necessity to anaesthetize and pervert the collective memory, the control of which be­comes total the minute the past is treated as a state secret and access to documents is forbid­den".

At last the period of May 1968 came along. This was the upsurge of a social movement on such a scale that it swept through the world from France to Britain, from Belgium to Sweden, from Italy to Argentina, from Poland to Germany. There is no doubt that the period of workers' struggles from 68-74 facilitated historical re­search into the revolutionary movement. A num­ber of books appeared on the history of the revolutionary movements of the 20th century in Germany, Italy, France and Britain. The red thread of historical continuity between the distant past of the 20s and the period of May 68 seemed obvious to those who were not taken in by the spectacular appearance of the student revolt. However, rare were those who saw a workers' movement arising from its ashes, the reawakening of a collective historical memory that had been anaesthetized and asleep for nearly 40 years. Nevertheless, in all their con­fused enthusiasm, revolutionary historical refer­ences emerged spontaneously, and with joyful profusion, from the mouths of the workers who were out on the streets and who frequented the anti-union Action Committees. And these refer­ences weren't the result of leftist students, historians or sociologists whispering in their ears. The collective memory of the working class was evoking - often in a confused way, and in the confusion of the events - the whole history of the workers' movement, and all its main stages: 1848, the Paris Commune, 1905, 1917, but also 1936, which, with the constitution of the Popular Front, was the antithesis of the other dates. The decisive experience of the German revolution (1918-23) was not referred to a great deal, but still the idea of workers' councils, preferred to that of the soviets which with their mass of soldiers and peasants were less purely proletarian, appeared more and more in the discussions in the streets and in the action committees born out of the generalized strike wave.

The resurgence of the proletariat onto the scene of history, a class which certain sociolo­gists had declared ‘integrated' or ‘ernbourgeoisiefied', broadly created favorable conditions for research into the history of the revolutionary movements of the 20s and 30s. Even though they were still all too rare, studies were made of the lefts in the IInd and IIIrd Internationals. The names of Gorter and Pannekoek, the initials KAPD and GIC, alongside the names of Bordiga and Damen, became more familiar to the elements who called themselves ‘ultra-left' or ‘internationalist communists'. The dead weight of Stalinism was being lifted. But other, more insidious forms of truncating and distorting the history of the workers' movement appeared as Stalinism declined. According to the climate of the day, a social democratic, Trotskyist, or purely academic historiography came forward, their effects being just as perni­cious as those of Stalinism. Social democratic historiography, like the Stalinist version, tried to anaesthetize and rub out the whole revolu­tionary significance of the left communist move­ment by turning it into a dead thing from the past. Very often the communist left's criticisms of social democracy were carefully erased so as to make its history as inoffensive as possible. Leftist historiography, in particular that of the Trotskyists, did its bit by lying through omis­sion, carefully avoiding saying too much about the revolutionary currents to the left of Trotskyism. When they couldn't avoid mentioning them, most simply dealt with them in passing by sticking the label ‘ultra-left' or ‘sectarian' on them, and by referring to Lenin's critique of ‘left wing childishness'. A method, what's more, that had already been practiced for a long time by Stalinist historiography. History became the history of their own self-justification, an in­strument of legitimization. Let's again cite what was written by Georges Haupt, who was far from being a revolutionary, about the historiography of this ‘new left':

"Less than a decade ago, the anti-reformist and anti-Stalinist ‘new left', a severe critic of university history which it rejects as bourgeois, took up a ‘traditional' attitude to history and got into the same rut as the Stalinists and so­cial democrats by forcing the past into the same mould. Thus the ideologues of the extra-parlia­mentary opposition (which it hasn't been for a long time, author's note) in the sixties in Germany themselves tried to find their legitimacy in the past. They treated history like a big cake from which everyone could take a slice according to appetite and taste. Erected into a source of legitimacy and used as an instrument of legitimization, working class history became a sort of depot of accessories and disguises in which each fraction, each grouplet could find its justifying reference, useable for the needs of the moment" (Haupt, op cit. p 32).

Revolutionary currents like Bordigism or councilism, because they were unable to escape the danger of sectarianism, also made the his­tory of the revolutionary movement an instru­ment for legitimizing their conceptions. At the cost of deforming real history, they cut things to shape, eliminating all the components of the revolutionary movement which went in a differ­ent direction to them. The history of the com­munist left was no longer that of the unity and heterogeneity of its constituent parts, a complex history that had to be seen in its globality, in its international dimension, in order to show its unity. It became a history of rival, antagonistic currents. The Bordigists superbly ignored the history of the Dutch and German communists. When they did speak about them, it was always with a lofty disdain, and like the Trotskyists they referred to Lenin's ‘definitive' critique of left wing childishness. They carefully covered up the fact that in 1920 Bordiga, just like Gorter and Pannekoek, was condemned by Lenin for being ‘infantile' because of the same rejec­tion of parliamentarism and of the British CP's entry into the Labor Party.

Councilist historiography has had a similar attitude. Glorifying the history of the KAPD and the ‘Unionen' - which most often they reduce to their ‘anti-authoritarian', anarchistic currents, like Ruhle's - and above all of the GIC, they ig­nore no less superbly the existence of Bordiga's current and of the Italian Fraction around Bilan in the 30s. This current is thrown into the same sack as ‘Leninism'. With no less a zeal than the Bordigists, they also erase the enormous differ­ences between the Dutch Left of 1907 to 1927, which affirmed the need for a political organization, and the councilism of the 1930s. Pannekoek's itinerary before 1921 and after 1927 becomes a straight line for the councilists. The left communist Pannekoek of pre-1921 is ‘revised' in the light of his later councilist evolution.

Apart from the sectarianism of these Bordigist and councilist historiographies, which aim to be ‘revolutionary' when only the truth is truly revolutionary, one has to point out the narrowly national vision held by these currents. By reducing the history of a revolutionary cur­rent to one national component, chosen in rela­tion to their ‘territory' of origin, these currents have shown a restricted national narrow-mind­edness and a strong inward-looking spirit. The result is that the international dimension of the communist left has been rubbed out. The sec­tarianism of these currents is inseparable from their localism, reflecting an unconscious submis­sion to national characteristics, which today is quite obsolete for a real international revolu­tionary movement.

Twenty years after 1968, the greatest danger faced by attempts to write a history of the rev­olutionary movement is less deformation or ‘disinformation' than the enormous ideological pressure which has been exerted in recent years. This pressure has translated itself into a notable diminution of academic studies and re­search in the history of the workers' movement. To get some idea of this, it's enough to cite the conclusions of Le Mouvement Social (no. 142. January-March 1988), a French journal known for its researches into the history of the work­ers' movement. One historian notes a tangible drop, in this journal, of articles devoted to the workers' movement and the parties and organizations that claim adherence to it. He notes a "tendencial drop in ‘pure' political history: 60% of the articles at the beginning, 10-15% today", and above all a "tendency towards a decline in the study of the workers' movement": 80% of the articles 20 years ago, 20% today. Since 1981, no doubt because of the erosion of "lyrical illu­sions" about the left in power, we've seen a definite drop in studies of communism in gen­eral. This ‘dislocation' has been even more bru­tal since 1985-6. A disquieting sign of this ide­ological pressure, which comes from the bour­geoisie in response to a growing uncertainty about the security of its economic foundations. The author notes that "a working class prepon­derance (in this journal) has been slowly eaten away by the rise of the bourgeoisie." And he concludes by showing that there has been an increase in studies devoted to the bourgeoisie and non-proletarian strata. The history of the workers' movement is more and more giving way to the history of the bourgeoisie and to plain economic history.

Thus, after a whole period in which studies of the workers' and revolutionary movement were being written, albeit in an academic con­text in which semi-truths and semi-lies were the limits of their achievement, and in which the revolutionary dimension of the movement's his­tory was obscured, we are now seeing a period of reaction. Even when its ‘neutral', even when it's adapted to the tastes of the day and sanitized , the history of the workers' movement, above all when it's revolutionary, appears ‘dangerous' for the dominant ideology. The political and ideological history of the revolution­ary movement is explosive. Because it is a praxis, it is heavy with revolutionary lessons for the future. It calls into question all the ide­ologies of the official left. As a critical lesson about the past, it is heavy with a critique of the present. It is a "weapon of criticism" which as Marx affirmed  can be turned into "criticism by weapons". Once again we can cite G Haupt:

" ... history is an explosive terrain to the ex­tent that the reality of the facts or the experi­ences of a past which has often been glossed over are liable to call into question any pre­tence to being the sole representative of the working class. Because the history of the work­ers' world touches the ideological foundations upon which all the parties who want to be in the vanguard base their hegemonic claims." (p 38, ibid)

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

This history of the German-Dutch communist left goes against the stream of present-day histori­ography. It does not aim to be a purely social history of this current. It aims to be a political history, restoring life and relevance to all the political and theoretical debates which developed within it. It aims to place this left in its inter­national context, because otherwise its existence becomes incomprehensible. It aims above all to be a critical history, to show, without a priori assumptions or anathemas, its strengths and its weaknesses. It is neither an apology for nor a rejection of the German-Dutch communist cur­rent. It aims to show the roots of the councilist current, the better to underline its intrinsic weaknesses and explain the reasons for its dis­appearance. It also aims to show that the ideol­ogy of councilism expresses a movement away from the conceptions of revolutionary marxism, which were expressed in the 1930s by the Italian Left and the KAPD. And as such this ide­ology, close to anarchism, can be particularly pernicious for the future revolutionary move­ment, because of its rejection of the revolution­ary organization and of the Russian revolution, and finally because of its rejection of the whole experience acquired by the past workers' and revolutionary movement. It is an ideology which disarms the revolutionary class and its organizations.

Although written in a university context this history is thus a weapon of struggle. To take up Mehring's expression, it is a history-praxis, a history "to wage the present-day struggle and to attain the new world of the future."

This history is thus not an ‘impartial' one. It is a committed work. Because historical truth, when it is the history of the revolutionary movement, demands a revolutionary commitment. The truth of the facts, their interpretation from a proletarian standpoint, can only lead to revo­lutionary conclusions.

In this work, we have taken as our own Trotsky's reflections about the objectivity of the work of revolutionary history, from the preface to his History of the Russian Revolution:

"The reader, of course, is not obliged to share the political views of the author, which the latter on his side has no reason to conceal. But the reader does have the right to demand that a historical work should not be the defense of a political position, but an internally well­-founded portrayal of the actual process of the revolution. A historical work only then com­pletely fulfils its mission when events unfold upon its pages in their full natural necessity ...

The serious and critical reader will not want a treacherous impartiality, which offers him a cup of conciliation with a well-settled poison of reactionary hate at the bottom, but a scientific conscientiousness, which for its sympathies and antipathies open and undisguised seeks support in an honest study of the facts, a de­termination of their real connections, an expo­sure of the causal laws of their movement. That is the only possible historic objectivism, and moreover it is amply sufficient, for it is verified and attested not by the good intentions of the historian, for which only he himself can vouch, but by the natural laws revealed by him of the historic process itself."

The reader can judge, through the abun­dance of the material used, that we have aimed at this scientific good faith, without hiding our sympathies and antipathies.

Manuel Fernandez Grandizo, known as G. Munls, died on 4 February 1989. The proletariat has lost a militant who devoted his whole life to the class struggle.

Born at the beginning of the century, Munis began his life as a revolutionary very young, becoming a militant of Trotskyism at a time when this current was still in the proletarian camp and was waging a bitter struggle against the Stalinist degeneration of the parties of the Communist International. He was a member of the Spanish Left Opposition (OGE) which was formed in February 1930 in Liege, in Belgium, around F. Garcia Lavid, known as ‘H Lacroix'. He was ac­tive in the Madrid section where he supported the Lacroix tendency against the leadership around Andres Nin. The discussion in the Left Opposition revolved around the question of whether or not it was necessary to create a ‘second communist party' or to continue opposi­tional work within the existing CPs in order to regenerate them. This latter position, which in the 30s was that of Trotsky, was in a minority at the third conference of the OGE, which then changed its name to Izquierda Comunista Espanola (Spanish Communits Left). Despite his disagreement, Munis continued to militate within it.

This orientation towards creating a new party was concretized in the foundation of the POUM in September 1934. This was a centrist party, without any real principles. Regrouping the ICE and J Maurin''s ‘Workers and Peasants' Bloc'. Along with a small group of comrades, Munis opposed the dissolution of the revolution­ary current into the POUM and founded the Bolshevik-Leninist Group of Spain.

The circumstances of his life had taken Munis to Mexico, but as soon as he received news of the 1936 uprising in Barcelona, he re­turned to Spain, reformed the Bolshevik-Leninist Group which had disappeared, and later on par­ticipated with courage and determination, along­side the ‘Friends of Durruti', in the May 1937 insurrection of the workers of Barcelona against the Popular Front government. Arrested in 1938, he managed to escape the Stalinist prisons in 1939.

The outbreak of the second imperialist world war led Munis to break with Trotskyism, on the question of the defense of one imperialist camp against another, and to adopt a clear internationalist position of revolutionary de­featism against the imperialist war. He de­nounced Russia as a capitalist country and this led to the Spanish section breaking with the IVth International at its first post-war Congress, in 1948 (cf ‘Explicacion y Llamamiento a los militantes, grupos y secciones de la IV Internacional,' September 1949).

After this break, his political evolution continued to move in the direction of greater revolutionary clarity, in particular on the union and parliamentary question, and notably after discussions with militants of the Gauche Communiste de France. However, the ‘Second Communist Manifesto' which he published in 1965 (after he'd spent a number of years in Franco's jails) showed a continuing difficulty in breaking completely from the Trotskyist approach, even though this document is evidently situated on a proletarian class terrain.

In 1967, along with comrades from the Venezuelan group Internacialismo, he partici­pated in efforts to restore contacts with the revolutionary milieu in Italy. Thus, at the end of the ‘60s, with the resurgence of the working class onto the scene of history, he took his place alongside the weak revolutionary forces existing at that time, including those who were to form Revolution Internationale in France. But at the beginning of the ‘70s, he unfortunately remained outside the discussions and attempts at regroupment which resulted in particular in the constitution of the ICC in 1975. Even so, the Cerment Ouvriere Revolutionaire (FOR), the group he formed in Spain and France around the positions of the ‘Second Manifesto', at first agreed to participate in the series of confer­ences of groups of the communist left which be­gan in Milan in 1977. But this attitude altered during the course of the second conference; the FOR walked out of the conference, and this was the expression of a tendency towards sectarian isolation which up to now has prevailed in this organization.

It's thus clear that we have very important differences with the FOR, which has led us to polemicise with them a number of times in our press (see in particular the article in International Review 52). However, despite the serious errors he may have made, Munis re­mained to the end a militant who was deeply loyal to the combat of the working class. He was one of those very rare militants who stood up to the pressures of the most terrible counter­revolution the proletariat has ever known, when many deserted or even betrayed the militant fight; and he was once again there alongside the class with the historical resurgence of its struggles at the end of the ‘60s.

We pay our homage to this militant of the revolutionary struggle, to his loyalty and un­breakable commitment to the proletarian cause. To the comrades of the FOR, we send our fraternal greetings.

IR 58, 3rd Quarter 1989

Understanding the decadence of Capitalism, VII

THE CONVULSIONS OF IDEOLOGY 

The ‘ideological crisis’, the ‘crisis of values’ which journalists and sociologists have been talking about for decades is, contrary to what they say, not a ‘painful adaptation to capitalist technological progress’. It is rather the expres­sion of the halt in any real historical progress by capitalism. It’s the decomposition of the dominant ideology which accompanies the deca­dence of the economic system.

All the convulsions which capitalist ideologi­cal forms have gone through over the past three quarters of a century in fact constitute not a permanent rejuvenation of capitalism but an expression of its senility, demonstrating the necessity and possibility of the communist revolution.

In the previous articles in this series [1] [6], which sought to respond to those ‘Marxists’ who reject the theory of the decadence of capitalism, we concentrated mainly on the economic aspects of the question: “It’s in political economy that we must seek the anatomy of civil society,” as Marx said [2] [7]. We reiterated the marxist vision according to which it is economic factors which determine that, at a certain moment in their de­velopment, the various historical systems of so­ciety (slavery, feudalism, capitalism...) enter into a phase of decadence. As Marx put it:

“At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of produc­tion, or - what is just a legal expression for the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins and epoch of social revolution.” [3] [8].

We have shown that capitalism has undergone such a process since the first world war and the international wave of proletarian revolutions which put an end to it. We’ve shown how this system has been transformed into a permanent obstacle to the development of the productive forces, to the production of humanity’s means of existence: the most destructive wars in history, a permanent arms economy, the greatest famines ever known, epidemics, wider and wider areas condemned to chronic underdevelopment

We’ve insisted that capitalism is locked up in its own contradictions and can only postpone its day of reckoning through a desperate flight into credit and unproductive expenditure.

At the level of social life we have analysed some of the fundamental transformations brought about by these economic changes: the qualitative difference between the wars of the 20th century and those of ascendant capitalism; the bloated growth of the state machine in decadent capi­talism, in contrast to the ‘economic liberalism’ of the 19th century; the differences in the forms of life and struggle for the proletariat between the 19th and 20th centuries.

However this picture remains incomplete. At the level of, the ‘superstructures’, of the ‘ideological forms’ which are based on these cri­sis—ridden relations of production, we have also seen convulsions and transformations which equally express this decadence. From the same passage by Marx:

“With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of a natural sci­ence, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.” [4] [9].

In our texts on decadence (in particular in the pamphlet devoted to it) we’ve gone into certain characteristics of these ideological transformations. We return to them here in or­der to respond to certain aberrations which our critics have formulated on this question.

THE BLINDNESS OF ‘INVARIANCE’

Those who reject the theory of decadence, who can’t see any change in capitalism since the 16th century on the concrete level of produc­tion, are no less myopic when it comes to seeing the evolution of capitalism at the level of its ideological forms. What’s more, for some of them, in particular the punk anarcho-Bordigists of the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste [5] [10], anyone who claims to recognize any transformations at this level is simply displaying the “moralising” vision of the “priests”. This is what they write about this:

‘~..It only remains to the decadentists to add on ideological justification, the moralising argu­ment ... of a superstructural decadence reflect­ing (like the vulgar materialists they are) the decadence of the relations of production. ‘Ideology decomposes, the old moral values col­lapse, artistic creativity stagnates or takes re­bellious forms, philosophical obscurantism and pessimism develop.’ The 64,000 dollar question is: who is the author of this passage: Raymond Aron? Le Pen? Monseigneur Lefebvre [6] [11] ... Oh no - it’s from the ICC pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism. The same moralising discourse thus corresponds to the same evolusionist vi­sion, whether from the mouths of the priests of the right, left or ultra-left.

“As if the dominant ideology was decompos­ing, as if the essential moral values of the bourgeoisie were collapsing! In reality what we see is a movement of decomposition/recomposition on a growing scale: each time the old forms of the dominant ideology become disqualified, they give rise to new ideological recompositions whose bourgeois content and essence invariably remains identical.” [7] [12].

The good thing about the GCI is its capacity to condense into a few lines a particularly high number of absurdities, which, in a polemic, allows one to economise on paper. But let’s begin at the beginning.

ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS AND THE IDEOLOGICAL FORMS

According to the GCI it is ‘vulgar materialism’ to establish a link between the decadence of the relations of production and the decline of the ideological superstructures. The GCI has read Marx’s critique of the conception which sees ideas as a purely passive reflection of material reality. Instead, Marx puts forward a dialectical view which sees the permanent inter—relation­ship between these two entities. But you’d have to be an ‘invariantist’ to deduce from this that the ideological forms aren’t subject to the evo­lution of material conditions.

Marx is very clear on this:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, ie. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material rela­tionships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.” [8] [13]

How could the “dominant material relation­ships” go through the convulsions of a period of decadence without the same thing happening to their “expression in ideas”? How could a so­ciety living through an epoch of real economic development, where the social relations of pro­duction appear as a source of the amelioration of the general conditions of existence, be ac­companied by ideological forms identical to those of a society in which the same relations are leading society towards misery, massive self-de­struction, permanent and generalised anguish?

By denying the link between the ideological forms of an epoch and the economic reality un­derlying it, the GCI claims to be combating ‘vulgar materialism’, but it only does this by falling into the idealism which believes in the primordial existence of ideas and their indepen­dence from the material world of social produc­tion.

CAN THE DOMINANT IDEOLOGY DECAY?

What offends the GCI is that one can talk about the decomposition of the dominant ideology. To see this as a manifestation of the historic deca­dence of capitalism is to develop a “moralising argument”. Against this, they offer us a great truth: bourgeois ideology in the 20th century is, just like it was in the 19th century, “invariably” bourgeois. Conclusion? Therefore it doesn’t decompose (!).

In the ‘dialectical’ view of ‘invariance’ we are taught that as long as capitalism exists it re­mains “invariably” capitalist and that as long as the proletariat exists it also remains “invariably” proletarian.

But having deduced from these tautologies the non-putrefaction of the dominant ideology, the GCI attempts to deepen the question: “what we see is a movement of decomposition/recomposition on a growing scale: each time the old forms of the dominant ideology become disqualified they give rise to new ideological recompositions...“

This isn’t quite so ‘invariant’. The GCI obvi­ously doesn’t give any explanation about the origin, the causes, the beginning of this “movement on a growing scale.” The only thing it’s sure about is that — unlike in the ‘decadentist’ conception - this has nothing to do with the economy.

But let’s get back to this discovery of a ‘movement’ by the GCI: decomposition/recomposition. According to their explana­tion, the dominant ideology permanently goes through “new ideological recompositions.” Yes “new”. This is eternal youth! What are these “ideological recompositions”? The GCI comes up with an answer straight away.

“This is what we’re seeing with the re-emergence in force and on a world scale of religious ideologies.”

But as everyone knows, religion is the last desperate cry of ideological mystification. Other novelties: “anti-fascism ... democratic myths anti-terrorism.” What’s new about these old re­frains used by the ruling class for at least half a century, if not for much longer? If the GCI doesn’t have any other examples to give it’s be­cause fundamentally there are no “new ideologi­cal recompositions” in decadent capitalism. Capitalist ideology can no more rejuvenate itself that the economic system which engenders it. On the contrary, what we see in decadent capitalism is the wearing out, at different speeds in dif­ferent parts of the planet, of the ‘eternal’ values of the bourgeoisie. 

WHAT IS THE BASIS FOR THE GRIP OF THE DOMINANT IDEOLOGY?

The ideology of the ruling class boils down to the latter’s “ideas of its dominance.” In other words it is the permanent justification of the social system run by that class. The power of its ideology resides first and foremost not in the abstract world of ideas confronting other ideas, but in the acceptance of this ideology by men themselves and in particular by the ex­ploited class.

This acceptance is based on an overall bal­ance of forces. It is exerted as a constant pres­sure on each member of society, from birth to the funeral ceremony. The ruling class has peo­ple specifically charged with this work: in the past the religious institutions took the main brunt of it, in decadent capitalism it falls to the ‘scientists of propaganda’ (we’ll come back to this). Marx talked about: “the active and con­ceptive ideologues whose principal means of earning their daily bread consists in keeping up the illusions about itself fuelled by this class.” [9] [14].

But this isn’t enough to hold up an ideologi­cal domination in the long term. It’s also neces­sary for the ideas of the ruling class to have a minimum degree of correspondence with existing reality. The most important of these ideas is al­ways the same: the existing social rules are the best possible for ensuring the material and spiritual well-being of society’s members. Any other form of social organisation can only lead to anarchy, misery and desolation.

It’s on this basis that the exploiting class justify the permanent sacrifices that they demand from and impose on the exploited class. But what happens to this ideology when the mode of production no longer manages to pro-vide the minimum of well-being and society slides into misery, anarchy and desolation? When the most difficult sacrifices no longer bring any compensation to the exploited?

The ruling ideas are then daily contradicted by reality itself. Their power to convince is weakened. In a process which is always complex, more or less rapid, made up of advances and retreats which express the vicissitudes of the economic crisis and of the balance of forces between the classes, the ‘moral values’ of the ruling class cave in under the thousand and one blows of a reality which gives them the lie.

It’s not new ideas which destroy old ones, it’s reality which deprives them of their mystifying power. Marx again: “Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development, but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking.” [10] [15].

It’s the experience of two world wars and dozens of local wars, the reality of nearly 100 million deaths, for nothing, in these quarters of a century, which has, especially in the proletariat of the European countries, dealt the most devastating blows against patriotic ideology. It’s the development of the most frightful misery, in the countries of capitalism’s periphery, and in­creasingly in the main industrial centres, which is destroying illusions in the benefits of capi­talist economic laws. It’s the experience of hun­dreds of struggles ‘betrayed’, systematically sabotaged by the unions, which is ruining the latter’s ideological power and explains why, in the most advanced countries, the workers are showing an increasingly massive disaffection from the unions. It’s the reality of the identical practices of all the ‘democratic’ political parties, from right to left, which has continually eroded the myth of bourgeois democracy and has led in the old ‘democratic’ countries to record rates of abstention from elections. It’s the growing in­ability of capitalism to offer any perspective other than unemployment and war which is leading to the collapse of all the old moral val­ues which sang to the glories of the fraternity between capital and labour.

The “new ideological recompositions” the GCI talks about simply describe the bourgeoisie’s efforts to restore some life to its old moral val­ues by coating them with a more or less so­phisticated layer of varnish. This can at the most hold back the movement of ideological de­composition — in particular in the less developed countries where the working class has less his­torical experience [11] [16] - but in no way can it reverse it or even halt it.

The ideas of the bourgeoisie, and the hold they have, are no more imperious to decomposi­tion that those of the feudal lords or slave-owners in their days, however displeasing this may be to the guardians of ‘invariantist’ ortho­doxy.

Finally, to conclude on the GCI’s intransigent defence of the indestructible quality of the ideas of the bourgeoisie, a few words about their reference to the men of the right. With its powerful capacity for analysis, the GCI points out that certain bourgeois of the ‘right’ in France have talked about the crumbling of the moral values of their class. The GCI uses this to make yet another amalgam with the ‘decadentists.’ Why not amalgamate the latter with the pygmies, because, just like the ‘decadentists’, they observe that the sun rises every morning? It’s quite normal for right—wing factions to moan about the decomposition of the ideological system of their class; this is just the other side of the coin to the politicians of the left, whose essential task is to keep this mori­bund ideology alive by disguising it with an anti-capitalist’, ‘pro-worker’ verbiage. It’s no accident that the ‘popularity’ of Le Pen and his Front National is the result of a political and media operation carefully organised by Mitterand’s Socialist Party.

We are no longer at the end of the 19th century, when economic crises were becoming more and more attenuated, when the arts and sciences were developing in an exceptional man­ner, and when the workers saw their living conditions regularly improving under the pres­sure of their mass economic and political organisations. We are in the epoch of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Biafra, of massive and growing unemployment for 30 years out of 75.

The dominant ideology doesn’t have the same hold that it had at the beginning of this cen­tury, when it could make millions of workers believe that socialism could be the product of a peaceful, almost natural evolution of capitalism. In the decadence of capitalism, it is increasingly necessary for the dominant ideology to be im­posed by the violence of media manipulations, precisely because it can less and less be im­posed any other way.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MEANS OF IDEOLOGICAL MANIPULATION

The GCI makes a banal but true observation:

“The bourgeoisie, even with its limited vision (limited from the point of view of its class be­ing) has drawn enormous lessons from the past and has consequently refined and reinforced its ideological weapons.”

This is an undeniable fact. But the GCI un­derstands neither its origin nor its significance.

The GCI mixes up the strengthening of bour­geois ideology and the strengthening of the in­struments of its dissemination. It doesn’t see that the development of the latter is the prod­uct of the weakness of this ideology, of the ruling class’s difficulty in ‘spontaneously’ up­holding its power. If the bourgeoisie has had to multiply a hundredfold its expenditure on pro­paganda, this isn’t out of any sudden pedagogic desire, but because in order to maintain its power, the ruling class has had to impose un­precedented sacrifices on the exploited class and has had to face up to the first international revolutionary wave.

The beginning of the dizzying development of the ideological instruments of the bourgeoisie dates precisely to the opening of the period of capitalist decadence. The first world war was the first ‘total’ war, the first that involved a mobilisation of the totality of society’s produc­tive forces in the interests of the war. It was not enough to ideologically dragoon the troops at the front, it was also necessary - and in an even stricter manner — to dragoon the entire producer class. In order to carry out this work, the ‘workers’ unions’ were definitively trans­formed into instruments of the capitalist state. This work was all the more vital because never before had such a war been so absurd and de­structive, and because the proletariat had launched its first attempt at international revo­lution.

During the inter—war period, the bourgeoisie, confronted with the most violent economic crisis in its history, and with the necessity to prepare for a new war, had to systematise and develop still further the ideology and the strengthening of the instruments of political propaganda, in particularly the ‘art’ of manipulating the masses: Goebbels and Stalin have left the world bour­geoisie practical treatises which today serve as basic references for any media publicist and manipulator. “A lie repeated one thousand times becomes the truth,” as the man in charge of Hitler’s propaganda put it.

After the second world war, the bourgeoisie was equipped with a new and formidable instru­ment: television. The dominant ideology in every household, distilled daily for everyone by the most powerful government and commercial ser­vices. Presented as a luxury, the state in fact made it the most powerful instrument of its ide­ological domination.

The bourgeoisie has indeed “refined and re­inforced its ideological weapons,” but contrary to the affirmations of the GCI, first, this has not prevented the dominant ideology from wearing out and decomposing, and secondly, this is the direct product of the decadence of capi­talism.

This development of ideological totalitarianism can also be seen in the decadence of past soci­eties, such as ancient slavery and feudalism. In the decadent Roman Empire, there was the divinisation of the Emperor and then the imposi­tion of Christianity as the state religion; in feu­dalism, the divine right of kings and the sys­tematic use of the Inquisition. But no more than under capitalism did they represent a strength­ening of the dominant ideology, a greater adhe­sion by the population to the ideas of the rul­ing class. On the contrary. 

THE SPECIFICITY OF CAPITALIST DECADENCE

Here once again we must recall the important differences between the decadence of capitalism and the decadence of societies which preceded it in Europe. First of all, the decadence of cap­italism is a phenomenon of world-wide dimen­sions, which affects all countries simultaneously, even if conditions differ. The decadence of past societies was always a local phenomenon.

Secondly, the decline of slavery, and also of feudalism, took place at the same time as the rise of a new mode of production within the old society and co-existing with it. Thus the effects of Roman decadence were attenuated by the si­multaneous development of feudal economic forms; those of feudal decadence by the devel­opment of commerce and capitalist relations of production in the big towns.

By contrast, communism is not the work of an exploiting class which can, as in the past, share power with the old ruling class. As an exploited class, the proletariat can only emanci­pate itself by destroying from top to bottom the power of the old exploiting class. There is no possibility that the premises of new communist relations could come along to lighten or limit the effects of capitalist decadence. This is why cap­italist decadence is much more violent, destruc­tive and barbaric than that of past societies.

Compared to the means developed by the bourgeoisie to ensure its ideological repression, those used by the most delirious emperors of decadent Rome, or the cruellest of feudal inquisitors, look like children’s games. But these means are in proportion to the degree of inter­nal putrefaction attained by the ideology of decadent capitalism.

“MEN BECOME CONSCIOUS OF THIS CONFLICT AND FIGHT IT OUT” 

But it’s not just the idea of a decomposition of the dominant ideology or the collapse of moral values which shocks the GCI. For the apostles of invariance, talking about the manifestations of decadence at the level of philosophical and artistic forms is also a species of ‘moralism’.

Here again one can only ask why the GCI still lays claim to marxism. As we’ve seen, not only did Marx speak about this, but he saw it as a particularly crucial area: “ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”

For marxism, ‘men’ are determined by the relationship between classes. Thus the way con­sciousness develops about the conflict between the existing relations of production and the ne­cessity for the development of the productive forces is different according to which class we’re talking about.

For the ruling class, an awareness of this conflict is expressed on the political and juridi­cal level through the armouring of its state, through the hardening of totalitarian generali­sation of the control of the state, of the law, over the whole of social life. This is state capi­talism, the feudalism of the absolute monarchs the divinisation of the Emperor. But, simultane­ously, social life sinks deeper and deeper into illegality, generalised corruption and banditry. Since the trafficking during the first world war which made and unmade colossal fortunes, world capitalism has developed trafficking of all kinds: in drugs, prostitution and weapons, making them into a permanent source of finance (for example for the secret services of the great powers) and, in the case of certain countries, the main source of revenue.

Unlimited corruption, cynicism, the most sor­did and unscrupulous Machiavellianism have be­come qualities essential for survival within a ruling class which tears itself apart all the more violently as the sources of its riches fade away.

As for the artists, philosophers and certain religious thinkers, who are in general part of the middle classes, their masters’ loss of any future - which they probably feel more acutely than their employers themselves — means that they have a tendency to assimilate their own end to the end of the world. They respond with black pessimism to the blockage of material de­velopment by the contradictions in the dominant laws of society.

This is how this feeling was voiced by Albert Camus, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, in the aftermath of the second world war, in the decade of wars in Korea, and Indochina, of Suez and Algeria:

“For me, the only given is the absurd. The problem is to know how to get out of this and whether suicide has to be deduced from the ab­surd.”

A sort of ‘nihilism’ has developed, denying that reason has any possibility of understanding and mastering the course of events. There is a development of mysticism, understood as a negation of reason. And this again was a phe­nomenon which marked the decadence of previ­ous societies. Thus in the feudal decadence of the 14th century:

“The swamp—like nature of the times saw the hatching of mysticism in all its forms. It ap­peared at the intellectual level with the treaties on the art of dying and, above all, the imitation of Jesus Christ. It appeared on the emotional level with the great manifestations of popular piety exacerbated by the preachings of uncon­trolled elements of the wandering clergy: the ‘flagellants’ roamed the countryside, beating and tearing their breasts with blows from the lash in village squares, with the aim of disorienting human senses and calling Christians to repent. These manifestations gave rise to an imagery in often doubtful taste, like the fountains of blood symbolising the Redeemer. Very quickly, the movement turned to hysteria and the ecclesiasti­cal hierarchy had to intervene against the trou­ble-makers to prevent their preaching further swelling the number of vagabonds…

“Macabre art developed ... a sacred text was particularly favoured by the most lucid minds: the Apocalypse,” [12] [17].

Whereas in past societies the dominant pes­simism was counter-balanced after a certain time by the optimism engendered by the emergence of the new society, in decadent capitalism, there seems to be no bottom to the abyss.

Capitalist decadence destroys the old values, but the senile bourgeoisie has nothing to offer except the void, nihilism. ‘Don’t think!’ This is the only response which capitalism in decomposition can offer to the questions posed by the most desperate. ‘No future’ is its only perspec­tive.

A society which is breaking all historical records in suicide, in particular among the young, a society in which the state is forced, in a capital city like Washington, to install a state of siege during the night against young people, against children, in order to contain an explo­sion of banditry, is a society blocked, a society in decomposition. It’s no longer advancing. It’s regressing. This is ‘barbarism.’ And it’s this barbarism which is expressed in the despair, or the revolt, which for decades has marked the artistic, philosophical and religious forms.

In the hell which a society in decadence makes for human beings, only the action of the revolutionary class carries any hope. In the case of capitalism, this is more true than ever before.

Any society subject to material scarcity, that is to say all hitherto societies, is organised in such a way that its first priority is to ensure the material subsistence of the community. The division of society into classes was not a curse that fell from the sky, but the fruit of the de­velopment of the division of labour in order to meet this prime necessity. All relations between human beings, from the way to distribute the wealth created, to relationships of love, are me­diated through the mode of economic organisation.

When the economic machine breaks down, it’s this link, this mediation, this cement of relations between human beings that crumbles and de­composes. When productive activity ceases to create for the future then virtually all human activities seem to lose any historical meaning.

In capitalism the importance of the economy in social life attains unprecedented levels. Wage labour, the relationship between proletariat and capital, is out of all exploitative relations in history, the one most stripped of any non-com­mercial relationship, the most pitiless of all. Even in the worst economic conditions, the slave masters or the feudal lords fed their slaves and their serfs ... as they fed their cattle. Under capitalism, the master only feeds his slave as long as he’s needed for business. No profit, no labour, no social relationship. Atomisation, solitude, powerlessness. The effects on social life when the economic machine breaks down are much more profound under capitalist decadence than in the decadence of previous societies. The disintegration of society provoked by economic crisis engenders a return to primi­tive, barbaric social forms: war, delinquency as a means of survival, omnipresent violence, bru­tal repression [13] [18].

In this swamp, the only thing which has any future is the fight against capital, which offers no perspective except generalised self-destruc­tion. The only thing which unifies and creates real human relations is the fight against capital, which alienates and atomises them. And the principal protagonist in this fight is the prole­tariat.

This is why proletarian class consciousness, which is affirmed when the proletariat acts as a class, which is developed by revolutionary po­litical minorities, is the only one which can look the world in the face, the only one which can really understand the reasons why society is blocked.

The proletariat has demonstrated this by taking its defensive struggle to its final conse­quences, in the international revolutionary wave opened up by the seizure of power by the Russian proletariat in 1917. Then it clearly reaffirmed the project which is that of the workers of the whole world: communism.

The organised activity of revolutionary mi­norities, by pointing systematically to the causes of social decomposition, by drawing out the general dynamic which leads to the commu­nist revolution, constitutes a decisive factor in the development of this consciousness.

It is essentially in and through the prole­tariat that “men become conscious of this con­flict and fight it out.”

DECOMPOSITION OF THE DOMINANT IDEOLOGY: DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONDITIONS FOR THE REVOLUTION 

For the revolutionary class, nothing can be gained by lamenting the miseries of capitalist decadence. On the contrary, it must see the de­composition of the ideological forms of capitalist domination as a factor which can help free workers from the ideological grip of capital. It represents a danger when the proletariat sinks into resignation and passivity. The lumpenisation of young unemployed proletarians, self—destruc­tion through drugs or submission to the ‘everyone for himself’ ideology of the bour­geoisie, threaten a real weakening of the work­ing class (see ‘The Decomposition of Capitalist Society’ in IR 57). But the revolutionary class can’t take its struggle to its ultimate conclusion without losing its last illusions in the existing system. The decomposition of the dominant ideol­ogy is part of the process leading to this.

Furthermore, this decomposition has its ef­fects on the other parts of society. The ideo­logical domination of the bourgeoisie over the whole non-exploiting population outside the proletariat is also weakened by it. This weak­ening doesn’t of itself contain any future: the revolt of these strata, without the action of the proletariat, can only lead to a multiplication of massacres. But when the working class takes the initiative in the struggle, this enables it to count on the neutrality or even the support of these strata.

There can’t be a proletarian revolution if the armed bodies of the ruling class haven’t them­selves decomposed. If the proletariat has to confront an army which continues to obey un­conditionally the ruling class, its combat is doomed in advance. Trotsky had already made this a law after the revolutionary struggles in Russia in 1905. This is all the more true today, after decades of the development of its weapons by the decadent bourgeoisie. The moment when the first soldiers refuse to fire on the proletarians in struggle always constitutes a decisive point in the revolutionary process. Now, only the decomposition of the ideological values of the established order, combined with the revo­lutionary action of the proletariat, can lead to the disintegration of the armed bodies of capi­tal. This is another reason why the proletariat must not ‘only see misery in misery.’

 

The GCI, for whom the revolution has always been on the agenda, doesn’t understand the changes that have taken place in the dominant ideological forms; in its ‘invariant’ universe, there’s no room for any such movement. It therefore renders itself incapable of under­standing the real movement that leads towards the revolution.

The decomposition of the ideological forms of capitalism is a crying proof that the world communist revolution is now on the agenda of his­tory. It is part of the process in which the consciousness of the necessity for revolution is maturing, and in which the conditions that made it possible are being created. 

RV