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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A noose around the neck of the Russian Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

National liberation will not cure national oppression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adalen 20.5.1991

Chaos

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

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

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

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

The Balance sheet of the Gulf war

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real victory of American capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The inevitable slide into chaos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The class struggle

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

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

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

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

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

RV

16/6/91

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

[2] Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1991.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russian capitalism's road to disaster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The economic collapse accelerates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The paralysis of the ruling class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The proletariat caught in the whirlwind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The terror bombing of the German population

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the democracies made use of the Nazi concentration camps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the Warsaw Uprising (August 1944)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy and colonial massacres

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In particular, Marc belonged to that tiny minority of militants who survived and resisted the terrible counter-revolution which battened on the working class from the 1920’s to the 60’s: militants like Anton Pannekoek, Henk Canne-Meijer, Amadeo Bordiga, Onorato Damen, Paul Mattick, Jan Appel, or Munis. Moreover, not only did he maintain his untiring loyalty to the communist cause and his complete confidence in the proletariat’s revolutionary capabilities, he was able to pass on his experience to a new generation of militants, and to avoid becoming wrapped up in analyses and positions that had been overtaken by historical events. In this sense, his whole activity as a militant is an example of what marxism means: the living, constantly developing thought of the revolutionary class, which bears with it humanity’s future” (International Review no.65 [13] ).

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

‘INTERNATIONALISME’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ‘INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST CURRENT’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICC, 1991.