We are publishing here a response to the analysis drafted by Emma Goldman (1869-1940) in the first years after the October 1917 revolution. After her expulsion from the United States in January 1920 she spent two years in Russia, then published three books:[1] “I consider then, and still consider, that the Russian problem is entirely too complex to speak lightly of it”, she wrote in the introduction to her first book. We are responding to Emma Goldman because she was a central figure of the revolutionary workers’ movement in the United States at the time of the First World War. Because of her determination to defend a clearly internationalist position against the war she was nicknamed “Emma the Red - America's Most Dangerous Woman” by the American ruling class. But there are two other reasons to examine Goldman's positions in more detail. On the one hand, her important influence in the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist milieu up until today – “the Rosa Luxemburg of the anarchists”; and on the other because her early analysis of the Russian Revolution and the problems it faced shows great honesty and responsibility. Today, although we do not share at all some of her positions, Goldman's efforts are a valuable contribution to the understanding of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution.

 

Goldman, an anarchist of Russian origin, was inspired by the theories of the influential anarchist Peter Kropotkin, but defended an anarcho-syndicalist position in her activity. She clearly rejected marxism as a political and theoretical orientation. What distinguished Goldman from Kropotkin was her determination, along with Malatesta, Berkman, and others, in February 1915, to take a firm stand against the “Manifesto of the Sixteen”, whereby Kropotkin and other anarchists debased themselves by their shameful approval of the First World War. Goldman defended a clear internationalist position condemning any participation, support or tolerance of the war, thereby providing an internationalist point of reference in the United States.

Our aim in this article is to examine Goldman’s political assumptions regarding the Russian Revolution, her experiences and conclusions. To anticipate: Goldman's observations, underpinned by a deep proletarian instinct, and her significant advances, must in our view be distinguished from some of her central political conclusions. In order to allow sufficient insight into Goldman's position, it is necessary to include long quotations. Since it is not possible to address all aspects of her analysis, we are forced to make a selection and so urge a direct reading of her writings on the Russian Revolution and her autobiography.

Goldman was constantly preoccupied with two questions: the fusion of the Bolsheviks with the state apparatus and its consequences; and her own self-laceration over the moment that would allow or even force her to expose her criticism of the Bolsheviks – which she eventually did after months of painful hesitation. We cannot address here Goldman’s other political concerns, like the “red terror”, the Cheka, Brest-Litovsk, Makhno’s movement in the Ukraine, the Razvyorstka (the relentless requisition of food from the peasants, which therefore includes the relationship between the working class and the peasantry), the catastrophic situation of children[2] or her position regarding the workers' councils. However, her experiences and analyses of the Kronstadt uprising in March 1921 are important because they signified Goldman's break with the Bolsheviks.

"The truth about the Bolsheviki"

The outbreak of the October Revolution filled her with great enthusiasm: “From November, 1917, until February, 1918, while out on bail for my attitude against the war, I toured America in defence of the Bolsheviki. I published a pamphlet in elucidation of the Russian Revolution and in justification of the Bolsheviki. I defended them as embodying in practice the spirit of the revolution, in spite of their theoretic Marxism.”[3]

In 1918, in the anarchist magazine Mother Earth, she published an article entitled “The Truth about the Bolsheviki”:

“The Russian Revolution can mean nothing to him unless it sets the land free and joins to the dethroned Tsar his partner, the dethroned land-owner, the capitalist. That explains the historic background of the Bolsheviki, their social and economic justification. They are powerful only because they represent the people. The moment they cease to do that, they will go, as the Provisional Government and Kerensky had to go. For never will the Russian people be content, or Bolshevism cease, until the land and the means of life become the heritage of the children of Russia. They have for the first time in centuries determined that they shall be heard, and that their voices shall reach the heart of, not of the governing classes – they know these have no heart – but the heats of the peoples of the world, including the people of the United States. Therein lies the deep import and significance of the Russian Revolution as symbolised by the Bolsheviki (…) The Bolsheviki have come to challenge the world. It can nevermore rest in its old sordid indolence. It must accept the challenge. It has already accepted it in Germany, in Austria and Romania, in France and Italy, aye, even in America. Like sudden sunlight Bolshevism is spreading over the entire world, illuminating the great vision and warming it into being - the new life of human brotherhood and social well-being.”[4]

So Goldman's view of the Bolsheviks in 1918 was anything but negative. On the contrary, her defence of the Russian Revolution and of the Bolsheviks was a highly responsible reaction to the American bourgeoisie's campaign of lies and its role in the brutal, internationally coordinated campaign against revolutionary Russia. Her radical criticism after two years in Russia was always motivated by the intention of defending the October Revolution against its external enemies, as well as against internal degeneration; this was the main concern of her activities and writings.

Enthusiasm and disappointment

Two brief quotes impressively illustrate the change in Goldman's assessment of the evolution of the Russian situation. She describes her arrival in Petrograd in January 1920 in exuberant terms: “Soviet Russia! Sacred ground, magic people! You have come to symbolise humanity’s hope, you alone are destined to redeem mankind. I have come to serve you, beloved Matushka. Take me to your bosom, let me pour myself into you, mingle my blood with yours, find my place in your heroic struggle, and give to the uttermost to your needs!”[5]

But then, two years later, as a final description of her stay in Russia, we find the following: “In the train, December 1, 1921! My dreams crushed, my faith broken, my heart like a stone. Matushka Rossiya [Mother Russia] bleeding from a thousand wounds, her soil strewn with the dead. I clutch the bar at the frozen window-pane and grit my teeth to suppress my sobs.”[6]

“It was just one year and eleven months since I had set foot in what I believed to be the promised land. My heart was heavy with the tragedy of Russia. One thought stood out in bold relief: I must raise my voice against the crimes committed in the name of the Revolution. I would be heard regardless of friend or foe.”[7]

What happened between her arrival in 1920 and her departure two years later? And was her disappointment exclusively the result of a naive expectation overtaken by reality? We will return to this second question at the end of the article.

The encirclement of the Russian Revolution

Goldman rightly attaches great importance to the question of the encirclement of the Russian Revolution, which, according to her, was a real cause of the difficulties of the first years of soviet rule. But, as we will show later, she speaks little of its political isolation as due to the fact that the world proletariat had not been able to take power in other countries, which was the essential question, and which did not allow the important errors of Bolshevik power to be corrected.

In her book The Crushing of the Russian Revolution written in 1922, Goldman stresses from the outset how the encirclement of Russia stifled the revolution and that the situation of a world war created the worst conditions for the revolution.

“The march on Russia began. The interventionists murdered millions of Russians, the blockade starved and froze women and children by the hundred thousands. And Russia turned into a vast wilderness of agony and despair. The Russian Revolution was crushed and the Bolshevik regime immeasurably strengthened. That is the net result of the four years conspiracy of the imperialists against Russia.”[8]

The internationally coordinated war against Russia resulted in a brutal strangulation. It would be very erroneous not to take this tragic situation into account in the analysis of the degeneration and failure of the Russian Revolution. Goldman constantly evokes it in her personal experiences; for example she describes the terrible situation resulting from the ruthless starvation of Russia and its consequences for millions of children in 1920-21, a situation further aggravated by the scheming of many state bureaucrats to enrich themselves. On this issue, despite all her harsh criticisms, Goldman defended the Bolsheviks' efforts to improve the situation of the children:

“It is true that the Bolsheviki have attempted their utmost in regard to the child and education. It is also true that if they have failed to minister to the needs of the children of Russia, the fault is much more that of the enemies of the Russian Revolution than theirs. Intervention and the blockade have fallen heaviest upon the frail shoulders of innocent children and the sick. But even under more favourable conditions the bureaucratic Frankenstein monster of the Bolshevik state could not but frustrate the best intentions and paralyse the supreme effort made by the communists on behalf of the child and education (...) More and more I came to see that the Bolsheviki were trying to do all they could for the child, but that their efforts were being defeated by the parasitic bureaucracy their state had created”[9]

So, concretely, she describes what were called the “Dead Souls”[10]: names of children who had already died and were registered on the lists of those entitled to food rations by the lower bureaucracy, who then diverted these fraudulent rations for their own consumption or to sell for themselves; all this to the detriment of hundreds of thousands of starving children, the most vulnerable victims of the asphyxiation caused by the international blockade!

Goldman cannot be reproached for having analysed the decline of the Russian Revolution without taking into account the decisive and deadly situation of its isolation in Russia. She also attempted, as is shown by the quotes from her texts, to distinguish between the Bolsheviks and the state bureaucracy, to which we will return later.

Her weakness lies rather in the absence of a clear analysis of the fact that the war and the blockade against Russia were only possible because the working class, specifically in western Europe, was progressively defeated, particularly in Germany. The working class in western Europe, and also in the United States, was confronted with a much more experienced bourgeoisie and a more sophisticated state apparatus than in Russia. But it is not only the defeat of the international revolutionary wave that produced the desperate situation of Russia; it is also the backwardness of the international working class compared to Russia.

In Germany, the attempted revolution only began more than a year after October 1917, which left a long time free for the strategy of Russia's isolation, as shown in the months following the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. The seizure of power by the proletariat in the central states of western Europe was the only way to break the strangling of the Russian Revolution and put a stop to armed intervention. It is only possible to understand the roots of the defeat of the Russian Revolution by examining precisely the international balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; this aspect appears only occasionally in the writings of Goldman, barely developed, and which leaves the impression that the fate of the revolution was sealed mainly on Russian soil.

The isolation and strangulation of Russia after October 1917 in no way explains every aspect of its internal degeneration, which was ultimately the most traumatic experience for the working class, nor should it serve as justification for this internal degeneration. With regard to the problem of the Bolsheviks’ catastrophic errors, in particular their policy of identification with the state apparatus, it is crucial to see that this could only have been corrected under the influence of a victorious revolutionary working class in other countries, which was tragically not to be the case.[11]

On closer inspection, there is a contradiction in Goldman's central theses about the relationship between the international situation and the causes of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. On the one hand she writes: “All my observations and studies over two years gave me the clarity that the Russian people, if not continuously threatened from without, would have soon realised the danger from within and would have known how to meet that danger (…)”.On the other hand, however: “If there was ever a doubt as to what constitutes the greatest danger to a revolution - outside attacks or the paralysed interest of the people within - the Russian experience should dispel that doubt completely. The counter-revolutionists, backed by Allied money, men and munitions, failed utterly (...)”[12]

As we have already said, Russia’s isolation must in no way serve as an excuse for its errors. But Goldman draws a curious conclusion in which she contradicts all her “observations and studies” quoted above: the salvation of the revolution depended essentially on the forces and politics of the working class in Russia, the international situation becoming for her a much more secondary factor. Goldman develops a logic here that reminds us of Voline, without however going so far;[13] she presents the defeat of the Allied counter-revolutionary forces as proof that the counter-revolution had been a perfectly surmountable obstacle for the revolution, which is shockingly simplistic when you consider the huge damage caused by the this bloody confrontation,[14] including the deaths of tens of thousands of determined revolutionaries, which Goldman herself had well described. Those conscious revolutionaries who had voluntarily put themselves in the front line in their thousands and fallen in battle could probably have opposed in some way the internal counter-revolution.

These two factors; isolation and strangulation on the one hand, and the errors of the Bolsheviks on the other, were mutually reinforcing. The main difference between them was that the war against Russia was obvious to all, while the internal degeneration began in a much more hidden way, eventually becoming the trauma of the century for the international working class. Goldman's conclusions are, in essence, a common way of taking into account both the question of the external counter-revolution and that of the internal counter-revolutionary degeneration; a problem with which all the revolutionaries of the 1920s were confronted.

War does not create the best conditions for revolution

One of Goldman's notable contributions to understanding the defeat of the Russian Revolution – even though we do not share her conclusion – is her reflection on the conditions for a revolution during and after a war: “Perhaps the Russian Revolution was doomed at its birth. Coming as it did upon the heels of four years of war, which had drained Russia of her best manhood, sapped their blood, and devastated her land, the revolution may not have had the strength to withstand the mad onslaught of the rest of the world.”[15]

Here she rightly points out the direct result of the war and responds to the false and schematic ideas whereby the crisis automatically aggravates the war and war automatically strengthens the consciousness of the working class, thus leading to the break out of revolution. Goldman emphasises that fundamentally the revolution suffered from exhaustion in Russia resulting from the war itself. But the idea that the fate of the revolution could somehow be “doomed at its birth” shows a fatalistic approach.

An important potential factor must be considered that was not realised. The First World War ended in November 1918, one year after October 1917. As we have already pointed out, the only hope for October was for the revolution to break as quickly as possible in other countries and, above all, for a rapid revolutionary surge in western Europe. This was a historically possible perspective, and the working class had no choice but to engage the struggle in that direction.

The war ended with victorious and defeated countries. If the defeat shook the defeated governments and could, therefore, facilitate their weakening and the revolutionary dynamic, this was not the case for the victorious governments which, on the contrary, were strengthened. In the victorious states where the working class had been painfully dragged to slaughter by the bourgeoisie for four years, it was the aspiration for peace and stability that prevailed and significantly undermined the possibilities for a revolutionary assault by the proletariat in France, Britain, Belgium, Holland and Italy. It was not only the balance of power between the imperialist states that was different after the war, but also the state of mind of the masses who were thus divided according to whether they were in a victorious or vanquished country. Goldman raises the problem of the war which creates poor conditions for the revolution, but she reduces it mainly to the case of Russia itself

What possibilities for change after a revolution?

What possibilities for change existed in Russia at a time of total encirclement and famine? In the anarchist camp, there were very different opinions on this subject but what was significant was the great expectation of immediate improvements in living conditions, especially in terms of economic measures and the fundamental reorganisation of production. So what were Goldman's expectations at that time, just two years after October 1917? Was she expecting on her arrival in Russia in January 1920 to find a society that already met human needs? At her first meeting with Maxim Gorky, on a train to Moscow, she told him: “I also hope you will believe me when I say that, though an anarchist, I had not been naive enough to think that anarchism could rise overnight, as it were, from the debris of old Russia.”[16]

She describes conversations with Alexander Berkman, her closest political and personal companion for decades, as follows: “He dismissed the charges [against the Bolsheviki] as the irresponsible prattle of ineffective and disgruntled men. The Petrograd anarchists were like so many in our ranks in America who used to do least and criticise most, he said. Perhaps they had been naive enough to expect anarchism to emerge overnight from the ruins of autocracy, from the war and blunders of the Provisional Government.”[17] Goldman did not judge the Russian Revolution by a naive measure based exclusively on the immediate improvement of living conditions and the economy.[18]

On the question of the immediate possibilities of a social upheaval in the interest of the working class and other oppressed layers, like the millions of peasants in Russia, Goldman puts her point of view again in a framework that does not ignore the international situation. Nor did she hesitate to defend the efforts of the Bolsheviks (as we have seen with regard to the situation of children which demanded immediate and drastic action) and to severely criticise the positions of other anarchists. Goldman did not submit to the law of silence and the rejection of any mutual criticism within the anarchist camp. We do not know what arguments she used against impatient anarchists who expected the immediate upheaval of society. But these controversies between anarchists show that there was no homogeneous anarchism in Russia during the revolution.

The question of possible immediate measures to rapidly relieve suffering was of crucial importance for the working class and for the peasantry as a whole, and was not only a theme of the most impatient parties of anarchism, among whom this question often uniquely decided their attitude towards the Bolsheviks. For the working class, revolution is not an abstract historical logic. After decades of brutal exploitation, and having endured the sufferings of the butchery of 1914-1918, the great hopes of a sunrise on the horizon of life were more than understandable and fitting. They constituted an important driving force of the revolutionary conviction and combativity that enabled October. Given the immediate reality of the strangulation of revolutionary Russia, of hunger and the war against the white armies, the expected sun had not risen on the horizon. Hunger and demoralisation weighed heavily on the working class. In this almost desperate situation, Goldman adopted a responsible attitude of patience and perseverance which, with the progressive defeat of the world revolutionary wave after the war and for all revolutionaries could only be maintained with enormous political will and clarity.

The Bolsheviks and the state apparatus: the shipwreck of marxism?

In her analysis of the dynamic of the state apparatus in full growth after October, Goldman was totally faithful to her own idea according to which the Russian problem was much too complicated to be explained away by a few superficial phrases. She gave a great deal of attention to this question and distinguished herself by precise observations and reflections. Nevertheless, we absolutely do not share a good number of these conclusions! Her writings contain contradictions on the question of the relations between the Bolsheviks and the developing state apparatus.

In 1922 she was not yet ready to make a profound analysis; this was only possible at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s when the Italian Communist Left took up the task. There was no doubt that certain anarchist principles on the question of the state strongly dominated her analyses and the conclusions that flowed from it.

First of all it's indispensable to broadly present Goldman’s vision on the issue:

“The first seven months of my stay in Russia had almost crushed me. I had come with so much enthusiasm, with a passionate desire to throw myself into the work, into the holy defence of the revolution. What I found completely overwhelmed me. I was unable to do anything. The chariot wheel of the Socialist State rolled over me paralysing my energy. The wretchedness and distress of the people, the callous disregard of their needs, the persecutions and the repression tore at my mind and heart and made life unbearable. Was it the revolution which had turned idealists into wild beasts? If so the Bolsheviks were mere pawns in the hands of the inevitable. Or was it the cold, impersonal nature of the state which by foul means had harnessed the revolution to its heart and was now whipping it into channels indispensable to the state? I could not answer these questions. Not in July 1920, at any rate.”[19]

“Yet neither in the conservative not even in the revolutionary sense do the trade unions in Russia represent the need of the workers. What they really are is the coerced and militarised adjunct of the Bolshevik state. They are “‘the school of communism’ as Lenin insisted in his thesis on the functions of the trade unions. But they are not even that. A school presupposes the free expression and initiative of the pupils, whereas the trade unions in Russia are military barracks for the mobilised labour army, forced into membership by the whip of the state driver.”[20]

“I am certain that neither Lunacharsky nor Gorky knew about it [the imprisonment of children by the Cheka]. But therein lies the curse of the vicious circle; it makes it impossible for those at the head to know what the host of their subordinates are doing (...) Does Lunacharsky know of such cases? Do the leading communists know? Some no doubt do. But they are too busy with ‘important state affairs’. And they have become callous to all such ‘trifles’. Then, too, they themselves, are caught in the vicious circle, in the machinery of Bolshevik officialdom. They know that adherence to the party covers a multitude of sins.” [21]

And concerning relations between the state apparatus and its bureaucrats:

“In the village where he [Kropotkin] lived in little Dimitrov, there were more Bolshevik officials than ever existed there during the reign of the Romanov's. All those people were living off the masses. They were parasites on the social body, and Dimitrov was only a small example of what was going on throughout Russia. It was not the fault of any particular individual, rather it was the state that they had created, which discredits every revolutionary ideal, stifles all initiative and sets a premium on incompetence and waste.”[22].

Goldman's observations on the concrete reality of the state very precisely describe how it developed more and more and began inexorably to consume everything. It's to her great credit that she gives a detailed perception of the “daily life” of the bureaucratic apparatus and its profound contradiction with the interests of the working class and other exploited classes. In 1922, her descriptions were highly pertinent faced with all the glorifications circulating in the international workers' movement on the situation in Russia and faced with a blindness towards the problems it confronted. There's no doubt that Goldman’s efforts to warn against the dangers of the state as it was developing in Russia were precious at this time, even if her analysis was based on what she saw and only provisional.

But what conclusions did she draw from it?

“It would be an error to assume that the failure of the revolution was due entirely to the character of the Bolsheviki. Fundamentally it was the result of the principles and methods of Bolshevism. It was the authoritarian spirit and principles of the state which stifled the libertarian and liberating aspirations. Were any other political party in control of the government in Russia the result would have been essentially the same. It is not so much the Bolsheviks who killed the Russian Revolution as the Bolshevik idea. It was marxism, however modified; in short, fanatical governmentalism (...) I have further shown that it is not only Bolshevism that failed, but Marxism itself. That is to say, the STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolise all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevails. (...) The main cause of the defeat of the Russian Revolution lies much deeper. It is to be found in the whole Socialist conception of revolution itself.”[23]

“And while the workers and peasants of Russia were laying down their lives so heroically, this inner enemy rose to ever greater power. Slowly but surely the Bolsheviki were building up a centralised state, which destroyed the Soviets and crushed the revolution, a state that can now easily compare, in regard to bureaucracy and despotism, with any of the great powers of the world.”[24]

“The marxist policies of the Bolsheviki, the tactics first extolled as indispensable to the life of the revolution only to be discarded as harmful after they had wrought misery, distrust and antagonism, were the factors that slowly undermined the faith of the people in the revolution.”[25]

Goldman’s thesis is the following: marxism, because of the policy of the Bolsheviks towards the state following the revolution, has turned out to be useless. Contrary to the viscerally anti-organisation sections of anarchism, Goldman never defended the position that the problems of the Bolsheviks fundamentally resulted from the organisational strength of their political party. She rejected rather their concrete policy. And she had good reason to on two counts when she said that the state is by nature "institutional and static". Manifestly, she refers here to the experience concerning the bourgeois state and its nature before the revolution. Goldman’s position is not exclusively emotional, as some anarchists constantly reproached her for at the time, but is based on historic experience. The state in feudalism and capitalism is by its nature completely static and, above all, unconditionally defends the interests and power of the dominant class; it is openly reactionary. Secondly, we share the point of view according to which the problem is not that of individual personalities in the ranks of the Bolsheviks, but the enormous confusion within the party concerning the state after the revolution, which in fact reflected the immaturity of the workers' movement at that time on the question of the state.

Even after a world proletarian revolution (which was never the case at the time of the Russian Revolution, being largely limited to that country), the "semi-state" – necessary but limited to minimal functions and subordinate to the workers' councils – remains in its essence always conservative and static, and in no way constitutes a driving force for the establishment of a communist society; nor is it an organ of the working class. The Italian Communist Left described it thus: “... the state, even with the adjective ‘proletarian’ attached to it, remains an organ of coercion, and in sharp and permanent opposition to the realisation of the communist programme. In this sense it is an expression of the capitalist danger throughout the development of the transition period ....”[26]

Consequently, it is absolutely false to speak of a "proletarian state" as an organ of the revolution, as the Trotskyists claim with regard to Russia, but also the Bordigist current concerning the theoretical analysis of the transition period. Such an idea is completely incapable of grasping the danger of identifying the workers' councils and the political party with the state apparatus – as tragically happened in Russia.

To avoid any false debate, a remark is necessary: Goldman often speaks of a "centralised state" built by the Bolsheviks. But this was not because she was a partisan of the federalist concept, like Rudolf Rocker who advocated the principle of an extremely federalist class struggle. [27]  The term "centralist" used by Goldman was rather a characterisation of the impenetrable, unresponsive, corrupt and hierarchical state apparatus in Russia, which sabotaged the implementation of even the smallest measures for the working class and other oppressed layers of society, like the peasantry.

But does the test of revolution signify the collapse of marxism as Goldman claims? And was anarchism, on the contrary, confirmed by the Russian Revolution? If one wants to understand the events around the Russian Revolution, standing as an arbiter of two historical political currents on the "field of the revolution" to give a winner and a loser is hardly useful.

We cannot deal with all aspects of the tragic degeneration of the Bolshevik party and the Russian Revolution in this response, but we have already dealt with these in numerous ICC texts. But we must respond to Goldman on the alleged shipwreck of marxism as a whole. The Bolshevik party degenerated, which was clearly expressed by its fusion with the state apparatus; that’s a fact – but marxism has not failed.

With her method, how does Goldman explain the fact that faced with the question of war, it was precisely within the marxist workers' movement, and on the basis of its historical legacy, that the clearest, most determined internationalist positions emerged, such as those embodied in the Kienthal Conference of 1916? And all this led by a marxist organisation, the Bolsheviks, a spearhead against the reformism which was gaining ground faced with the question of war.

With her method, how does Goldman explain the fact, mentioned at the beginning of this article and correctly denounced by herself, that within anarchism and even around the central figure of anarchism at the time, Kropotkin, a tendency appeared which abandoned internationalist principles and openly proclaimed so in a manifesto – a deviation that gave rise to great uncertainty, tensions and resistance within the anarchist ranks? According to Goldman's own method anarchism hit the rocks here since internationalism had just been thrown overboard by its most influential representatives. As in the marxist workers' movement this produced a lively confrontation faced with the test of war and a determined part of anarchism, which also included Goldman, fought against any support for either of the two imperialist camps involved.

It would be absolutely false to say that anarchism as a whole became bankrupt in 1914. On the contrary, it's precisely because such a drastic decantation took place within the anarchist and marxist workers' movement that it was possible in the struggle against war and in October ‘17, revolutionary, internationalist anarchists fought side-by-side with revolutionary marxists. If the necessary positioning between war and the revolution indeed produced such a result, it was just as much among marxists as among anarchists, producing a determined and intransigent defence of internationalism and the interests of the working class.

And that's not all. With her approach and the thesis of the bankruptcy of marxism, how does Goldman explain the fact that the Bolsheviks, an organisation of the marxist tradition, were able in 1917, with the April Theses formulated by its most determined representatives, to bring clarity against the democratic confusions still existing in the Russian working class?

It's a fact that the majority of the Bolsheviks gradually moved away the spirit of the October revolution, turning their backs on it. By identifying with the state apparatus and taking repressive measures against those who criticised, they became locked into the absurd belief that they could save the revolution and thus became the incarnation of the counter-revolution from within. But it wasn't the totality of the Bolsheviks who embarked on this path, because there were different organised reactions within the party in the face of these signs of degeneration.

Goldman describes her great sympathy for and closeness to one of these oppositional groups within the party; the "Workers' Opposition" around Kollontai and Shliapnikov. Clearly, marxism was capable of producing a militant revolutionary opposition, which Goldman expressly welcomed. On the other hand, she (and more so still her political comrade Alexander Berkman) described the organised tendencies within anarchism in Russia, the so-called "soviet anarchists", who openly supported the policies of the Bolsheviks; and this even in 1920 when the terror of the Cheka[28] was already set up. She also honestly describes what followed: " Unfortunately, as was unavoidable under the circumstances, some evil spirits had found entry into the Anarchist ranks – debris washed ashore by the Revolutionary tide. (…) Power is corrupting and anarchists are no exception".[29] So, if we follow Goldman’s method, has anarchism in its entirety failed because of such facts? Such a conclusion would be wrong from our point of view. Her approach and conclusion does not take into account all the post-October 1917 debates within a so-called "bankrupt marxism".

The question of the state after the revolution wasn't resolved within the workers' movement of the time and this is equally valid for the anarchists. An essential reason was the absence of any concrete historical experience for what happened in Russia after 1917. Up to then the workers' movement had always started from the perspective of a rapidly extending revolution. The insurmountable isolation of the Russian Revolution and the obligation to defend its territory brutally and rapidly reinforced it suffocation and its degeneration; the state and the Bolshevik Party "fused" to become an active factor in this dynamic.

Even Goldman's political reference point, “Father Kropotkin” as his political entourage called him, was also unable to answer the questions of the role and function of the state after a revolution in his book The State: its Historic Role. The radical rejection of the state by the great majority of anarchists on the basis of an instinctive distrust, came from the experience of a brutal confrontation with the state under feudalism and the capitalist state apparatus; it rightly demanded the destruction of the bourgeois state by the proletarian revolution as was advocated by Lenin in his book The State and Revolution.

Even though this merit of the anarchist movement must be recognised, a false conception nevertheless prevailed in its ranks: the reorganisation of society, immediately after the revolution, by the workers' councils, the unions and cooperatives. Such a scenario hopelessly pushes the organs of the defence and political interests of the working class, the workers' councils, which constitute the dynamic element of the society, to fuse with the organism charged with the management of society (what we call a reduced and controlled transitional state.[30] If this happens, the workers' councils can only lose their autonomy in relation to the state (which would mean the working class losing its autonomy as a class), and themselves becoming a cog in the bureaucratic machine. Goldman also shares this position, even if only in an implicit and undeveloped form.

Let's return to the question of the so-called shipwreck of marxism. The majority of anarchists criticised the tragic developments in Russia. But anarchism wasn’t confirmed in its totality in the Russian Revolution, just as marxism did not fail as a whole. There were without any doubt two false ideas among the Bolsheviks on the subject of the relations between workers' councils, party and state. At the time of the Russian Revolution the idea of unity between party and state apparatus dominated, and of a party which, alongside the workers' councils, had to be involved in the exercise of power. The dominant conception was that a minority within the class, its party, because of the confidence placed in it, would be called to take power in the name of the working class. This point of view clearly expressed the immaturity that existed on the question of the state after the revolution.

Through their conceptions of the post-revolutionary state and their relationship with it, the Bolsheviks became caught in a destructive spiral which, in the situation of complete isolation of the revolution, saw a false idea turn into a tragedy. Although the Bolsheviks never openly rejected the principle of the seizure of power by the workers 'councils, one of the first signs of degeneration was the gradual denial of the powers of the workers' councils, a process in which the Bolsheviks played a decisive role.

It’s not fatalistic sarcasm but a historical fact to say it was the tragic experience of the Russian Revolution that clarified all these questions. Salvation could only come from the international extension of the revolution on the basis of the vitality of the soviets. This would also have denied any retrospective determinism according to which the fate of the Russian Revolution was already sealed at its birth. But wanting to save the revolution with "the strong arm of the state", as the Bolsheviks initially attempted, was a pure and simple impossibility.

Goldman draws a static conclusion from the reality of the growing domination of the state apparatus after October and of the process of degeneration. The weakness in her method is not to take into account the struggle in the marxist ranks against the dynamic of state domination: nor does it take into account the enormous difficulties that this situation generated among the anarchists, even if this figures in the detail of her observations. Added to this weakness is her idea that the Bolsheviks – as a party of marxism and for that very same reason – were doomed to failure from the very start because of their supreme goal, that of seizing power, just as all the detractors of the Bolshevik Party claimed. It seems that, according to Goldman, it is the elementary existence of marxist positions which decided the fate of the revolution. In her conclusion on the question of the state she also expressly denies the fact that it was a process of degeneration resulting from the world context rather than a question "settled" from the start. With her proclamation of "the failure of marxism" in the experience of the Russian revolution, she gives too much away too easily, finally leading to another thesis.

"The end justifies the means" and Kronstadt: a break with the Bolsheviks

One of Goldman's theses where she goes furthest in her criticism is:

“The Bolsheviks are the Jesuit order in the Marxist church. Not that they are insincere as men or that their intentions are evil. It is their Marxism that has determined her policies and methods. The very means they have employed have destroyed the realisation of their end. Communism, Socialism, equality, freedom – everything for which the Russian masses have endured so much martyrdom – have become discredited and besmirched by her tactics, by their Jesuit motto that the end justifies the means.” (…) “But Lenin is a shrewd and subtle Jesuit; he joined in the popular cry: ‘All power to the Soviets!’. When he and his follow-Jesuits were firmly in the saddle, the breaking up of the Soviets begun. Today they are like everything else in Russia – a shadow with the substances utterly crushed.” (…)  “To be sure, Lenin often repents. At every All-Russian Communist conclave he comes forth with his mea culpa. ‘I have sinned’. A young Communist once said to me: ‘It would not surprise me if Lenin should some day declare that the October Revolution was a mistake.’”[31]

Yes, the objectives of the Bolsheviks, communism, socialism, equality and freedom, which Goldman did not deny to be the true goals of the Bolsheviks, could not be realised. In other places in her writings on Russia, she describes how she was confronted with a question that was full of hope and asked many times by many Bolshevik leaders: "Will we soon see the revolution in Germany and the United States?" This too from Lenin in a meeting with Goldman. The Bolsheviks she spoke to were eager to receive a positive reply from her, she being closely in touch with the situation in the United States. It was clear from her descriptions that the Bolsheviks lived in constant fear of isolation and desperately awaited the least sign of revolutionary developments in other countries. This itself proves that in the ranks of the Bolshevik Party, which was anything but homogeneous, the hope of a world revolution had continued to live despite the increasingly clear degeneration. And so it was not just about a greed for power in Russia, as she runs the risk of claiming with the idea of the "Jesuitism" of the Bolsheviks.

 

Goldman's concerns revolved around the contradiction between the initial objectives of the Bolsheviks and their specific policies and methods. This led to a definitive break after the bloody repression of the Kronstadt uprising in March 1921 under the banner of saving the revolution, and where there was use of brutal violence within the working class, which was in stark contradiction with communist principles. Her experience with the Cheka also played a decisive role in her break with the Bolsheviks.

The method according to which the end justifies the means must be vehemently fought against by the working class. Goldman is honest in not to hiding her own hesitations about it. But her descriptions clearly refute the thesis that the Bolsheviks' thinking was that of the "Jesuits of Marxism", who would stop at nothing in the pursuit of their goals, and that here there would be a fundamental difference between the Bolsheviks and the anarchism.

How was this question posed among anarchists? She described her discussions with Berkman on the question of the legitimate means for defending the revolution:

"It was absurd to denounce the Bolsheviki for the drastic measures they were using, Sasha urged. How else were they to free Russia from the stranglehold of counter-revolution and sabotage? So far as he was concerned, he did not think any methods too harsh to deal with this. Revolutionary necessity justified all measures, however we might dislike them. As long as the Revolution was in jeopardy, those seeking to undermine it must pay the penalty. Single-hearted and clear-eyed as ever was my old pal. I agreed with him; still, the ugly reports of my comrades kept disturbing me."[32]

This debate with Berkman went on in the sharpest way:

“For hours he would argue against my ‘impatience’ and deficient judgement of far-reaching issues, my kid-glove approach to the Revolution. I had always depreciated the economic factor as the main cause of capitalist evils, he declared. Could I fail to see now that economic necessity was the very reason which was forcing the hand of the men at the Soviet helm? The continued danger from the outside, the natural indolence of the Russian worker and his failure to increase production, the peasants’ lack of the most necessary implements, and their resultant refusal to feed the cities had compelled the Bolsheviki to pass those desperate measures. Of course he regarded such methods as counter-revolutionary and bound to defeat their purpose. Still, it was preposterous to suspect men like Lenin or Trotsky of deliberate treachery to the Revolution. Why, they had dedicated their lives to that cause, they had suffered persecution, calumny, prison, and exile for their ideals! They could not go back on them to such an extent!”[33]

For the working class, the means used must not be in contradiction with its fundamental objectives.[34] However, we reject the assertion that marxism alone, and the Bolsheviks in particular, would be vulnerable to the penetration of the dominant class ideology by adopting means that conflict with the goal of communism. The discussions described by Goldman are characteristic of the fact that anarchism has always had enormous difficulties in this regard. An example of the use by many anarchists of means that contradict the goal is the attack on Lenin by Fanny Kaplan on August 30th, 1918, justified by allegations of Lenin's so-called betrayal of the revolution. Given the long tradition of assassinations of representatives of the hated tsarist regime, which exposed the anarchists to a brutal repression, part of Russian anarchism resorted to what is called "propaganda by deed" by having recourse to "the ends justifies the means". This included targeting working class fighters, as the attack on Lenin shows!

It is not a matter of mourning the hated figures of Tsarism targeted by the methods of one part of Russian anarchism, which expressed a reductive understanding of feudalism, identifying it with some individuals. But, as Berkman defended it correctly against Goldman, this system was not based on the malevolence of individuals, but on social and economic bases in contradiction with the needs of the exploited classes. The "propaganda by deed", the individual violence against the hated representatives of feudalism, conceived as "triggering reflection" also expressed a false conception of the development of class consciousness, since these methods in no way demonstrate the necessity for a united struggle of the whole class against the foundations of exploitation.

It is understandable that Goldman showed allegiance to Kaplan as a prisoner, since she was tortured by the Cheka. She did not herself call for the same methods as Kaplan. But why in this situation did she not dare go a step further and criticise the "Jesuit" methods in the ranks of anarchism, rather than circumscribing it to the Bolsheviks?

Goldman suffered greatly in September 1921 with the Cheka's execution of friends, of anarchists such as Fanya Baron, with the approval of Lenin. Although Lenin was one of the most determined and clearest personalities of the October Revolution, such measures are unacceptable. Goldman developed a growing antipathy, especially towards Trotsky and Lenin, describing them as clever and cunning Jesuits.[35]

The Cheka had become uncontrollable and used hostage-taking and torture to extract information and carried out executions to spread fear. It was often used against political opposition groups coming from the very ranks of the Bolsheviks and anarchists, but also against workers who participated in strikes. Goldman's criticism of prisoners – defenceless individuals – being condemned to death, whether members of bourgeois counter-revolutionary organisations, criminals, or those taken prisoner from the white armies, is absolutely justified because such measures were not only meaningless acts of violence, but were also an expression of the view that people cannot change their opinions, their behaviour and political positions and they must, in a word, be liquidated.[36] Within the Bolsheviks, the fight against the suppression of opposition voices inside the party and the working class began in 1918. Although Goldman herself witnessed debates and the existence of different positions among the Bolsheviks, she draws too simplistic a picture in order to condemn the latter as "Jesuits of Marxism", as if they were forged from a single block, which never corresponded to reality. The central problem was the sliding into a militarist approach to political problems rather than turning to working class consciousness, to which most of the Bolsheviks succumbed in the false belief that they were saving the besieged revolution. But this does not correspond to a thirst for power allegedly rooted inside the Bolshevik Party.

Marxism has never defended the principle according to which the end justifies the means; this was never a principle or practice of the Bolsheviks before and during the October Revolution. Kronstadt's suppression, however, the tragic culmination of a growing repression, showed how much the degeneration had already progressed, the forms it would take and the logic behind it. Its political justification was derived from its underlying goal (the "iron cohesion" of Russia against the international attacks) justifying the means (bloody repression).

Goldman's personal and utterly demoralising experiences of Kronstadt led to a break with the Bolsheviks and marked a turning point. In the last days before the crushing of the sailors, soldiers and workers of Kronstadt, she was part of a delegation (including in addition to her, Perkus, Pertrowski, Berkman) who tried to negotiate with the Red Army. "Kronstadt broke the last thread that held me to the Bolsheviki. The wanton slaughter they had instigated spoke more eloquently against them then aught else. Whatever their pretences in the past, the Bolsheviki now proved themselves the most pernicious enemies of the revolution. I could have nothing further to do with them."[37]

Kronstadt was a terrible tragedy, a tragic mistake much more than a simple "error".

The crushing of Kronstadt with several thousand dead proletarians (on both sides!) was based on an absolutely false assessment of the character of this uprising by Bolshevik leaders that could have had several causes: the fact that the international bourgeoisie had perfidiously seized this opportunity to hypocritically declare its "solidarity" with the insurgents; also the growing fear that Kronstadt had passed into the camp of the counter-revolution or was even already an expression of the counter-revolution. Goldman responded correctly to both of these aspects. In her autobiography dating back to 1931, however, she was unable to draw the most important lesson from the Kronstadt tragedy, as was the case for the entire Marxist Left during the repression, which mostly supported it. Neither, even with the passage of time, would she be able to understand, contrary to certain currents of the Communist Left, that violence within the working class must be firmly rejected and that this must be a principle.[38]

As with the question of the state, Goldman falls far too easily into the question of the so-called "continued Jesuitism of the Bolsheviks". She calls the Bolsheviks Jesuit, which is in total contradiction with their history. The dynamism of the majority of the Bolsheviks, who did not hesitate to use violence in Kronstadt in 1921 as an alleged means of class struggle, was by no means "their tradition" but rather, as we have seen, an expression of the process of their progressive degeneration.

Instead of looking fundamentally at the question that all revolutionaries without exception faced, namely what means can be used in the class struggle and in the revolution, the "Jesuit" label that Goldman loosely attributed to the Bolsheviks was rather an obstacle to understanding the degeneration of the revolution as a process.

Silence or criticism?

One question is found in Goldman's writings on Russia like a red thread: when was it justified to formulate an open criticism of the Bolsheviks? She described an encounter with anarchists in Petrograd with great indignation:

"These charges and denunciations beat upon me like hammers and left me stunned. I listened tense in every nerve, hardly able clearly to understand what I heard, and failing to grasp its full meaning. It couldn’t be true — this monster indictment! (…) The men in that dismal hall must be mad, I thought, to tell such impossible and preposterous stories, wicked to condemn the Communists for the crimes they must know were due to the counterrevolutionary gang, to the blockade and the White generals attacking the Revolution. I proclaimed my conviction to the gathering, but my voice was drowned in the laughter of derision and jeers.”[39]

As regards the question of the changes to come immediately after the revolution, Goldman's despondency with the positions of the other anarchists shows that anarchism was anything but homogeneous, especially with regard to the attitude towards the Bolsheviks. Anarchism in Russia had again divided into different camps.[40] The following passages from Goldman's writings once again testify to her responsible attitude in not ignoring her own uncertainties, but they also show the evolution of her attitude towards the Bolsheviks.

"Well could I understand the attitude of my Ukrainian friends. They had suffered much during the last year: they had seen the high hopes of the Revolution crushed and Russia breaking down beneath the heel of the Bolshevik state. Yet I could not comply with their wishes. I still had faith in the Bolsheviki, in their revolutionary sincerity and integrity. Moreover, I felt that as long as Russia was being attacked from outside I could not speak in criticism. I would not add fuel on the fires of counterrevolution. I therefore had to keep silent, and stand by the Bolsheviki as the organised defenders of the Revolution. But my Russian friends scorned this view. I was confounding the Communist Party with the revolution, they said; they are not the same, on the contrary they were opposed, even antagonistic.”[41]

 “At the first news of war with Poland I had set aside my critical attitude and offered my services as a nurse at the front (…) But he (Zorin) never did. That of course could have no bearing on my determination to help the country, in whatever capacity possible. Nothing seemed so important just then.” (…) “I was not denying Makhno’s services to the Revolution in the struggle against the White forces, nor the fact that his povstantsy army was a spontaneous mass movement of the toilers. I did not think, however, that anarchism had anything to gain from military activity or that our propaganda should depend on military or political spoils. But that was beside the point. I was not in a position to join their work, nor was it a question of the Bolsheviki any more. I was ready to admit frankly that I had erred grievously when I had defended Lenin and his party as the true champions of the Revolution. But I would not engage in active opposition to them so long as Russia was still being attacked by outside enemies.”[42]

“I was oppressively conscious of the great debt I owed to the workers of Europe and America: I should tell them the truth about Russia. But how could I speak out when the country was still besieged on several fronts? It would mean working into the hands of Poland and Wrangel. For the first time in my life I refrained from exposing grave social evils. I felt as if I were betraying the trust of the masses, particularly of the American workers, whose faith I dearly cherished.”[43]

"I found it necessary to observe silence so long as the combined imperialist forces were at the throat of Russia. (…) Now, however, the time for silence has passed. I therefore mean to tell my story. I am not unmindful of the difficulties confronting me. I know I shall be misappropriated by the reactionaries, the enemies of the Russian Revolution, as well as excommunicated by its so-called friends; who persist in confusing the governing party of Russia with the Revolution. It is, therefore, necessary that I state my position clearly towards both.”[44]

At that time other revolutionaries, such as Rosa Luxemburg, were quick to make criticisms of the Bolsheviks, even when they expressed total solidarity with them and defended the decisive role they had played in the Russian Revolution. Rosa Luxemburg wrote her pamphlet The Russian Revolution in 1918 at the same time as Goldman published the article "The Truth about the Bolsheviks" in Mother Earth with boundless enthusiasm. The example of Rosa Luxemburg shows how difficult it was to make the decision to publish her own criticism at the right time, and always with the concern not to strike a blow to the revolution. In her text written in the Moabit Prison, Luxemburg expressed a criticism of the Bolsheviks, where her concern was, by clarifying the problems posed in Russia, to show her support and solidarity:

"Lenin and Trotsky, on the other hand, decide in favour of dictatorship in contradistinction to democracy, and thereby, in favour of the dictatorship of a handful of persons, that is, in favour of dictatorship on the bourgeois model.” (…) “But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class – that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people. Doubtless the Bolsheviks would have proceeded in this very way were it not that they suffered under the frightful compulsion of the world war, the German occupation and all the abnormal difficulties connected therewith, things which were inevitably bound to distort any socialist policy, however imbued it might be with the best intentions and the finest principles. (...) The danger begins only when they make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances, and want to recommend them to the international proletariat as a model of socialist tactics.”[45]

Luxemburg did not refrain from criticism. Why did Goldman not follow the example of Rosa Luxemburg when, in her writings, she repeatedly expressed her sadness following the assassination in January 1919 of Luxemburg, whose positions she knew? Why in her pamphlet The Crushing of the Russian Revolution did she never make reference to Luxemburg’s criticisms written three years previously?

The reason is simple: she did not know of it. Indeed, Luxemburg's text became the victim of a gross fear of "stabbing the revolution in the back" and of playing the bourgeoisie's game in raising criticisms. The publication of Luxemburg's criticism of the Bolsheviks, which she wanted to make known immediately after drafting it, was deliberately withheld by her closest political friends and did not appear until four years later, in 1922.[46]

Unfortunately, Goldman did not have the opportunity to draw inspiration from Luxemburg's criticism of the Bolsheviks. Her excitement on arrival in Russia is understandable given the horrors in which the World War had plunged humanity. Goldman's “Soviet Russia! Sacred ground” and her subsequent utter disillusionment is also an example that euphoria is most of the time condemned to suffer great disappointment. It is not surprising that 13 years later she rejected as "naive" her initial defence of the Bolsheviks.

Luxemburg was never inclined to political excitement and formulated her criticism on the basis of the first experiences of the months following October 1917, concluding with the famous words that the future belongs to Bolshevism. Goldman wrote her criticism three years later, based on her own experience of a later phase of the revolution in Russia, after the workers' councils were dispossessed of their power at the time of the unleashing of the Cheka and the inescapable identification of the Bolshevik Party with the state apparatus. Nevertheless, it harboured great hopes: "Lenin and his retinue are sensing the danger. Their attack upon and the persecution of the Labour Opposition and the Anarcho-Syndicalists are continuing with even greater intensity. Is it that the Anarcho-Syndicalist star is rising in the east? Who knows- Russia is the land of miracles.”[47] What would have been Luxemburg's analysis at the end of 1921, after the onset of a clear degeneration and after Kronstadt? Sadly, we will never know.

Goldman oscillated between silence and her "I have to raise my voice against the crimes committed in the name of the Revolution”. But how should that happen? During her stay in Russia, the bourgeois newspaper World in New York repeatedly asked her to publish articles on Russia. Goldman at first refused, after hard discussions with Berkman, who was strictly against such an approach, with the argument that everything published in the bourgeois press could only be used in the service of the counter-revolution and proposed she produce her own leaflets for distribution to the workers. A few weeks later, as Goldman had left Russia at the end of 1921, she allowed World to publish her texts.

"I wrote her that I preferred to have my say in the liberal and labour press in the United States, and that I should be willing to have them publish my articles without any pay rather than have them appear in the New York World or similar publications. (…) Now that I knew the truth, was I to be forced to slay it and keep silent? No, I must protest. I must cry out against the gigantic deception posing as truth and justice.”[48]

Goldman had waited a few months in Russia to make public her criticism because she did not want to "stab the revolution in the back". And because of this unthinking decision, she was pilloried from various directions:

“My Communist accusers were not the only ones to cry ‘Crucify!’ There were also some anarchist voices in the chorus. They were the very people who had fought me on Ellis Island, on the Buford and the first year in Russia because I had refused to condemn the Bolsheviki before I had a chance to test their scheme. Daily the news from Russia about the continued political persecution strengthened every fact I had described in my articles and in my book. It was understandable that Communists should close their eyes to the reality, but it was reprehensible on the part of people who called themselves anarchists to do so, especially after the treatment Mollie Steimer had received in Russia after having valiantly fought in America for the Soviet régime.“[49]

The charge of treason by some parts of the American workers' movement had largely deprived her analysis and reflections of the attention and recognition they deserved. But in a world where two classes confront each other in an absolutely antagonistic way, it was a desperate act to criticise herself and to explain it from the fact that she had no other choice. Indeed it was extremely dangerous to want to use an instrument of the bourgeoisie, whatever it may be, even briefly, as a means of expressing a working class position. What a pity that such a strong militant had fallen into this trap!

What Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg have in common is undoubtedly the enormous desire to understand the problems of the Russian Revolution, to defend the revolutionary character of October 1917 and to not succumb to the dramatic situation without criticising. Goldman never accepted the tactical method of simply considering the Bolsheviks as a "lesser evil" and to support them only for the duration of the war against the white armies, a position openly defended in Russia by the anarchist Machajski in the journal The workers’ revolution.

Expressing open criticism of the policies of the Bolsheviks was from the outset less risky outside Russia than in Russia itself. But Goldman's doubts did not stem from fear or repressive measures against her. Owing to her status as a well-known American revolutionary, she enjoyed much greater protection than other revolutionary immigrants. Although she did not hide her sympathy for the Workers' Opposition and allied herself with the imprisoned anarchists (for example when she spoke at Kropotkin's funeral), she was only placed under "soft" surveillance by the Cheka, to intimidate her.

Would her criticisms have destroyed the shining example of the October revolution within the international working class? Certainly not. The alternative was posed not in the terms of "either being silent or denouncing the Bolsheviks". On the contrary, a mature political critique of Bolshevik policies at that time provided support for the entire international revolutionary wave. The working class is the class of consciousness, not of thoughtless action. Therefore, criticism of its own actions and mistakes is a legacy of the workers' movement which had to be maintained even in such tragic times. It is not part of the nature of the working class to conceal its problems, unlike the bourgeoisie. As Luxemburg’s text shows, criticism of the Bolsheviks must not be limited to indignation but should also be mature enough to support the struggle against the degeneration of the revolution. Later it was a criterion for the Italian Communist Left to refrain from expressing hasty analyses and criticisms that did not permit lessons to be drawn.

Goldman's analysis of the Russian Revolution went beyond mere indignation. But in different places, with its characterisation of Lenin and Trotsky as "cunning Jesuits", she slipped into a method of criticism which fixated on charismatic individuals, which cannot be justified by the great influence that these individuals had on the policy of the Bolsheviks. Lenin does not personify the disarming of the councils and their fusion with the state, any more than Trotsky personifies the crushing of Kronstadt.

Later on, Goldman developed the position vis-à-vis Trotsky that his actions – especially Kronstadt – were sufficient to make him a pioneer of Stalinism.[50] The use of violence that he had directed as commander of the Red Army at Kronstadt did not reflect his personal inclinations but was the implementation of a decision of the whole Bolshevik power and, let us again recall, was supported at the time by the entire marxist left. The tragic error of Kronstadt was an illustration of both the immaturity of the workers' movement on the question of violence (no violence within the working class) and the degenerate course of the revolution in Russia, which would much later end up in to the openly counter-revolutionary politics of socialism in one country and the emergence of Stalin as leader of the world counter-revolution. Whatever the inadequacies of Trotsky's political denunciation of Stalinism and its organised apparatus of repression aimed at the complete physical and ideological crushing of the working class, it nonetheless expressed a proletarian reaction against them.

The value of Goldman's analysis lies in her raising the central questions confronting the Russian Revolution. The contradictions in her analysis and the conclusions, that we absolutely do not share, are not a reason to reject or ignore her efforts altogether. On the contrary, they are the expression of the enormous difficulty of producing a complete analysis of the Russian problem since 1922. She was not alone in this matter. She has the merit of having rejected the fusion of the party with the state apparatus, the seizure of power by the party and the repression of Kronstadt.

In this sense, she made an important contribution to the working class, which must be welcomed but also criticised. Goldman never claimed that October 1917 ultimately gave birth to Stalinism, as the ruling class still does today, in its deceitful campaigns, but stubbornly defended the October Revolution.

Mario 07/01/2018

 

The events of spring 1968 in France, in their roots and in their results, had an international significance. Underlying them were the consequences for the working class of the first symptoms of the world economic crisis, which was reappearing after well over a decade of capitalist prosperity.

After decades of defeat, disorientation and submission, in May 1968 the working class returned to the scene of history. While the student agitation which had been developing in France since the beginning of spring, and the radical workers’ struggles which had broken out the previous year, had already changed the social atmosphere, the entry en masse of the class struggle (10 million on strike) overturned the whole social landscape.

Very soon other national sectors of the working class would enter the struggle. After the huge strike of May 1968 in France, the struggles in Argentina (the Cordobazo), the “Hot Autumn” in Italy and many other movements across the world provided proof that the world proletariat had left behind the period of counter-revolution. In contrast to the crisis of 1929, the one now emerging would not lead to world war but to the development of class battles that would prevent the ruling class from imposing its barbaric solution to the convulsions of its economy.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of this major event, we are publishing on our website a dossier made up of some the main articles the ICC has written about it, in particular:

• ‘Understanding May [9]’, re-published from Revolution Internationale 2, 1969, which polemicises in particular with the situationists who at the time denied the return of the economic crisis as one of the causes for the upsurge of the movement;
• ‘May 68 and the revolutionary perspective’ from International Review 133 (The student movement around the world in the 1960s [10]) and 134 (End of the counter-revolution and the historic return of the world proletariat [11]), which goes in detail into the events themselves and examines their historical importance.

We also begin the publication of a series of three articles aimed at drawing a balance sheet of the period since 1968, motivated by the concern to examine the extent to which the conclusions we have drawn about the meaning of May 1968 have been verified by history. The first article looks at the course followed by the aggravation of the economic crisis, and the following two will deal with the dynamic of the class struggle and the development of the revolutionary milieu.

                                          ******

Sinking into the economic crisis [12]

The advances and retreats in the class struggle since 1968 [13]

The report we publish below was presented and discussed at an international meeting of the ICC in November 2017, with the aim of drawing out the main tendencies in the evolution of imperialist tensions. In order to do this, it based itself on the organisation’s previous texts and reports which had made an in-depth analyses of these tendencies, i.e. the orientation text ‘Militarism and Decomposition’ [19] in 1991 (published in International Review 64) and the report to the 20th International Congress [20] (published in IR 152, 2013).

Since the latter report was written, there has been a series of major events in the aggravation of imperialist tensions in the Middle East: first, the direct military incursion by Turkey in Syria on 20 January, to confront the Kurdish troops based in the region of Afrin in the north of Syria. This intervention, which had at least the tacit agreement of Russia, is heavy with future military confrontations, in particular with the USA, which in this region is allied with the Kurdish forces of the YPG, and expresses important divisions within NATO, of which both Turkey and the USA are members. Then there was the US military strike in Syria (supported by Britain and France), aimed at the presumed sites for the construction of chemical weapons, and marking a clear increase in the growth of tensions between the USA and Russia. Still more recently we had Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme, which has led to a sharpening of tensions between Israel and Iran but also to a more global destabilisation, since the American decision has been condemned by the majority of countries. All this highlights the risk of an uncontrolled escalation of conflicts in the Middle East (see our article), and shows that capitalism is a growing threat to humanity [21].

Over the last four years, imperialist relations have gone though some major developments: the war in Syria and the fight against IS, the Russian intervention in the Ukraine, the refugee crisis and the terrorist attacks in Europe, Brexit and the pressure of populism, the election of Trump in the USA and the accusations about Russia’s involvement in his election campaign (“Russiagate”), the tensions between the US and China over the provocations by North Korea, the opposition between Saudi Arabia and Iran (including the tensions over Qatar), the failed coup d’Etat against Erdogan and the subsequent repression in Turkey, the conflict over Kurdish autonomy, the upsurge of nationalism in Catalonia, and so on. It is thus important that the IB evaluates the extent to which these events are consistent with our general analyses of the period, but also what new orientations do they reveal?

To do this, it’s crucial, as the 1991 orientation text “Militarism and decomposition” puts it right from the start, to use a method that is adequate for understanding a situation which has no precedent:

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

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

• basing ourselves always and firmly on the basic acquisitions of marxism,
• examining reality without blinkers, and de­veloping our thought "without ostracism of any kind" (Bilan).

In particular, faced with such historic events, it is important that revolutionaries should be capable of distinguishing between those analyses which have been overtaken by events and those which still remain valid, in order to avoid a double trap: either succumbing to sclerosis, or "throwing the baby out with the bath water"

Applying this approach, which is imposed by current reality, has been the basis of our ability to analyse the fundamental evolution of imperialist relations for the past 26 years.

In this perspective, the present report proposes that we should try to grasp recent events at three levels, in order to locate their importance within our framework of analysis:

1. To what extent are they in accord with the framework of analysis developed after the implosion of the eastern bloc? Here we will remind ourselves of the main analytical axes of the orientation text on militarism and decomposition (IR 64, first quarter of 1991)
2. To what extent do they follow the major trends of imperialist tensions on a world scale, described in the report of the 20th international congress (IR 152, second quarter of 2013)?
3. What are the most significant developments in imperialist tensions today?

The orientations of the 1991 OT

This text puts forward the analytical framework for understanding the question of imperialism and militarism in the period of decomposition. It advances two fundamental orientations for characterising imperialism in the current period:

The disappearance of the blocs does not call into question the reality of imperialism and militarism

On the contrary, they become more barbaric and chaotic: “The constitution of imperialist blocs is not the origin of militarism and imperialism. The oppo­site is true: the formation of these blocs is only the extreme consequence (which at certain mo­ments can aggravate the causes), an expression (and not the only one), of decadent capitalism's plunge into militarism and war…the end of the blocs only opens the door to a still more barbaric, aberrant, and chaotic form of imperialism”.

This is expressed in particular by the outbreak of extreme imperialist appetites and the multiplication of tensions and conflicts: “The difference with the period that has just ended is that these conflicts and antagonisms, which before were contained and used by the two great imperialist blocs; will now come to the forefront, because with the disappearance of the discipline imposed by the presence of the blocs, these conflicts risk becoming more violent and more numerous, in particular, of course, in zones where the proletariat is weakest”

Similarly we are seeing the development of “every man for himself” and their corollary, the attempts to contain the chaos, both of which are factors aggravating military barbarism: “the chaos which is threatening the major developed countries and their inter-relations.….. faced with the tendency towards generalized chaos which is specific to decomposition and which has been considerably accelerated by the Eastern bloc's collapse, capitalism has no other way out in its attempt to hold together its different compo­nents, than to impose the iron strait-jacket of military force. In this sense, the methods it uses to try to contain an increasingly bloody state of chaos are themselves a factor in the aggravation of military barbarism into which capitalism is plunging”.

The OT thus centrally underlines the fact that there is a historic tendency towards every man for himself, towards the weakening of US control over the world, particularly over its former allies. And at the same time, there is an attempt on its part to use military force, where it has an enormous superiority, to maintain its status and impose its control over these same ex-allies.

The reconstitution of blocs is not on the agenda

The increasingly barbaric and chaotic character of imperialism in the period of decomposition is a major obstacle to the reconstitution of new blocs: “the exacerbation of the latter (militarism and imperialism) in the present phase of capitalism's life paradoxically constitutes a major barrier to the re-formation of a new system of blocs tak­ing the place of the one which has just disappeared….  the very fact that military force has become - as the Gulf conflict confirms - a pre­ponderant factor in any attempt by the ad­vanced countries to limit world chaos is a con­siderable barrier to this tendency…the reconstitution of a new pair of imperialist blocs is not only impossible for a number of years to come, but may very well never take place again”.

The USA is the only power that can play the role of world cop. The only other possible candidates for the leadership of a bloc are Germany and Japan: “the world appears as a vast free-for-all, where the tendency of ‘every man for himself’ will operate to the full, and where the alliances between states will be far from having the stability that characterized the imperialist blocs, but will be dominated by the immediate needs of the mo­ment. A world of bloody chaos, where the American policeman will try to maintain a mini­mum of order by the increasingly massive and brutal use of military force”.

At the same time, the USSR will never be able to regain a role as challenger: “It is, for example, out of the question that the head of the bloc which has just collapsed - ­the USSR - could ever reconquer this position”.

Here again the analysis remains essentially accurate: after 25 years in the period of decomposition, there is still no perspective for the reconstitution of blocs.

In conclusion, the framework and the two main axes presented in the OT have broadly been confirmed and remain profoundly valid.

However, further reflection is needed about certain elements of the analysis

The role of the USA as sole gendarme of the world has evolved a great deal over the past 25 years: it’s one of the key questions to deepen in this report. However, the OT puts forward an orientation which has become even more concrete than the predictions we made in 1991: the fact that the actions of the USA would create further chaos. This has been strikingly illustrated by the development of terrorism today, which is to a large extent the result of the US policy in Iraq, and secondarily of the French-British intervention in Libya.

We can also say today that the analysis overestimated the potential role attributed to Japan and even Germany. Japan has been able to build up its weaponry and has gained more autonomy in certain sectors, but this is not at all comparable to the tendency towards the formation of blocs since Japan has had to submit to US protection faced with the threat from North Kore and above all from China. The potential still exists for Germany without having been seriously strengthened over the last 25 years. Germany has gained more weight, it plays a preponderant and even leading role in Europe, but on the military level it remains a dwarf, even if (unlike Japan) it has had its troops participating in as many UN “mandates” as possible, By contrast, the period has seen the emergence of China as a new rising power, a role we considerably underestimated in the past.

Finally for Russia, the analysis remains basically correct, in the sense that its position as a bloc leader in 1945 was already an “accident” of history. But the prediction that “despite its enormous arse­nals, the USSR will never again be able to play a major role on the international stage” and that it. is “condemned to return to a third-rate posi­tion” have not really been confirmed: Russia has certainly not become a world-wide challenger to the USA but it plays a far from negligible role as a “troublemaker”, which is typical of decomposition, which through its alliances and military interventions is exacerbating chaos all over the world (and it has had a certain success in Ukraine and Syria, has strengthened its position vis-a-vis Turkey and Iran and has developed a cooperation with China). We undoubtedly underestimated the resources of an imperialism with its back to the wall, ready to defend its interests tooth and nail.

The analyses of the report to the 20th ICC Congress (2013)

Locating itself in the framework of an increasingly barbaric and chaotic imperialism and of the growing impasse facing US policy, which could only further exacerbate military barbarism (axes of the report to the 19th congress[1]), the report puts forward four orientations in the development of imperialist confrontations which concretise the axes of the 91 OT:

 - The growth of every man for himself, expressed in particular by a multiplication of imperialist ambitions. This was expressed concretely by:

• (a) the danger of military confrontations and the growing instability of the states of the Middle East: unlike the first Gulf war of 91, which was stirred up by the US and waged by an international coalition under its leadership, this highlights the terrifying extension of chaos;
• b) the rise of China and the exacerbation of tensions in the Far East. The report’s analysis partially corrects the underestimation of the role of China in our previous analyses. However, despite an impressive economic expansion, growing military power and a more and more marked presence in imperialist confrontations, the report asserts that China does not have the industrial and technological capacities to impose itself as the head of a bloc and constitute itself as a global challenger to the USA.

 - The growing impasse of the policies of the USA as a global cop, in particular in Afghanistan and Iraq, has led to a further plunge into military barbarism “The striking failure of the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan has weakened the world leadership of the USA. Even if the American bourgeoisie under Obama has chosen a policy of controlled withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and has been able to reduce the impact of the catastrophic policies of Bush, it has not been able to reverse the tendency and this has lead to a further plunge into military barbarism. The execution of Bin-Laden was an attempt by the US to react to this retreat in its leadership and underline its absolute military and technological superiority. However, this reaction has not called into question the underlying trend towards retreat”.

 - The tendency towards the explosive extension of zones of permanent instability and chaos: “in whole swathes of the planet, from Afghanistan to Africa, to the point where certain bourgeois analysts, such as Jacques Attali in France, talks openly about the ‘Somalisation’ of the world”

 - The crisis of the eurozone (the PIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) is accentuating tensions between European states and centrifugal tendencies in the EU “On the other hand, the crisis and the drastic measures being imposed are pushing towards the break-up of the EU and a rejection of the idea of submitting to the control of a particular country, i.e. are pushing towards every man for himself. The UK radically oppose the proposed measures of centralisation and in the countries of Southern Europe there is a growing anti-German nationalism. The centrifugal forces can also lead to a tendency towards the fragmentation of states, through the autonomisation of regions like Catalonia, Northern Italy, Flanders or Scotland….Thus the pressure of the crisis, through the complex inter-action of centripetal and centrifugal forces, is accentuating the process towards the break-up of the EU and exacerbating tensions between states”.

The four major orientations developed in the report also remain valid. They show clearly that the tension between on the one hand the push towards every man for himself and the efforts to control chaos, underlined by the 91 OT, are leading to an increasingly chaotic and explosive situation.

 The general development of instability in imperialist relations

Since the 2013 report, events confirm the slide towards increasingly chaotic inert-imperialist relations. But above all, the situation is marked by its highly irrational and unpredictable character, linked to the impact of populist pressures, in particular the fact that the world’s number one power is today led by a populist president whose reactions are extremely unpredictable. An increasingly short-term approach by the bourgeoisie and the strong unpredictability that results from it are above all features of the policy of the US gendarme, but can also be seen in the policies of other imperialist powers, the developments of conflicts in the world, and the growth of tensions in Europe.

The decline of the US superpower and the political crisis in the American bourgeoisie

The arrival in power of Donald Trump, surfing on the populist wave, has had three main consequences:

The first concerns the unpredictability of decisions and incoherence of US foreign policy. The actions of this populist president and his administration, such as the denunciation of transpacific and transatlantic treaties, of the climate agreement, the putting into question of NATO and the nuclear treaty with Iran, unconditional support for Saudi Arabia, the bellicose set-to with North Korea or the tensions with China, are sapping the bases of international policies and agreements which had been defended by different US administrations. His unpredictable decisions, threats and poker moves have had the effect of undermining the reliability of the US as an ally: the detours, bluffs and sudden changes of position by Trump not only make the US look ridiculous but are leading to less and less countries having any confidence in the US.

At the same time,: even if the American bourgeoisie under Obama, by opting for a policy of controlled retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan, was able to reduce the impact of Bush’s disastrous policies, it hasn’t been able to reverse the basic tendency towards the decline of the sole superpower, and the impasse of US policy has been sharply accentuated by the actions of the Trump administration. At the G20 the isolation of the USA on climate change and the trade war was obvious. What’s more, Russia’s involvement in Syria to save Assad made the US step back and led to a strengthening of Russia’s influence in the Middle East, particularly in Turkey and Iran, whereas the US has not been able to contain China’s advance from outsider status in the 90s to that of a serious challenger which presents itself as a champion of globalisation.

The risk of destabilising the world situation and augmenting imperialist tensions has never been so strong, as we have seen with North Korea or Iran: the policy of the US is more than ever a direct factor in the aggravation of chaos on a global level.

The second consequence of Trump coming to power has been the opening of a major political crisis within the US bourgeoisie. The constant need to try to contain the unpredictable decisions of the  president but above all the suspicions that Trump’s electoral success was largely due to support from Russia (“Russiagate”), a prospect which is totally unacceptable for the US bourgeoisie, points to a particularly delicate political situation within the US bourgeoisie and a difficulty in controlling the political game.

The incessant battle to “contain” the president plays out at several levels: the pressure exerted by the Republican party (the failed votes on getting rid of Obamacare), opposition to Trump’s plans by his own ministers (the minister of Justice Jeff Sessions refusing to resign or the ministers of foreign affairs and defence who “nuance” Trump’s proposals), the struggle for control over the White House staff by the “generals” (McMaster, Mattis). And yet these efforts don’t always stop things getting out of hand, such as in September when Trump made a deal with the Democrats to stymie Republican opposition to raising the debt ceiling.

Whatever the approach towards Russia (about which there can be divergences within the US bourgeoisie, as we shall see)), the accusations that Russia was mixed up in the presidential election campaign and that Trump has ties to the Russian mafia are extremely serious, since this would mean that for the first time ever a US president has been elected with the support of the Russians, which is unacceptable for the interests of the US bourgeoisie. If the inquiries confirm the accusations, they can only lead to impeachment proceedings for Trump.

The final consequence of Trump coming to power is the development of tensions over the options for US imperialism. The question of links with Russia is also a focus for clan confrontations within the US bourgeoisie. Since the main challenger today is China, would a rapprochement with the former head of the rival bloc and an important military power be acceptable for the US bourgeoisie in order to contain chaos, terrorism and the push from China? Could America contribute to the re-emergence of its Cold War rival and accept negotiating with it in certain areas? Would this make it possible to contain Chinese ambitions and also strike a blow against Germany? Within the Trump administration, there are numerous partisans of such a rapprochement, like Tillerson in foreign affairs and Ross in trade, as well as the president’s son-in-law Kushner. However, a considerable part of the US bourgeoisie (particularly within the army, the secret services and the Democratic Party) don’t seem prepared to make concessions at this level. In this context, the investigations into Russiagate, which imply the possibility of a US president being manipulated and blackmailed by an external enemy, are being widely exploited by these factions to make any rapprochement with Russia totally unacceptable.

The crisis of the US gendarme further exacerbates the push towards every man for himself among the other imperialist powers and the unpredictability of relations between them

Trump’s protectionist orientations and the USA’s exit from various international agreements is leading various powers, especially those in Europe and Asia, to strengthen their ties – without for the moment completely excluding the US – and to express their wish to become more independent from the USA and defend their own interests. This appeared clearly through the collaboration between Germany and China during the last G20 in Hamburg, and this collaboration between European and Asian countries could also be seen at the Bonn climate conference which aimed to concretise the objectives drawn up at the Paris conference.

The USA’s withdrawal is exacerbating the every man for himself tendency among the other big powers: we have already pointed to the aggressive imperialist stance of Russia which has enabled it to regain footholds on the global imperialist battleground (Ukraine, Syria). As regards China, in the previous report we still underestimated (a) the rapidity of its economic modernisation and (b) the internal political stability of China, which seems to have been strongly reinforced under Xi. China presents itself today as the defender of globalisation in the face of US protectionism and as a pole of planetary stability in contrast to the instability of US policies, while at the same time developing a military strategy aimed at increasing its military presence outside of China (the South China Sea).

This development of every man for himself can go hand in hand with the establishment of circumstantial alliances (China and Germany to orient the G20, the Franco-German tandem to reinforce military cooperation in Europe, China and Russia in relation to Iran), but these remain fluctuating and can’t be seen as bases for the emergence of real blocs. Let’s consider at this level the example of the alliance between China and Russia. The two powers share common interests, for example in relation to the USA in Syria and Iran, or in the Far East (North Korea) in relation to the US and Japan. They have also held joint military manoeuvres in both regions. Russia has become a major supplier of energy to China, thus reducing its dependency on the West, while China has massive investments in Siberia and supplies Russia with considerable amounts of consumer goods. However, Russia does not want to be subordinated to a powerful neighbor which it is already dependent upon to an unprecedented degree. What’s more, the two countries are also rivals in central Asia, South East Asia and the Indian peninsula: the project of the “New Silk Road” goes directly against Russian interests, while Russia is renewing its links with India, the main adversary of China in Asia (along with Japan). Finally, the rapprochement between China and the EU and with Germany in particular represents a deadly threat to Russia which could find itself squeezed between China and Germany.

The extension of zones of war, instability and chaos

Faced with the explosion of every man for himself, the efforts to “hold together the different parts of a body that is tending to break up” seem to be more and more futile, while the instability of imperialist relations makes for an unpredictable extension of areas of conflict.

The defeat of Islamic State will not reduce instability and chaos: the confrontations between Kurdish militia and the Turkish army in Syria, between Kurdish units and the Iraqi army and pro-Iranian Shia militias in Kirkuk in Iraq herald new bloody battles in the region. The stance taken by Turkey, which plays a key role in the region, is both central to the evolution of tensions and full of danger for the stability of the country itself. Turkey has important imperialist ambitions in the region, not only in Syria and Iraq, but in all the Muslim countries, from Bosnia to Qatar and Turkmenistan to Egypt, and is playing its own imperialist cards to the full: on the one hand, its status as a member of NATO is very unstable, given its taut relations with the USA and the majority of countries in Western Europe who are members of NATO, and also the tensions over the refugees and its difficult relations with Greece; on the other hand, it is now heading towards a rapprochement with Russia and even Iran, which is a direct imperialist competitor in the Middle East, while at the same time opposing itself to Saudi Arabia (refusal to withdraw troops from Qatar). At the same time, the struggle for power inside the country has sharpened, with the increasingly dictatorial practices of Erdogan and the revival of Kurdish guerilla activity. At this level, the USA’s refusal to extradite Gülen but also its support, arming and training of Kurdish militias in Iraq by the USA, are heavy with menace for the development of chaos inside Turkey itself.

The unpredictability of certain foci of tension is especially evident in the case of the North Korea. But while the root of this conflict is the increasingly overt confrontation between China and the USA, a certain number of elements make the outcome of this situation highly uncertain:

• The ideology of the besieged fortress in North Korea, the advocacy of atomic weapons to respond to an inevitable attack by the Americans and the Japanese as an absolute priority, implies a high level of distrust towards its Chinese or Russian “friends” (and this in turn is based in certain experiences of the Korean partisans during the Second World War) and means that China’s control over North Korea is limited;
• Trump’s poker moves, threatening North Korea with total destruction, raises the question of his credibility. This is leading on the one hand to an accelerated rearmament of Japan (already announced by prime minister Abe); but on the other hand, the unbalance in atomic weapons between the USA and North Korea (a different situation from the “balance of terror” between the USA and the USSR during the Cold War) and the sophistication of “limited” atomic weapons, does not rule out the threat of their unilateral use by the USA, which would be a qualitative step in the descent into barbarism.

In short, the zone of war, decomposition of states and of chaos is tending to widen more and more, stretching from Ukraine to South Sudan, from Nigeria to the Middle East, from Yemen to Afghanistan, from Syria to Burma and Thailand. Here we also have to point to the extension of zones of chaos in Latin America: the growing political and economic destabilisation in Venezuela, the political and economic chaos in Brazil, the destabilisation in Mexico which will get worse if Trump’s protectionist policies towards the country are carried through. To all this must be added the extension of terrorism, its presence in the day-to-day reality of Europe, the USA, etc. The chaos spreading across the planet means that there is less and less possibility for reconstruction (whereas this could still be envisaged for Bosnia or Kosovo), as shown by the failure of the policy of the reconstruction and re-establishment of state structures in Afghanistan.

The development of tensions in Europe

This factor, already seen as potentially present in the report to the 20th Congress, has accentuated in a spectacular manner in the last few years. With Brexit, the EU has entered a zone of considerable turbulence, while under the cover of protecting citizens against terrorism police and army budgets have risen noticeably in Western Europe and still more in Eastern Europe.

Under the pressure of economic measures, the refugee crisis, terrorist attacks and above all the electoral victories of populist movements, fractures within Europe are multiplying and antagonisms sharpening: economic pressure by the EU on Greece and Italy, the result of the Brexit referendum, the pressure of populism on European policies (Holland, Germany) and victories in the countries of Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary and recently the Czech Republic), internal tensions in Spain with the “Catalan crisis”. A gradual dismemberment of the EU, for example via a “several speed Europe”, as currently advocated by the Franco-German duo, would produce a marked intensification of imperialist tensions in Europe.

The relationship between populism (against the “elites” and their globalist, cosmopolitan ideas, and for protectionism) and nationalism was highlighted by Trump’s speech to the UN in September: “nationalism serves an international interest: if every country thinks of itself first, things will arrange themselves for the world”. This exacerbated glorification of every man for himself (Trump’s “America First”) weighs heavily on the Catalan conflict. Against the background of the euro crisis and the drastic austerity which came in its wake, we are seeing a dramatic interaction between populism and nationalism: one the one hand a part of the middle and petty Catalan bourgeoisie which “no longer wants to pay for Spain”, or the provocations of Puigdemont’s Catalanist coalition dominated by the left and faced with a loss of credibility in power; on the “Espagnolist” side, the nationalist reaction of the Spanish prime minister Rajoy who has to deal with a crisis in the Partido Popular, which is deeply mired in corruption.

“Militarism and war have been a fundamental given of capitalism's life since its entry into decadence…  if militarism, imperialism, and war are identified to such an extent with the period of decadence, it is because the latter corre­sponds to the fact that capitalist relations of production have become a barrier to the devel­opment of the productive forces: the perfectly irrational nature, on the global economic level, of military spending and war only expresses the aberration of these production relations' contin­ued existence”. (“Militarism and decomposition”). The level of imperialist chaos and military barbarism today, far worse than we could have imagined 25 years ago, expresses very clearly the obsolescence of the system and the need for its overthrow.

 

As we expected, the megaphones of the bourgeoisie have not remained quiet on the centenary of the 1917 October revolution. As in every decade, lies and contempt have animated newspaper articles, documentaries and televised speeches which have followed one after the other for several weeks. Without any great originality, intellectuals have rehashed the story of a coup d'état made by a handful of men in the service of a neurotic boss greedy for power and motivated by personal vengeance[i]. Thus, in this view, the struggle for a society without social classes and without the exploitation of man by man is just a fig-leaf for an expressly totalitarian undertaking which has its origins in the thoughts of Marx himself[ii].

It would be useless to look for any semblance of honesty among these guard dogs of democracy and the capitalist mode of production. But if this event is so well classified in the archives of history, why the desperation to deform it every ten years with so much arrogance? Why does the bourgeoisie denigrate one of the most precious episodes in the history of the struggle of the proletariat? Contrary to the words that it spreads through its media, the bourgeoisie knows very well that the class that failed to overturn its world a hundred years ago still exists today. It is also aware that its world is still more ailing than it was in 1917. And its survival depends on its capacity to intelligently and unfailingly use the weapons at its disposal so as to avoid a new October which could, this time, see a result for the historic aim of the working class. Very quickly the bourgeoisie understood the weight that the revolution in Russia could have on the world's social order. Thus, after tearing themselves apart for four years, the principal powers of the time made common cause in order to stem the proletarian wave which threatened to submerge a society which had nothing more to offer, except war.

Against official history, according to which the October 17 revolution contained in embryo the traces of its degeneration, this article aims to show that the isolation of the Russian proletariat is first of all due to the coordination of bourgeois governments ready to take up this class war whose outcome would turn out to be decisive for the course of history. It will also show that from 1917 to today, different factions of the dominant class have used all the weapons at their disposal to block and repress the revolution, then mislead and denigrate its memory and its lessons.

The provocation of the July days

In June 1917, faced with continuing war and the imperialist programme of the Provisional Government, the proletariat reacted with animation. During the enormous demonstrations of June 18 in Petrograd the internationalist slogans of the Bolsheviks became the majority for the first time. At the same time, the Russian military offensive ended in a fiasco when the German army pierced the front in several places. The news of the setback for the offensive arrived in the capital and stoked the revolutionary flames. In order to confront this very tense situation, the idea appeared of provoking a premature revolt in Petrograd: crush the workers and the Bolsheviks by putting the responsibility for the military offensive's setback on the proletariat of the capital who had "stabbed in the back" those at the front. For this the bourgeoisie came up with several machinations aimed at pushing the workers in the capital into a revolt. The resignation of four members of the Cadet Party from the government and pressure from the Entente on the Provisional Government led the Mensheviks and the Social-Revolutionaries to rally to the bourgeois government[iii]; which only re-launched the clamour for the immediate taking of power by the soviets. Further, the threat of sending the regiments of the capital to the front only increased the soldier's discontent, which then moved in the direction of an armed uprising against the Provisional Government. The July 3 demonstration would have turned out to be catastrophic for the continuation of the revolution if the Bolshevik Party hadn't succeeded in calming the ardour of the masses and preventing them from a premature confrontation with troops under the command of the government. In these crucial days the party remained faithful to the proletariat by turning it away from the trap laid by the bourgeoisie. But these provocations were small-scale compared to the repression and the campaigns of lies that confronted the Bolsheviks in the days following. As today, the Bolsheviks were charged with the worst accusations: German agents paid by the Kaiser, snipers who fired isolated shots at the troops entering Petrograd. All means were used in order to discredit the party in the eyes of the workers in the capital. It was the deployment of enormous energy and thanks to a great political discernment that the Bolsheviks were able to defend their honour. If the July Days revealed the indispensable role of the party, they also revealed the real nature of the Mensheviks and S-Rs. In fact their support for the bourgeois government in these crucial days [iv] was the cause of their discrediting among the masses. Thus, as Lenin wrote: “A new period is coming in. The victory of the counter revolutionaries is making the people disappointed with the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties and is paving the way for the masses to adopt a policy of support for the revolutionary proletariat. "[v].

The bourgeoisie tries to prevent the proletarian revolution

In an interview given to the journalist and militant socialist John Reed some time before the taking of the Winter Palace, Rodzianko, the Russian "Rockefeller" stated: "the revolution is a sickness. Sooner or later, the foreign powers will have to intervene, as one must care for a sick child and teach him how to walk".[vi]

This intervention wasn't long in coming. Very quickly, diplomats of the big powers were in agreement with the Russian bourgeoisie in order to settle this question with some urgency. For the chief of British intelligence in Russia, Sir Samuel Hoare, the best solution was the installation of a military dictatorship. The Officer's Union of the army and the fleet proposed the same solution. This was also expressed by the Culture Minister, Kartachev, a member of the Cadet Party: "whoever is not afraid of being cruel and brutal will take the power in their hands".[vii]

The attempted Kornilov[viii] coup d'état in August 1917 was supported by London and Paris and the setback for this first counter-revolutionary attempt was far from discouraging for the world bourgeoisie. Henceforth for the Allies, it was a question of stopping the growing influence of the Bolsheviks among the ranks of the proletariat of Russia. On November 3, a secret conference took place of military allies in Russia in the office of the chief of the Red Cross, Colonel Thompson. Faced with the "Bolshevik peril", the American, General Knox quite simply proposed picking up the Bolsheviks and shooting them[ix]. But on November 7, the Military Revolutionary Committee took the Winter Palace and power was in the hands of the Petrograd Soviet. For the world bourgeoisie, military intervention now remained the sole option; much more so as the echo of the revolution was being felt throughout Europe.

Straightaway, the 2nd Congress of Soviets adopted the decree on peace which proposed to the belligerents an immediate peace without annexations. But this appeal found no response among the allied powers who wanted to draw the conflict out while waiting for American help. For the Central Powers, the liberation of the Eastern front allowed them to reorganise before the United States entered the war. A truce of three weeks was thus signed at Brest-Litovsk November 22, with the General Staff of Austria and Germany. Negotiations opened on December 9 between the two parties, but the same day, the battle of Rostov-on-Don between the Red Guards and the White armies, heralded the opening of the civil war.[x] After seizing power, the hardest test now stood in front of the proletariat of Russia. While waiting for an extension of the revolution to the rest of Europe, it was necessary to prepare for a confrontation with the counter-revolutionary forces of the interior that were well supported by the major powers.

Beginning of the civil war and of the encirclement

The counter-revolution was really organised in the days following the elections to the Constituent Assembly which was marked by a majority hostile to the Soviet government. At the end of November, generals Alexiev, Kornilov and Denikin, and the Cossak Kaledin, set up the army of volunteers in the south of Russia. At the beginning it was composed of about 300 officers. This army was the first military reaction of the Russian bourgeoisie. Its financing was provided by: "the plutocracy of Rostov-on-the-Don which raised six-and-a-half million roubles, that of Novocherkassk about two million". Made up of officers favourable to a restoration of the monarchy, it held, "the embryo of a class character" according to the Russian general Denikin[xi].

The Soviet government couldn't allow this army to be set up without reacting and the revolution had to strengthen itself on the military level. On January 28, 1918, the Council of People's Commissars adopted a decree aimed at transforming the Red Guard into a workers’ and peasants’ Red Army made up "of the most conscious and best organised elements of the labouring classes"[xii]. But the organisation of this army remained a difficult task. In fact, due to the lack of competent communist leaders, Trotsky recruited from the officer corps of the Tsarist army. By the beginning of 1918, the balance of force was hardly in favour of the Russia of the Soviets. Germany and Austro-Hungary profited from the breakdown of the army and then from its demobilisation on January 30 in order to put an end to the armistice signed some weeks before. In a radio programme reported in Pravda, the Council of People's Commissars protested: "regarding the offensive launched by the German government against the Soviet Republic of Russia which proclaimed the end of the state of war and begun to demobilise the army on all fronts. The workers and peasants government of Russia could expect a less similar attitude; the armistice had not been denounced by any of the contracting parties neither directly nor indirectly, neither February 10, nor any other moment as both parties were bound by the agreement of December 2,[xiii] 1917."

In fact Germany used the pretext of the independence of Ukraine to go onto the offensive with the consent of the Rada, the bourgeois government of Ukraine. A rout of the Red Guard followed, recalled by the Bolshevik Primakov:

"The retreat of the Red Guard resembles a great exodus. More than a hundred thousand, accompanied by their families, fled Ukraine. Tens of thousands of others dispersed into the villages, the hamlets, the forests and the ravines of Ukraine (...) The heavy burden of war, the violence of the occupying troops, the arrogance of the German lieutenants, the impudence of the haidamaks (Cossack paramilitaries), the bloody vengeance of the big owners, the betrayal of the Rada central, the open pillage of the country only inflamed popular hatred. The government of the central Rada was known as the Government of Betrayal."[xiv]

It is in this very difficult situation that the first mass levies of the Red Army took place while the question of peace was more and more pressing for the survival of the revolution.

The peace of Brest-Litovsk and the military offensive of the bourgeoisie

If, in order to gain time in the first place, the Republic of Soviets adopted a strategy of "neither war, nor peace", the delayed European revolution made the signing of the peace inevitable despite the shameful conditions imposed by the Central Empire which amputated a huge part of Russian territory. We know that afterwards the question of the peace gave rise to debates within the Bolshevik Party and the left S-R's. It's not the place here to dwell on these. But with this setback the position defended by Lenin, accepted by the Seventh Party Congress, turned out to be the best adapted to the situation.[xv]

In the weeks and months that followed, the Republic of Soviets was encircled on all fronts and the White Armies were set up in several parts of the country. In Samara, the Czechoslovakian legion was set up by the Entente powers[xvi] sowing terror along the Trans-Siberian railway line in important conurbations, thus facilitating the uprisings. Subsequently, the Anglo-Americans landed at Murmansk, the Whites occupied the south of western Russia, the Germans and Austrians came into the Don region and Japanese troops landed at Vladivostok...

At the beginning of summer 1918, the situation of the Republic of Soviets was becoming very alarming. On July 29 Lenin wrote: "Murmansk to the north, the Czechoslovak front in the east, Turkestan, Baku and Astrakhan in the south-east, we are seeing that all the chains forged by imperialism are in place." We can see that the engagement of the powers of the Entente was decisive for the organisation of the counter-revolution - a detail that our good democrats prefer to avoid. At the beginning of 1919, about 25,000 British, French, Italian, American and Serb soldiers were mobilised between Archangel and Murmansk[xvii] in a fight to the death against "the Bolshevik peril", which would continue to spread "if it wasn't stopped", according to Clemenceau.

The testimony of a member of the Expeditionary Force, Ralph Albertson, bears eloquent witness to the determination and barbarity used by this anti-communist coalition: "We used all the exploding gas shells possible against the Bolsheviks... We laid all the booby-traps possible when we evacuated the villages. Once we shot more than twenty prisoners... And when we took the commissar at Borok, a sergeant told me that his body had been left in the street, wounded by more than sixteen bayonet cuts. We took Borok by surprise and the commissar, a civilian, had no time to take up arms... I heard an officer tell his men that they weren't to take prisoners, that they had to kill them even if they were unarmed... I saw unarmed Bolshevik prisoners, causing no trouble, slaughtered in cold blood... Every night a battalion of incendiaries caused masses of victims."[xviii]

The peace of Brest-Litovsk only stirred up the hatred of the different counter-revolutionary factions but also of the left S-R's against the Bolsheviks. From this time on, the Russia of the Soviets appeared like a besieged fortress where hunger "is at the door of many towns, villages, factories and mills", as Trotsky related. The alliance of the Whites and the western powers plunged the revolution into a situation of a permanent struggle for survival. Moreover, from March 15, 1918, the different governments of the Entente decided to reject the peace of Brest-Litovsk and organised an armed intervention. But while the Entente powers were intervening directly in Russia, they also counted on the betrayal of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in order to advance the counter-revolution. In June 1918, the ex-assistant of Kerensky, the S-R Boris Savinkov, forecast the assassination of Lenin and Trotsky and started up an insurrection in Rybinsk and Yaroslav so as to facilitate landings by the Allies. In other words, in view of the extreme weakness of the Red Army, a great offensive was put into action in order to finish with the revolution once and for all.

As Savinkov relates, the Whites hoped to "encircle the capital with uprisings in the towns and, using the support of the Allies and Czechoslovaks to the north, who had just taken Samara on the Volga, putting the Bolsheviks in a difficult situation". We now know, thanks to the memoires published by several foreign secret agents and to investigations appearing in Pravda some years later, as well as diplomatic sources, that Britain and France were at the heart of this plot. The plans for insurrections in the towns around Moscow, the foreign landings, the Czechoslovak offensive were part of one and the same scheme orchestrated by the foreign military and diplomats and executed by leading S-R's who were ferociously opposed to peace with Germany and to the extension of the revolution.[xix]

The Czechoslovak regiments, guided by the Allies, took Samara on June 8 and then laid siege to Omsk. A month later they took Zlatoust in the Urals then, a few days later, they approached Yekaterinburg where the Imperial family was interned. The liberation of this family would have allowed the unification of the counter-revolutionary forces that were having a difficult time settling their own arguments and divergences. The Bolsheviks didn't want to run this risk and decided to execute the whole family. This decision was motivated by the necessity to intimidate the enemy and to show it, as Trotsky wrote some years later, "that there was no retreat possible, that the issue was total victory or total defeat". Despite everything, this decision was turned back against the Bolsheviks. The execution of the Tsar's children was utilised by the international bourgeoisie in its propaganda campaigns so as to present the Bolsheviks as barbarians thirsty for blood.

In July and August the offensive continued with the French and British landing in Murmansk in the north where they installed an “autonomous” government. The Turks and the British occupied Azerbaijan. The Germans went into Georgia with the consent of the Mensheviks while the Czech legions continued their advance towards the west. These weeks turned out to be decisive for the defence of the revolution, whose survival was hanging by a thread. At Sviajsk, close to Kazan, after several days of fighting, the extremely weakened high-command of the 5th Army could have all been captured with its main military chiefs beginning with Trotsky. A lack of information and strategic errors by the White generals allowed Trotsky and his men to escape. Given the extreme weakness of the Soviet power, the capture of its main leaders would have dealt a fatal blow to the morale and determination of the troops.

In the north, the British took command of all the armies of the region. Outside of four or five British battalions, the force was composed of four or five American battalions, one French, one Polish and one Italian plus some mixed formations[xx]. A Russian army was also organised but remained under the command and supervision of the British. At the beginning of August, this northern army took Archangel, overthrew the soviet and set up a provisional government composed of S-R cadets and controlled by British general Pool.

At the same time, the Commune of Baku fell in mid-August faced with an offensive by the Turkish army, some moussavatists (Azerbaijan nationalists) and some British regiments. Twenty-six people's commissars were gunned down on September 18 by the British[xxi].

Different factions of the Russian bourgeoisie profited from this difficult context in order to destabilise the power of the Soviets by fomenting plots which could have turned out to be disastrous for the revolution.

The time of plots

 A counter-revolutionary bloc was formed from May and June 1918, going from monarchists to some Mensheviks and S-R's. All these rallied around a "National Centre" that was originally created by the Cadets. The main leaders of the movement worked to collect political and military information which they transmitted to different White armies and maintained close relations with British, French and American secret agents. Moreover, a special conference was held in October 1918, composed of representatives of the Entente countries and the National Centre. The Cheka reacted rapidly, taking account of the existence of this single centre of the counter-revolution.

But that didn't prevent attempts aiming to destabilise the Soviet Republic. August 30, the chief of the Cheka, Ouritsky, was assassinated by an S-R. Some hours later an attempt was made on the life of Lenin when he came out of the Michaelson factory. But these two attempts were part of a much wider enterprise aimed at liquidating all of the leading Bolsheviks: "On August 15, Bruce Lockhart (a British secret agent) received a visit from an officer who presented himself as Colonel Berzine, the commander of the Latvian Guard of the Kremlin. He handed over a letter of recommendation written by Cromey, the British naval attaché to Petrograd. Berzine declared that, although they had initially supported the Bolsheviks, the Latvians didn't want to fight against the British who had landed at Archangel. After discussing with Groener, the French General Counsel, Lockhart put Berzine in touch with Railey. At the end of August, Groener presided over a secret meeting of certain Allied representatives. It was held at the General Consulate of the United States. Railey and another spy, George Hill, as well as Moscow's Figaro correspondent, René Marchand, were in attendance. Raily recounts in his memoires that he made it known that he had bought Berzine for two million roubles. It was a question of a single blow seizing the leading Bolsheviks who were due at a meeting of their Central Committee. The British were in touch with General Yudenitch and were preparing to supply him with arms and material. (...) After the assassination of Ouritski, the Cheka, who were on the plotters’ scent, had penetrated the British embassy in Petrograd. Cromey fired on the police, killing a commissar and several agents. He was shot and so was the naval attaché who was about to burn some compromising papers. But there was still enough left to enlighten the investigators; Raily managed to escape. After several months he got back to London where he accused Marchand of having betrayed him... As to Berzine, the Soviet press subsequently revealed that he had indicated to his chiefs that Bruce Lockhart and Raily had offered him two million roubles to participate in the assassination of the leading Bolsheviks."[xxii]  

The arrest of Bruce Lockhart concluded an enquiry that fully demonstrated the foreign participation in the plot and the scheming of the Whites[xxiii].

This failed plot was nonetheless one of the culminating points of the counter-revolution. At this stage the fall of the Soviet Republic seemed imminent. Faced with such a situation, the Red Terror was decreed on September 6. But if this measure was a major error[xxiv] we must admit that it was imposed by the force of events, that's to say by the terrorist practices of the foreign powers and the White armies.

"Without the help of the Allies, it is impossible to liberate Russia"

Officially, the bourgeois governments intervened in Russia in defence of democracy and against the "Bolshevik Peril". But in reality, the installation of a democracy was the last thing on the minds of the powers of the Entente who, before everything, were determined to avoid the extension of the revolutionary wave which was gaining ground in Germany by the end of 1918. The French, British and American bourgeoisies were prepared to do anything in order to defend their interests. Thus, from the beginning of the civil war, the invading armies acted like bloody hordes, supporting or installing military dictatorships in the territories re-taken from the Red Army. This is what happened for example at the beginning of January 1919, when General Miller landed at Archangel and proclaimed himself Governor General of the town and Minister of War. Leading an army of 20,000 men, made up of peasants and monarchist fishermen who hated the communists, he unleashed a reign of terror on the region. The old prosecutor of the province, Dobrovolsky, recalls that "the partisans of Pinet were so ferocious that the commander of the 8th regiment, a Colonel B., decided to produce a pamphlet on the human attitude to have towards prisoners".[xxv]

Moreover, the Allies didn't hesitate in directly supporting the armies of the main White army chiefs, partisans of a very authoritarian power such as Denikin and Kolchak. The offensive of the latter, undertaken from Siberia to the outskirts of Moscow at the end of 1918, was in great part made with a military arsenal supplied by the foreign powers: "The United States delivered 600,000 rifles and hundreds of cannons, many thousands of machine-guns, munitions, tools, uniforms, Britain 200,000 tools, 2000 machine-guns, 500 million bullets. France 30 planes and more than 200 automobiles. Japan 70,000 rifles, 30 cannons, 100 machine-guns, the necessary munitions and 120,000 tools. In order to pay for these deliveries which allowed him to furnish an army of more than 400,000 men, Kolchak sent from Hong-Kong 184 tonnes of gold, treasure which had been given to him"[xxvi].

It was this military division of labour between the Allies and the White Armies which the proletariat in Russia had to face up to throughout the year 1919. Lenin was well aware of the extreme fragility of the Soviet power and this is why he saw the need to denounce the role of the Tsarist generals in collaborating with the foreign armies:

“Kolchak and Denikin are the chief, and the only serious, enemies of the Soviet Republic. If it were not for the help they are getting from the Entente (Britain, France, America) they would have collapsed long ago. It is only the help of the Entente which makes them strong. Nevertheless, they are still forced to deceive the people, to pretend from time to time that they support ‘democracy’, a ‘constituent assembly’, ‘government by the people’, etc. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries are only too willing to be duped.

The truth about Kolchak (and his double, Denikin) has now been revealed in full. The shooting of tens of thousands of workers. The shooting even of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The flogging of peasants of entire districts. The public flogging of women. The absolutely unbridled power of the officers, the sons of landowners. Endless looting. Such is the truth about Kolchak and Denikin”.[xxvii]

This great counter-revolutionary alliance was even more vital when the revolution broke out in Germany in 1918. As the American historians, M. Sayers and A. Khan relate in The Great Conspiracy against Russia:

"The reason why the Allies didn't march on Berlin, and definitively disarm German militarism, resides in their fear of Bolshevism. The Allied Commander-in-Chief, Marshall Foch, revealed in his memoirs that, from the opening of peace negotiations, the German spokesmen constantly evoked the threat of the ‘Bolshevik invasion of Germany'... General Wilson of the British High Command recalled in his 'War Diary' that, November 9, 1918, two days before the signature on the Armistice, 'the cabinet met this night, from 6:30 to 8 o'clock, Lloyd George read two telegrams from 'Tiger' (Clemenceau) in which he told of an interview of Foch with the Germans: Tiger dreads the fall of Germany and the victory of Bolshevism in this country: 'Lloyd George asked me if I wanted that to happen or if I preferred an armistice. I replied without hesitation 'Armistice'. The whole cabinet agreed with me. For us, the real danger from now on wasn't the Germans, but Bolshevism'".

The fear of the extension of the revolution to the whole of Europe sharpened the determination of the bourgeois powers to definitively break the power of the Soviets. At the Peace Conference, Clemenceau was the most ferocious defender of this policy: "The Bolshevik danger is very great at this present hour; it is spreading. It has won over the Baltic Provinces and Poland; and, this morning, we have received very bad news, because it has spread to Budapest and Vienna. Italy is also in danger. The danger is probably greater there than in France. If Bolshevism, after spreading to Germany, crossed Austria and Hungary, taking in Italy, Europe would have to face a very great danger. That is why it is necessary to do something against Bolshevism."

Affirming loud and clear at this conference, "the right of peoples to self-determination", the bourgeoisie would not leave the world proletariat to make up its own mind at the risk of putting bourgeois society in peril. For both camps, the key to victory resided in the extension or isolation of the revolution. Also the fear of the bourgeoisie can be measured against the degree of violence and the atrocities which they carried out in Russia, Germany, Hungary and Italy. Because behind the veil of "the rights of man" hides the interests of a ruling class which always uses the worst measures when it's a question of its own survival.

Economic strangulation

The striking speeches of Clemenceau (above) allow us to understand his insistence on decreeing a total blockade of Russia and working for the neighbouring states to remain hostile to the Soviet Republic[xxviii].

And also arising from this, his determination to combat the revolutionary wave. The delay in making the revolution by the European and world proletariat plunged the Russian bastion into complete isolation. The Soviet Republic henceforth became a "besieged fortress" trying to resist immense difficulties. In 1919-1920, the effects of rationing and the subjugation of production to the needs of war applied during the course of the war, was making itself felt still more in this country. To this could be added the devastation of the civil war and the economic blockade imposed by the democratic powers between March 1918 and the beginning of 1920. All imports were blocked, including solidarity parcels sent by the proletariat of other countries. The White armies and those of the Entente had the coal of the Ukraine and the oil of Baku and the Caucasus in their grip, engendering a shortage of combustible material. The combustibles which reached the towns were down to 10% of that consumed before World War I. Famine in the towns was terrible where everything was in short supply. Heavy industry workers received first category rations which didn't go beyond 900 calories.

Evidently, this situation also had repercussions on the state of the soldiers of the Red Army who were prey to hunger, cold and sickness. In October 1919, the White troops of Yudenitch threatened Petrograd and the brigade commander, Kotovsky from the Ukraine, appealed for reinforcements. On November 4 Kotovsky sent an edifying report: "A generalised epidemic of typhus, scabies, eczema and sickness due to the cold following a lack of laundry, uniforms and baths. All this puts out of action 75 to 85% of our old fighting force who are, on the way to, or remaining in clinics and hospitals". Faced with the protests of some regiments, the brigade was rested. It could have been worse: "we were confronted with other difficulties, wrote a soldier. A typhoid epidemic has broken out and sicknesses due to the frost have ravaged the brigade. Soldiers and officers live in unheated barracks and receive starvation rations: 200 grams of 'soukhari' (a sort of grilled bread) and 300 grams of cabbage. It makes my heart ache to see our horses dying for lack of forage"[xxix]. Trotsky depicted in sombre terms the appearance of these same troops who were supposed to defend the main bastion of the Russian proletariat: "The workers of Petrograd do not look good: pasty-faced because of their hunger and lack of food, ragged clothed, boots with holes in, mismatched clothes."

After 1921, shortages continued and rationing became yet more drastic: "the ration of black bread was still on 800 grams for the workers of refineries and 600 grams for the model workers. The ration was decreased to 200 grams for holder of a ‘B card’ (unemployed). Herring stocks, which in other circumstances had saved the day, were completely lacking. Potatoes arrived frozen in the towns because of the lamentable state of the railways (running at hardly 20% of their pre-war potential). At the beginning of spring, 1921, an atrocious famine ravaged the western provinces of the Volga region. According to statistics recognised by the Congress of Soviets, between 2 and 2.7 millions suffered from hunger, cold, typhoid, diphtheria, influenza, etc."[xxx]

In the factories, the super-exploitation of workers didn't prevent the fall in production. The lack of food and the chaos of the economy pushed some to migrate to the countryside and others to leave the big firms for small workshops making barter easier. In these conditions, it was decided to enact the New Economic Policy (NEP) which put a brake on the statification of production.

The civil war left behind it a country bled white. Close to 980,000 deaths in the ranks of the Red Army and 3 million in the civil population. The already existing famine was amplified in the summer of 1921 with a terrible drought spreading throughout the Volga basin.

Even if, faced with the development of mutinies and the revolutionary "danger" on their own territory, the foreign powers withdrew their own troops during 1920, and if the counter-revolutionary armies had never really been up to re-taking power, gangrened as they were by internal quarrels, the lack of discipline and the absence of coordination, the world bourgeoisie nevertheless succeeded in stopping the revolutionary wave which had burst out after four years of imperialist war. The total isolation of Soviet Russia signalled the kiss of death for the revolution and plunged it into degeneration[xxxi].

As we will see in the second part of this article, it is in this context that Social Democracy and then Stalinism delivered the coup de grace to the October revolution and to its heritage.

Narek, April 8 2018.

A hundred years ago we were at height of the world revolutionary wave – more precisely, the outbreak of the revolution in Germany, a year after the proletariat took power in Russia, in October 1917.

As in Russia, the working class in Germany gave rise to workers’ councils, organs for unifying all workers and for the eventual taking of political power. Because it took place in the most industrialised country in the capitalist world, with the most numerous working class, the revolution in Germany had the potential to break the isolation of the proletarian power in Russia and to extend the revolution across Europe. The bourgeoisie was aware of this and it brought the imperialist war to an end, signing the armistice of 11 November 1918 because continuing the war would have further radicalised the masses and discredited all factions of the bourgeoisie, especially its most ‘left factions, which is what had happened n Russia in the months following the February 1917 revolution. Furthermore, although most of the right wing factions of the state apparatus were in total disarray because of the military disaster, the German bourgeoisie was able to rely on the social democratic traitors to weaken and then crush the working class and its revolution in Germany. This is a fundamental lesson for the revolution of the future, since it will again run up against all the left and extreme left factions of capital working overtime to undo the class struggle.

We are publishing a new article entitled

‘Revolution in Germany: 100 years ago, the proletariat made the bourgeoisie tremble’.

We also recommend some older articles to our readers:

‘90 years ago, the German revolution’. A series of five articles, the first of which was published in international Review 133 and the last in IR 137:

Germany 1918-19 (i): Faced with the war, the revolutionary proletariat renews its internationalist principles [28]; (ii): From war to revolution [29]; (iii): Formation of the party, absence of the International [30]; (iv) Civil War [31]; (v): From Noske to Hitler [32].

‘The German revolution’: a series of 13 articles, the first of which was published in IR 81 and the last in IR 99: (i) Revolutionaries in Germany during World War 1 [33]; (ii): The Start of the Revolution [34]; (iii) The Premature Insurrection [35]; (iv) Fraction or New Party? [36]; (v): From the work of a fraction to the foundation of the KPD [37];  (vi):  The Failure to Build the Organisation [38]; (vii): The Foundation of the KAPD [39]; (viii): The Kapp Putsch [40]; (ix): The March Action of 1921: the danger of petty-bourgeois impatience [41]; (x): The reflux of the revolutionary wave and the degeneration of the International [42]; (xi): The communist left and the growing conflict between the Russian state and the interests of the world revolution [43]; (xii): Germany 1923: The bourgeoisie inflicts a decisive defeat on the working class [44]; (xiii):  1923, Part 2 A defeat that marked the end of the world revolutionary wave [45]

“100 Years ago, the proletariat made the ruling class tremble”. This title may sound odd today because this immense historical event has more or less been consigned to oblivion. The bourgeoisie has succeeded in erasing it from the memory of the working class. And yet in 1918, all eyes were on Germany – a source of hope for the proletariat, and of fear for the bourgeoisie.

The working class had just taken power in Russia. 1917. The Bolsheviks. The soviets. The insurrection. Or as Lenin put it: “The Russian revolution is only one of the contingents of the international socialist army, on the action of which the success and triumph of our revolution depends. This is a fact which none of us lose sight of. We likewise bear in mind that the vanguard role of the Russian proletariat in the working-class movement is not due to the economic development of the country. On the contrary, it is the backwardness of Russia, the inability of what is called our native bourgeoisie to cope with the enormous problems connected with the war and its cessation that have led the proletariat to seize political power and establish its own class dictatorship” (Speech to the conference of factory committees in the Moscow province, July 23 1918)

Germany was the bolt on the door between East and West. A victorious revolution here would open the way to the revolutionary class struggle throughout the old continent of Europe. None of the bourgeoisies wanted to see this door unbolted. This is why the bourgeoisie was to direct all its hatred, and all its most sophisticated manoeuvres, against it. The revolution in Germany would determine the success or failure of the world revolution which had begun in Russia.

The power of the working class

1914: The world war breaks out. It brought 4 years in which the working class was subjected to the worst butchery in the history of humanity. The trenches. Poison gas. Famine. Millions of dead. Four years in which the trade unions and the social democratic parties took advantage of their glorious proletarian past – which they betrayed in 1914 by supporting the bourgeoisie’s war effort - and the confidence they were accorded by the workers to impose all kinds of sacrifices and to justify the war. But during these four years the working class, little by little, began to fight back. Strikes in a succession of cities. Unrest in the army. And of course, faced with this, the bourgeoisie did not remain inert. It reacted ferociously. “Ringleaders” in the factories, fingered by the unions, were arrested. Soldiers were shot for indiscipline or desertion.

1916. On the First of May Karl Liebknecht[1] raised the cry: “Down with the war! Down with the government!”  Rosa Luxemburg was jailed, alongside other revolutionary socialists - Meyer, Eberlein, Mehring (who was then 70 years old)[2]. Karl Liebknecht was sent to the front. But the repression wasn’t enough to silence the discontent. On the contrary: it gave rise to growing agitation in the factories.

1917: the unions came under more and more criticism. The “Obleute” appeared in the factories – the “Men of Confidence”, essentially rank and file union delegates who had broken with the union leadership. Above all, the workers of Germany were inspired by the courage of their class brothers and sisters in the East. The echo of the October revolution was being heard far and wide.

1918. The German bourgeoisie was becoming aware of the danger and it realised that it needed to extricate itself from the war. But the most backward part of the ruling class, linked to the old aristocracy, and especially the military aristocracy, didn’t understand what was at stake and rejected any idea of peace or any talk of defeat. Concretely, in November, the naval command based in Kiel insisted on one final battle to save its “honour” – using the rank and file sailors as cannon fodder of course. But on several ships the sailors mutinied and raised the red flag. The order was given to the ships that hadn’t been “infected” to fire on them. The mutineers surrendered, refusing to fire on their own class comrades.  As a result, they faced the death penalty. But in solidarity with those who had been condemned, a wave of strikes broke out among the workers of Kiel. Inspired by the October revolution, the working class took charge of its struggle and created the first workers’ and soldiers’ councils. The bourgeoisie then called in one of its most loyal guard-dogs: social democracy. The SPD leader Gustav Noske, the specialist in military matters and in “maintaining troop morale” was dispatched to the spot to stifle the danger. But he arrived too late. The workers’ and soldiers’ councils were already spreading to other ports and the great working class centres of the Ruhr and Bavaria. Faced with this geographic extension of the movement, Noske could not attack it head on. On 7 November the Kiel workers’ council called for revolution, proclaiming “power is in our hands”. On 8 November, practically the whole of north-west Germany was under the control of the councils. In Bavaria, Saxony, local princes abdicated. Workers’ councils spread to all the cities of the Empire, from Metz to Berlin.

It was precisely the generalisation of this mode of political organisation that made the bourgeoisie tremble. The unification of the class in workers’ councils, with delegates elected by assemblies and revocable at any moment, is an extremely dynamic form of organisation. The councils are a real expression of the revolutionary process, the place where the working class comes together, debates the goals of its struggle, takes control of social life. After the experience of 1917, the bourgeoisie understood this very well. This is why it focused on undermining the councils from within, taking advantage of the considerable illusions the working class still had in its old party, the SPD. Thus Noske was elected to the head of the workers’ council in Kiel. This weakness of our class would have tragic consequences in the weeks that followed. We will come back to this. But for now, on the morning of 9 November, the struggle was still developing. In Berlin, the workers demonstrated outside the barracks to rally the soldiers to their cause and freed their class comrades from prison. The bourgeoisie then understood that the war had to end right away and that the Kaiser had to go. It was drawing the lessons from the mistakes made by the Russian bourgeoisie. On 9 November 1918 Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated. On 11 November, the armistice was signed.

The struggle of the workers of Germany had hastened the end of the war, but it was the bourgeoisie which signed the peace treaty and was to use this event to act against the revolution.

The Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie

A brief summary of the balance of forces at the beginning of the civil war in November 1918:

• On the one hand, an extremely combative working class. It had spread the workers’ councils across the whole country and with great rapidity. But it held on to major illusions in its former party, the SPD. It allowed these traitors to assume the highest responsibilities within the councils, as in the case of Noske in Kiel. The revolutionary organisations, the Spartacists and other groups of the left were engaged in a political battle, carrying out the role of providing an orientation for the struggle. They put forward the necessity to create a bridge to the working class in Russia; they unmasked the manoeuvres and sabotage of the bourgeoisie, they understood the fundamental role of the workers’ councils.
• On the other hand, the German bourgeoisie, an extremely experienced and organised ruling class, conscious of the efficacy of its major anti-working class weapon, the SPD. Heeding the warning of the events in Russia, it clearly identified the danger of continuing the war and the threat posed by the workers’ councils. The whole work of sabotage carried out by the SPD was aimed at diverting the revolutionary process towards the cage of bourgeois democracy. To achieve this, the bourgeoisie was to attack on all fronts: from the most slanderous propaganda to the most savage repression, via a whole series of provocations.

The SPD thus took up one of the slogans of the revolution “end the war” while at the same time speaking up for “party unity” and wiping out the memory of its key role in the march to war. By signing the peace treaty, the SPD removed what was most unbearable from the workers, while at the same time injecting it with democratic poison. And to justify all this it found a useful scapegoat for the war and the famine: the monarchy and the military aristocracy.

Recuperating the councils

But the greatest danger for the bourgeoisie remained then councils and the slogan “all power to the soviets” which had come from Russia. The revocability of the delegates posed a real problem for the bourgeoisie, since it made it possible for the councils to constantly renew and radicalise themselves. This is why the councils were assailed by faithful representatives of the SPD, whether or not they were well-known figures like Noske in Kiel or Ebert in Berlin. The councils were gangrened from the inside, emptied of their substance. The whole aim of this manoeuvre was to convince the councils to renounce their own power in favour of the newly formed constituent assembly. The national congress of councils held in Berlin on 16 December 1918 was the clearest example of this.

• The soldiers’ delegates were over-represented in relation to workers’ delegates (I for every 100,000 soldiers, 1 for every 200,000 workers), since the workers tended to be well to the left of the soldiers.
• Access to the congress was forbidden to the Russian delegation. Exit internationalism!
• Access to the congress was forbidden to non-workers, i.e. every member appeared on the basis of their job. Thus members of the Spartacist League including Luxemburg and Liebknecht were denied entry. Exit the revolutionary left! Even under the pressure of 250,000 demonstrators outside the doors, the congress did not budge
• In the same logic, the SPD got the Congress to vote the call for the election of a constituent assembly for the 19th January 1919.

The system of councils is an affront to capitalism and its democratic apparatus. The bourgeoisie was well aware of this. But it also knew that time was not on its side and that the image of the SPD as a workers’ party was getting very thin. It thus had to precipitate events, while the proletariat needed time to mature, to grow politically.

Parallel to these ideological manoeuvres, from 9 November on, Ebert and the SPD were making secret agreements with the army to crush the revolution. They multiplied provocations, lies and slanders to pave the way to a military confrontation. Their calumnies were directed against the Spartakusbund in particular, accusing it of “assassinations, pillage, calling on the workers to shed their blood again”. They called for a pogrom against Liebknecht and Luxemburg. They created a “White Army” – the Freikorps, composed of soldiers traumatised by the war and motivated by blind hatred.

Beginning 6 December, a huge counter-revolutionary offensive was launched:

• Attack on the headquarter of the Spartacist paper, Die Rote Fahne
• Attempts to arrest members of the executive organ of the workers’ councils
• An attempted assassination of Liebknecht
• Systematic skirmishes during workers’ demonstrations
• A media campaign and military offensive against the People’s Naval Division, composed of armed sailors who had played an important role in spreading the revolution and acting in its defence

But far from scaring off the proletariat, such actions only increased its anger. Demonstrations were armed to defend themselves against provocations. This class solidarity culminated in the biggest demonstration since 9 November being held on December 25. Five days later, the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany, was founded in Berlin.

Again the bourgeoisie learned quickly and acted fast. By the end of December 1918 it had realised that frontally attacking the great figures of the revolution only strengthened class solidarity. It then decided to accentuate the rumours and the calumnies, while avoiding direct armed confrontations and manoeuvre around less well-known personalities. So it targeted Eichhorn, who had been elected to the head of a soldiers’ committee in Berlin and had been put in charge of the local police forces. He was removed from his post and the provocation worked very well. This was immediately perceived by the Berlin workers as an act of aggression. The Berlin workers responded massively: on 5 January 1919, 150,000 were in the street, which surprised even the bourgeoisie. But this would not prevent the working class from falling into the trap of a premature insurrection. Even though the movement had not been followed elsewhere in Germany where Eichhorn was not so well-known, revolutionary leaders like Pieck and Liebknecht, pulled along by the excitement of the moment, decided that evening to launch the armed insurrection. This went against the decisions of the KPD Congress, and the consequences of this improvisation were dramatic: having come out onto the streets, the workers remained there without any precise objective and in the greatest confusion. Worse still, the soldiers refused to take part in the insurrection, which ensured its defeat. Facing this error in analysis and the dangerous situation that resulted from it, Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches defended the only possible position that could avoid a blood-bath:  continue the mobilisation by arming the workers and calling on them to encircle the barracks until the soldiers came out in favour of the revolution. This position was argued by the correct analysis that while the political balance of forces was not in the proletariat’s favour at the beginning of January 1919, the military balance of forces was, at least in Berlin.

But instead of trying to arm the workers, the “Revolutionary Committee” began to negotiate with the government which it had just declared overthrown. From now on time was no longer on the side of the proletariat, but of the counter-revolution.

On 10 January 1919 the KPD called for the resignation of Liebknecht and Pieck from the Revolutionary Committee. But the damage had been done. There followed the bloody week, the so-called “Spartacist Week”. The “Communist putsch” was put down by the “heroes of freedom and democracy”. The White Terror was unleashed. The Freikorps hunted down revolutionaries all over the town and summary executions became systematic. On the evening of 15 January, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were kidnapped and then assassinated. In March 1919 it would be the turn of Leo Jogiches and hundreds of other militants of the revolutionary left.

The democratic illusions of the working class and the weaknesses of the KPD.

What was the cause of this dramatic failure? The events of January 1919 contained all the elements which had led to the defeat of the revolution: on the one hand an intelligent bourgeoisie, manoeuvring very skilfully, and on the other hand a working class still weighed down by illusions in social democracy and a communist party that was insufficiently organised, lacking a solid programmatic base upon which it could develop a clear analysis of the situation. The KPD was somewhat disorientated, it was young and inexperienced (it was made up of many young comrades, since a lot of the older ones had died in the war or the repression). It lacked unity and was unable to give a clear orientation to the working class.

Unlike the Bolsheviks who had maintained an organisational continuity since 1903, and had been through the experience of the 1905 revolution and the soviets, the revolutionary left in Germany, after the betrayal of the SPD in August 1914, had to reconstruct itself hastily, in the heat of the events. The KPD was founded on 30 December 1918 with the fusion of the Spartakusbund and the International Communists of Germany, the IKD. During this conference, the majority of delegates took a clear position against participation in bourgeois elections and rejected the trade unions. But the organisational question was largely underestimated and pushed to the bottom of the list. The question of the party was not grasped at the level demanded by what was at stake.

This underestimation of programmatic questions would result in the decision by Liebknecht and others  to call for the insurrection without waiting for a new analysis by the party, without a lucid method for assessing the balance of forces between the classes. The centralisation of decisions was not seen as a priority. It was these weaknesses of the party that would have such dramatic results. At one moment time was on the side of the proletariat. In a few hours the balance had changed and now the bourgeoisie was able to unleash the white terror.

All the same, strikes continued. From January to March 1919, the mass strike emerged in a spectacular manner. But the bourgeoisie also continued its work: executions, slanders, rumours….little by little the terror overwhelmed the proletariat. In February, while massive strikes were breaking out all over Germany, the Berlin proletariat, the heart of the revolution, was no longer able to take part, having been crushed by the January defeat. When it finally returned to the struggle, it was too late. The struggles in Berlin and the rest of Germany didn’t manage to unite. At the same time, the KPD had been “decapitated” and had been forced into illegality. In the wave of strikes between February and April, it was not able to play a decisive role. Its voice had been more or less smothered by capital. If the KPD had been able to unmask the provocation of the bourgeoisie and prevent the workers from falling into the trap, the movement would surely have had a different outcome. The working class thus paid the price for the organisational weaknesses of the party, which now became the target for the most brutal repression. Everywhere communists were being hunted down. The lines of communication between what was left of the central organs and the local or regional delegates were continually being broken. At the national conference of 29 March 1919, it was pointed out that “the local organisations are stuffed with agents provocateurs”.

In conclusion

The German revolution was above all the mass strike movement of the working class, extending geographically, countering capitalist barbarism with class solidarity, re-appropriating the lessons of October 1917 through the formation of workers’ councils. The German revolution was also the lesson about the necessity for an internationally centralised party, built on clear organisational and programmatic foundations. Without such an organ the working class will not be able to expose the Machiavellian tricks of the bourgeoisie. But the German revolution was also the capacity of the bourgeoisie to unite against the proletariat, to use manoeuvres, lies and manipulations of all kinds. It was the noxious stench of a dying order which refuses to give up. It was the deadly trap of illusions in democracy and the destruction of the workers’ councils from within.

 Even though the events of 1919 proved decisive, the flames of the revolution in Germany were not extinguished for several years. But on the scale of history, the consequences of this defeat would be very grave for humanity as a whole: the rise of Nazism in Germany, of Stalinism in Russia, the march towards the second world war under the banners of anti-fascism – these nightmarish events can all be traced to the failure of the revolutionary wave which, between 1917 and 1923, shook the bourgeois order without being able to topple it once and for all.

And yet the revolution in Germany in 1918 remains a source of inspiration and lessons for the future struggles of the proletariat. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote on the eve of her murder by troops dispatched by social democracy:

“What does the entire history of socialism and of all modern revolutions show us? The first spark of class struggle in Europe, the revolt of the silk weavers in Lyon in 1831, ended with a heavy defeat; the Chartist movement in Britain ended in defeat; the uprising of the Parisian proletariat in the June days of 1848 ended with a crushing defeat; and the Paris commune ended with a terrible defeat. The whole road of socialism – so far as revolutionary struggles are concerned – is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats… Where would we be today without those “defeats,” from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism? Today…we stand on the foundation of those very defeats; and we can’t do without any of them, because each one contributes to our strength and understanding...

To date, revolutions have given us nothing but defeats. Yet these unavoidable defeats pile up guarantee upon guarantee of the future final victory.

There is but one condition. The question of why each defeat occurred must be answered…

“Order prevails in Berlin!” You foolish lackeys! Your “order” is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will “rise up again, clashing its weapons,” and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing:

I was, I am, I shall be!”[3]

ICC, 1 November 2018

 

We are publishing below a report on the imperialist situation adopted by the ICC’s central organ at a meeting in June 2018. Since the report was written, events around Trump’s visit to Europe have very clearly confirmed the main ideas developed in the report, in particular the notion that the USA has now become the main propagator of the tendency of “every man for himself” on a global level, even to the point of trashing the instruments of its own “world order”. See our article on "Trump in Europe".

In September 1945 Marc Chirik wrote a letter from Paris to the writer Jean Malaquais and his wife Gally. Malaquais had worked with Marc in the French fraction of the communist left in Marseille during the war, a period which inspired his great novel Planet without Visa, one of whose principal protagonists is a communist revolutionary, an internationalist opposed to the “anti-fascist” war, named “Marc Laverne”.

The letter begins: “first, the disappeared. Michel, our poor Mitchell, no news of him, he must have ended his life in frightful conditions… Jean was the best element of the Belgian Fraction… the most talented, full of promise (did you know him?). He and his son were deported and died in a concentration camp in Germany”.

There follows a list of comrades and contacts from the political milieu in Vichy Marseille, as well as members of his own family: those who died, those who came back after suffering appalling tortures, those who managed to avoid the Nazi terror by adopting false names, or by flight. A terror continued by the Stalinist Resistance, as Marc recounts further on:

“The most critical moment for me, when I could see death in front of me, was a few weeks afterwards when the Stalinists arrested me along with Clara1 and took all my writings. They were ready to show me what they were made of. It was just by a miracle of luck that Clara had met, among the leading chiefs, a woman with whom she had worked for a while in the UGIF (to help Jewish children) and we were able to save our skins from the hatred of the Stalinists”.

Such was the situation facing internationalists during and immediately after the second imperialist world war. Mitchell, who was one of them, had written a series of articles on the ‘Problems of the Period of Transition’ in the pages of Bilan. We have published them as part of this series2 because they offer an authentic marxist framework for discussing some of the most fundamental questions of the communist transformation: the historical and international context of the proletarian revolution; the dangers emanating from the transitional state; the economic content of the transformation, and so on. These articles must have had a powerful influence on Marc and the French fraction, later the Gauche Communiste de France, as can be seen from their efforts to take Mitchell’s critique of the transitional state to its logical conclusion: the rejection of any identity between the proletariat and this necessary evil in the transformation of social relations.3

Stirrings in the proletarian milieu

The letter to Malaquais asks for news about the political milieu in the western hemisphere – the Paul Mattick group in Chicago, which he linked to the Dutch left, the Oehler group in the same city, the group of the Italian left in New York, the Eiffels group in Mexico. Marc also answers Malaquais’ questions about Victor Serge, who had been with them in the milieu in Marseille but had become a democrat, supporting the allied imperialisms during the war4. Following a review of the counter-revolutionary role being played by the former workers’ parties in the post-war settlement, Marc talks about the proletarian milieu, such as it was , in France, mentioning in passing the French fraction and the divergences around the formation of the party in Italy, but also the groups who had come out of Trotskyism “L’Union Communiste is dead, but in its place has arisen a group, the Communistes Revolutionnaires, coming from a split with the Trotskyists, and although confused, it is sincerely revolutionary”. The CR was aligned with the Austrian/German group Revolutionären Kommunisten Deutschlands, which had also broken from Trotskyism over the crucial issues of the defence of the USSR and support for the war. The French fraction had discussed and worked with the RKD during the war, jointly signing an internationalist manifesto at the time of the “liberation” of France5.

Thus the French fraction, and subsequently the GCF, were keenly interested in discussion with all the internationalist proletarian groups which had survived the war and which were undergoing a certain revival in its wake6. Despite their characterisation of official Trotskyism as an appendage to Stalinism, they were open to the possibility that groups emerging from Trotskyism – provided they made a total break with its counter-revolutionary positions and practices – could evolve in a positive direction. This had evidently been the case with the RKD/CR tendency, and also with the Stinas group, the International Communist Union, in Greece, although we don’t know much about the existence of any contacts between Stinas and the Italian communist left during or after the war7

In France itself, the GCF entered into contact with the group around Grandizo Munis and, from 1949, with the Socialisme ou Barbarie group animated by Cornelius Castoriadis/Chaulieu (who had been a member of the Stinas group in Greece), Claude Lefort/Montal and others. In the case of the Munis group, then called Union Ouvrière Internationaliste, the GCF held a series of meetings with them on the present situation of capitalism. The seminal text ‘The evolution of capitalism and the new perspective [54]’ was based on the exposé given by Marc Chirik at one of these meetings. Similar initiatives were taken with the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.

In a subsequent article, we are going to examine the ideas of Munis and Castoriadis in more detail, not least because both of them devoted a great deal of energy to defining the meaning of proletarian revolution and of socialist society in a period of continuing reaction in which the hideous deformations of Stalinism, of “really existing socialism” in Russia and its bloc, were more or less dominant in the working class. This ideological domination was not at all challenged by official Trotskyism, whose “contribution” to understanding the transition from capitalism to socialism was limited to an apology for the Stalinist regimes, defined as deformed workers’ states, and an advocacy of “nationalisation under workers’ control” (i.e. a form of state capitalism) in the countries outside the Russian bloc. It is thus of particular interest to study the work of elements who were breaking with Trotskyism not only because of its abandonment of internationalism, but also because its vision of social transformation remained firmly within the horizon of capitalism.

As a kind of preface to this study, we think it would be useful to republish the text ‘Welcome to Socialisme ou Barbarie’ in Internationalisme 43, because it is a good example of the method employed by the GCF in its relationship with the refugees from the shipwreck of Trotskyism in the wake of World War Two

The title of the article immediately sets the tone: a fraternal welcome to a new group which the GCF recognises as clearly belonging to the revolutionary camp, despite the many differences in the method and outlook of the two groups. The new group was the result of a split by the Chaulieu/Montal tendency within the French Trotskyist Party, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (in which Munis had also briefly sojourned). This led the GCF to qualify a previous statement it had made about this tendency:

“The overall judgment we made of this tendency in recent issues of Internationalisme, however severe it might have been, was absolutely well-founded. We must however make a correction concerning its definitive character. The Chaulieu tendency was not liquidated, as we presented it, but found the strength, albeit after a very long delay, to break with the Trotskyist organisation and form itself into an autonomous group. Despite the heavy weight of this heritage on the group, this fact represents a new element that opens the possibility of its later evolution. The future alone will tell us to what extent it constitutes a gain in the formation of a new revolutionary movement. But right now we must say to them that they won’t be able to carry out this task unless they rid themselves completely and as quickly as possible of the scars they have inherited from Trotskyism and which can still be felt in the first issue of their review”.

And indeed, the “heavy weight of this heritage” was to prove an extremely difficult one to throw off. This burden can also be seen in the subsequent work of Munis, but it was to prove much more destructive in the case of Socialisme ou Barbarie, not least because, as the GCF article notes, the Chaulieu group immediately proclaimed that it had gone beyond all the existing revolutionary currents and would be able to provide definitive answers to the enormous problems confronting the working class. This arrogant assumption was to have very negative consequences for the future evolution of the group. We will seek to demonstrate this in a subsequent article.

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Internationalisme 43, June/July 1949

Welcome to Socialisme ou Barbarie

The first issue of a new revolutionary review called Socialisme ou Barbarie has just appeared in France.

In the sombre situation in which the workers’ movement in France and the rest of the world finds itself today, a situation marked by a course towards war, in which the rare revolutionary groups – expressions of the life and state of consciousness of the proletarian class – who still survive thanks to a determined desire to act and a constant ideological effort , are becoming a little weaker each day; in a situation where the revolutionary press is reduced to a few small duplicated bulletins, the appearance of a new printed review, an “organ of criticism and revolutionary orientation” is an important event which every militant can only welcome and encourage.

Whatever the breadth of our disagreements with the positions of Socialisme ou Barbarie, and whatever the future evolution of this review, on the basis of the fundamental positions and general orientation expressed in this first issue, we must consider this group as undeniably proletarian and revolutionary. That is to say, we welcome its existence, and will follow with sympathy and interest its future activity and efforts. Since revolutionary sympathy is above all based on paying attention to political positions, we intend to examine the ideas put forward by Socialisme ou Barbarie without prejudice and with the greatest of care, to analyse them as they evolve, criticising what seems erroneous in them and in such cases countering them with our own views. We see this not with the aim of carrying out a vain polemic based on denigration - something which has become only too common among groups and which deeply repels us – but, however lively the discussion might be, as being exclusively geared towards the confrontation and clarification of positions.

Socialisme ou Barbarie is the organ of a tendency which has just broken with the Trotskyist party, the Chaulieu-Montal tendency. It is a political tendency known among the milieu of militants in France and we have spoken about it on several occasions, and again quite recently8, not in exactly tender terms. This perhaps demands a supplementary explanation on our part.

Examining the Trotskyist movement in France and noting that it once again, for the umpteenth time, finds itself in a state of crisis, we posed the question whether this crisis had a positive significance from the point of view of revolutionary formation. We replied with a categorical No, and for the following reason. Trotskyism, which was one of the proletarian reactions within the Communist International during the first years of its degeneration, never went beyond this position of being an opposition, despite its formal constitution into an organically separate party. By remaining attached to the Communist Parties – which it still sees as workers’ parties –even after the triumph of Stalinism, Trotskyism itself functions as an appendage to Stalinism. It is linked ideologically to Stalinism and follows it around like a shadow. All the activity of Trotskyism over the last 15 years proves this. From 1932-33 where it supported the possibility of the victory of the proletarian revolution in Germany under Stalinist leadership, to its participation in the 1939-45 war, in the Resistance and the Liberation, via the Popular Front, anti-fascism and participation in the war in Spain, Trotskyism has merely walked in the footsteps of Stalinism. In the wake of the latter, Trotskyism has also contributed powerfully to introducing into the workers’ movement habits and methods of organisation and forms of activity (bluff, intrigue, burrowing from within, insults and manoeuvres of all kinds) which are so many active factors in the corruption and destruction of any revolutionary activity. This doesn’t mean that revolutionary workers who only have a little political education have not been drawn into its ranks. On the contrary, as an organisation, as a political milieu, Trotskyism, far from favouring the development of revolutionary thought and of the organisms (fractions and tendencies) which express it, is an organised milieu for undermining it. This is a general rule valid for any political organisation alien to the proletariat, and experience has demonstrated that it applies to Stalinism and Trotskyism. We have known Trotskyism over 15 years of perpetual crisis, through splits and unifications, followed by further splits and crises, but we don’t know examples which have given rise to real, viable revolutionary tendencies. Trotskyism does not secrete within itself a revolutionary ferment. On the contrary, it annihilates it. The condition for the existence and development of a revolutionary ferment is to be outside the organisational and ideological framework of Trotskyism.

The constitution of the Chaulieu-Montal tendency within the Trotskyist organisation, and precisely after the latter had sunk itself up to its neck in the second imperialist war, the Resistance and national liberation, did not, with good reason, inspire much confidence towards it on our part. This tendency was formed on the basis of the theory of bureaucratic collectivism in the USSR and consequently rejected any defence of the latter. But what value could this position of non-defence of the USSR have when your practice is to co-habit in an organisation whose activity clearly and concretely resides in the defence of Russian state capitalism and participation in imperialist war? Not only did the Chaulieu-Montal tendency find its cohabitation in the organisation possible, it participated actively, and at all levels, in the activism typical of Trotskyism, based on bluff and mystification, in all its electoral, trade union and other campaigns. Furthermore, we could hardly avoid being unfavourably impressed by the behaviour of this tendency, made up of manoeuvres, combinations, dubious compromises, aimed more at seizing control of the leadership of the party than at developing the consciousness of its militants. The prolonged hesitations of the members of the tendency to leave the organisation – at the last congress, in summer 1948, they were still accepting being elected to the central committee – denotes both their political incoherence, their illusion in the possibility of re-dressing the Trotskyist organisation, and finally their total incomprehension of the political and organisational conditions indispensable to the elaboration of revolutionary thought and orientation

The overall judgment we made of this tendency in recent issues of Internationalisme, however severe it might have been, was absolutely well-founded. We must however make a correction concerning its definitive character. The Chaulieu tendency was not liquidated, as we presented it, but found the strength, albeit after a very long delay, to break with the Trotskyist organisation and form itself into an autonomous group. Despite the heavy weight of this heritage on the group, this fact represents a new element that opens the possibility of its later evolution. The future alone will tell us to what extent it constitutes a gain in the formation of a new revolutionary movement. But right now we must say to them that they won’t be able to carry out this task unless they rid themselves completely and as quickly as possible of the scars they have inherited from Trotskyism and which can still be felt in the first issue of their review.

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It’s not our intention here to make a deep and detailed analysis of the positions of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group. We will come back to this another time. Today we will limit ourselves to observing that, after reading their first issue, this is a group in evolution, and that its positions are anything but fixed. This should not be seen as a reproach, far from it. This group rather seems to be moving away from its fixed position about a third class, the bureaucracy, and from the idea of a dual historical antithesis to capitalism; either socialism or bureaucratic collectivism. This position, which was previously the only reason for its existence as a tendency, was a dead-end both at the level of theoretical research and of practical revolutionary activity. It’s because it seems today to be abandoning, if only partially, this conception of a historical opposition between statism and capitalism, in favour of seeing statification as a tendency inherent in capitalism in the present period, that this group is managing to get a more correct appreciation of the present trade union movement and its necessary integration into the state apparatus.

We want to draw attention to a very interesting study by A. Carrier on the cartel of autonomous unions, in which through his pen the group Socialisme ou Barbarie for the first time expresses "our position on the historically obsolete nature of trade unionism as a proletarian weapon against exploitation".

However, we are a bit surprised to learn, after such a clear declaration on the historically obsolete character of trade unionism, that this position does not lead Socialisme ou Barbarie to refuse to take part in any trade union life. The reason for this practical attitude, which is in contradiction with the whole analysis made of the trade union movement, is formulated thus: “we go where the workers are, not just because they are there, so to speak, physically, but because that’s where they struggle, with more or less effectiveness, against all forms of exploitation”. What’s more, participation in the unions is justified by saying: “We are not uninterested in the question of demands. We are convinced that in all circumstances there are correct demand slogans which, without resolving the problem of exploitation, assure the defence of the elementary material interests of the class, a defence which has to be organised on a daily basis faced with the daily attacks of capitalism”. And this after having, with the support of figures, demonstrated that “capitalism has reached the point where it can no longer give anything, where it can only take back what it has given. Not only is any reform impossible, but even the present level of poverty can’t be maintained”. From this point, the significance of the immediate programme has changed.

This whole study on “The cartel of united trade union action” is extremely interesting, but while it provides a valid analysis of trade unionism in the present period, it is also a very striking manifestation of the contradictory state of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group. The objective analysis of the evolution of modern capitalism towards statification, both of the economy and of the economic organisations of the workers (an analysis which is that of the groups of the ultra-left, to which we belong) is in competition with the old traditional subjective attitude of participation and activity in the trade union organisation, an attitude inherited from Trotskyism from which they have not fully disengaged.

A good part of this number of Socialisme ou Barbarie is devoted to polemics with the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste. This is very understandable. Leaving a political organisation, where you have a whole past of militancy and conviction, doesn’t take place without a kind of emotional crisis, and often involves personal recriminations, which is quite natural. But here we are dealing with a polemic and a polemical tone which is well out of proportion.

We are thinking of the article by Chaulieu “Useless Mouths”, which is aimed at clearing a member of the group, Lefort, of the accusations made against him by La Vérité. We can well understand the strong indignation that can be provoked by this kind of accusation, full of hypocritical insinuations and malicious allusions. But Chaulieu doesn’t manage to keep things at a certain level, and in his reply he indulges in a regrettable grossness and vulgarity. Wordplay around the name of Pierre Frank is really worthy of a naughty schoolboy and doesn’t really have a place in a revolutionary publication. Once again we are in the presence of the decomposition which has been infecting the workers’ movement for years. The precondition for the reconstitution of a new revolutionary movement is to free itself of this venomous tradition imported by Stalinism, and maintained, among others, by Trotskyism. We can never insist too much on this “moral” aspect , which is one of the foundation-stones of revolutionary work in the immediate and in the future. This is why we were so disagreeably impressed to find this malodorous polemic in the columns of the first issue of Socialisme ou Barbarie. We should also point out that, caught up in the fires of polemic, Chaulieu and his friends have forgotten to reply to one of the key questions which gave rise to this polemic, i.e. whether or not it’s possible to carry out research into problems of the revolutionary movement through any publication that offers you its columns.

In Internationalisme we have already looked at this question, and the conclusion we arrived at is in the negative. Today there is an anguishing problem of a lack of means of expression for revolutionary thought. Every thinking revolutionary militant has had this feeling of being stifled and feels the need to break out of the silence which has been imposed on them. But beyond the subjective aspect of the problem there is a political problem linked to the present situation. We can’t find relief by depositing our thoughts anywhere: we have to make our thought an effective weapon of the proletarian class struggle. Have Lefort, Chaulieu and their friends asked themselves what is the result of collaborating with a literary and philosophical review like Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes?

This kind of collaboration will not only produce little more than ‘revolutionary’ verbiage, but it will also give credibility among militants to a review, an ideological current towards which the greatest political and ideological reserve is necessary. In this way, instead of clarifying things by distinguishing between different currents, you only end up increasing confusion. It shows a real lack of understanding of the conditions for revolutionary research to turn Sartre and his review - for whom the political application of his philosophy means support for the RDR9 - into a place, a milieu, for discussion about the role played by Trotsky and Trotskyism in the degeneration of the Communist International. Revolutionary theoretical research can never be the topic of conversation in a salon, or provide a theory for left-leaning literary types. However pitiful the means of expression available to the revolutionary proletariat, it’s only in this framework that you can work towards the elaboration of the theory of the class. Working on, improving, developing these means of expression is the only way for militants to make their thought and action effective. Trying to use means of expression that don’t belong to the organisms of the class always denotes an intellectualist and petty bourgeois tendency. The fact that this problem is completely neglected in the polemic written by Socialisme ou Barbarie proves that it has not even grasped, let alone solved, the problem. We think that this too is very significant.

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

Before engaging in a critical examination of the positions defended by the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, we think that it’s necessary to pause a moment at another point, which is also highly characteristic: the manner in which this group presents itself. It would be wrong to consider that this is something without any importance. The idea one has of oneself, and the appreciation one has of other groups, is intimately linked to the general conceptions one professes. It is often this aspect which is most revealing about the nature of a group. In every case it is an indispensable element which makes it immediately possible to grasp the underlying conceptions of a group.

Here are two extracts from the leading article of the first issue of the review, an article which is in some ways the credo or political platform of the group.

Talking about the present-day workers’ movement, and having noted the complete alienation of the masses in anti-working class ideologies, the review writes:

“The only ones that seem to be keeping afloat in this universal deluge are weak organisations like the ‘4th International’, the anarchist federations, and a few so-called ‘ultra-left’ groups (Bordigists, Spartacists, council communists). Organisations which are weak, not because of their meagre numbers – which in itself means nothing, and is not a criterion – but above all because of their lack of ideological and political content. Linked much more to the past than to the anticipation of the future, these organisations already find themselves absolutely incapable of understanding the social development of the 20th century, and even less of orienting themselves positively in response to it”

And, having enumerated the weaknesses of Trotskyism and anarchism, the article continues a few lines later:

“Finally, the ‘ultra-left’ grouplets either passionately cultivate their sectarian deformations, like the Bordigists, sometimes going so far as to making the proletariat responsible for their own incapacity, or, like the council communists, content themselves with drawing up, on the basis of past experience, recipes for the ‘socialist’ kitchens of the future….Despite their delirious pretensions, both the ‘4th International’ and the anarchists and the ultra-lefts are in truth nothing but historical memories, tiny scabs on the wounds of the class, doomed to disappear with the rise of the new skin being prepared in the underlying tissues” (p 9).

So much for the other existing tendencies and groups. It thus becomes understandable that, after such a severe judgment, a condemnation without appeal of the others, you present yourself in these terms:

“By presenting ourselves today, through the means of this review, to the vanguard of manual and intellectual workers, we are the only ones responding in a systematic way to the fundamental problems of the contemporary revolutionary movement; we think that we are the only ones taking up and continuing the marxist analysis of the modern economy, posing on a scientific basis the problem of the historical development of the workers’ movement and its meaning, defining Stalinism and the ‘workers’’ bureaucracy in general, and finally, posing the revolutionary perspective by taking into account the original elements created by our epoch…We think that we represent the living continuation of marxism in the framework of contemporary society. In this sense we have no fear of being confused with all the editors of ‘marxist’ publications seeking ‘clarification’, all the men of good will, all the chatterers and gossips. If we pose problems, it’s because we think that we can resolve them” (our underlining).

This is a language in which pretension and limitless self-flattery is only equalled by the ignorance shown about the revolutionary movement, its groups and tendencies, its work and its theoretical struggles over the last 30 years. Ignorance explains a lot, but it is not a justification and still less does it entitle you to claim a glorious medal for yourself. What medal authorises the Socialisme ou Barbarie group to speak so dismissively of the recent past of the revolutionary movement, its internal struggles, and its groups, whose only fault is to have posed some ten or twenty years in advance the problems which SouB in its ignorance claims to have discovered today?

The fact of having come into political life very recently during the course of the war, and even more the fact that it has come from the politically corrupted organisation of Trotskyism, in whose swamp it was floundering up till 1949, should not be invoked as a certificate of honour, as a guarantee of political maturity. The arrogant tone here bears witness to the evident ignorance of this group, which has not yet sufficiently freed itself from ways of thinking and discussing that derive from Trotskyism. If it looked at things in a different way, it would be seen quite easily that the ideas it announces today, and which it considers to be its original work, are for the most part a more or less happy reproduction of the ideas put forward by the left currents of the Third International (the Russian Workers’ Opposition, the Spartacists in Germany, the Council Communists in Holland, the Communist Left of Italy) over the course of the past 25 years.

If, instead of contenting itself with a few bits of knowledge and even of hearsay, the Socialisme ou Barbarie group had taken the trouble to make a deeper study of the many, though hard-to-find, documents of these left currents, it might perhaps have lost its pretensions to originality, but it would assuredly have gained in depth.

---

 

The ICC held public meetings in a number of cities across several countries to coincide with the 50th anniversary of May 1968. Generally speaking, those present broadly supported the way in which we characterised the movement:

•  the historical significance of these events was expressed by the renewal of the class struggle, with the most massive workers' strike that ever existed until then – 10 million workers on strike –  a movement that owed nothing to the actions of the trade unions but was a spontaneous outbreak of struggle arising  purely from the initiative of the workers themselves;
• this working class movement, while in no way inspired by the major student unrest of the time, was  partly catalysed by the brutal police attacks on the students that caused real outrage inside the working class;
• this historical episode gave rise to an unprecedented atmosphere such as exists only during major working class movements: in the streets, in universities and in some occupied factories people spoke openly and there were intense political discussions;
• this huge movement was the product of the return of the open economic crisis and its effect on the working class, and it freed the younger generation from the crushing weight of the of counter-revolutionary period;
• this movement was therefore able to bring an end to an important blockage to the class struggle and to the overwhelming grip of Stalinism through its union transmission belts.

The idea that May 68 had signalled the development of a wave of struggles internationally was generally of no surprise to those present. But paradoxically, it was still not considered the case that May 68 marked the end of the long period of counter-revolution that resulted from the defeat of the first world revolutionary wave and which, at the same time, opened a new course towards class confrontations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In particular, a number of characteristics of the current period, like the development of fundamentalism, the spread of wars across the planet, etc., tended to be seen as indicating that we are still in a counter-revolutionary period. For us, this is a mistake which has its source in a twofold problem.

On the one hand, there is insufficient knowledge of what the period opening up the world counter-revolution was like following the defeat of the first revolutionary wave, and thus a difficulty to really grasp what such a period meant for the working class and its struggle, but also for humanity insofar as the barbarism inherent in capitalism in crisis was no longer bound by any limits. This is why in this article we have chosen to go back to examine this period in detail. On the other hand, with the period that opened with May 68, although it may seem more familiar to the generations who – directly or indirectly – know about May 68, grasping its underlying dynamic is not something that comes spontaneously. In particular, it may be obscured by events and situations which, although important, do not constitute the decisive factors. This is why we will also return to this period by highlighting its fundamental differences with the period of counter-revolution.

The history of class struggle comprises advances and retreats

 

Everyone was in agreement that, at an immediate level, after a struggle, a workers' mobilisation tends to fall back and often with it the will to fight, and this also exists at a deeper level throughout history. In fact, this gives validity to what Marx had pointed out on this subject in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that the proletarian struggle alternates between advances, often very dynamic and dazzling (1848-49, 1864-71, 1917-23) and retreats (in 1850, 1872, and 1923) which, moreover, have each time led to the disappearance or degeneration of the political organisations that the class had given itself during the period of rising struggles (Communist League: established in 1847, dissolved in 1852; International Workers’ Association: founded in 1864, dissolved in 1876; Communist International: founded in 1919, degenerated and died in the mid 1920s; the life of the Socialist International 1889-1914, having followed a broadly similar course but with less clarity[1]).

The defeat of the first international revolutionary wave of 1917-23 would open the longest, deepest and most terrible period of counter-revolution suffered by the proletariat, with the working class as a whole losing its bearings, with the few remaining organisations loyal to the revolution being reduced to tiny minorities. But it also opened the door to an unleashing of barbarism that would surpass the horrors of the First World War. On the other hand, since 1968 the opposite dynamic has developed and there is no reason to say that it has now been exhausted, despite the major difficulties experienced by the proletariat since the early 1990s and with the extension and deepening of barbarism across the planet.

The period 1924 - 1967: the deepest ever counter-revolution suffered by the working class

The expression “It is midnight in the century”, from the title of a book by Victor Serge,[2] applies perfectly to the reality of this nightmare that lasted nearly half a century.

The terrible blows struck early on against the world revolutionary wave that had opened with the Russian revolution in 1917 already constituted the antechamber to the long series of bourgeois offensives against the working class that would plunge the workers' movement into the depths of the counter-revolution. For the bourgeoisie, it would not only be a question of defeating the revolution but also of delivering blows against the working class that it would not be able to recover from. Faced with a world revolutionary wave that had threatened the global capitalist order, and this was indeed its conscious and stated objective,[3] the bourgeoisie could not simply be content with driving the proletariat back; it had to do everything in its power to ensure that this experience would leave such an image to the future world proletariat that it would never want to do it again. Above all, it had to try to discredit forever the idea of communist revolution and the possibility of establishing a society without war, without classes and without exploitation. For this reason, it was able to benefit from political circumstances that were considerably favourable to it: the loss of the revolutionary stronghold in Russia was not the result of its defeat in the military confrontation with the white armies that tried to invade Russia, but came from its own internal degeneration (to which, of course, the considerable war effort contributed greatly). So much so that it would be easy for the bourgeoisie to make the monstrosity that emerged from the political defeat of the revolution, the “Socialist” USSR, look like communism. At the same time, the latter had to be perceived as the inevitable destiny of any struggle of the proletariat for its emancipation. All fractions of the world bourgeoisie, in all countries, from the far right to the Trotskyist far left, would participate in this lie.[4]

When the World War was ended by the main bourgeoisies involved in it in November 1918, it was with the obvious aim of preventing new centres of revolutionary activity from swelling the tide of the revolution that had been victorious in Russia and was threatening in Germany, where the bourgeoisie had been weakened by the military defeat. This sought to prevent the revolutionary fever, incited by the barbarism of the battlefields and by the unbearable exploitation and misery behind the front lines, from also seizing hold in other countries such as France and Great Britain. And this goal was generally achieved: in the victorious countries, the proletariat, while it had fervently acclaimed the Russian revolution, did not show a massive commitment to the flag of revolution for the overthrow of capitalism in order to put an end forever to the horrors of war. Exhausted by four years of suffering in the trenches or in the arms factories, it sought instead to seek rest, “taking advantage” of the peace that the imperialist bandits had just delivered. And since, in the final analysis, in all wars the defeated parties get the blame, the Entente countries (France, United Kingdom, Russia) removed all the responsibility from capitalism as a whole, and laid all the blame onto the Central Powers (Germany, Austria, Hungary). Even worse, the bourgeoisie in France promised workers a new era of prosperity on the basis of the reparations that would be imposed on Germany. In this way, the proletariat in Germany and in Russia would be all the more isolated.

But what would really happen, in both victorious and defeated countries, was the future that Rosa Luxemburg had outlined in her Junius Pamphlet: if the world proletariat did not succeed through its revolutionary struggle in building a new society on the smoking ruins of capitalism, then inevitably the latter would inflict even worse disasters on humanity.

The story of this new descent into hell, which culminated in the horrors of the Second World War, is tied up in many ways with that of the counter-revolution that reached its peak at the end of this conflict.

The white armies' offensive against Soviet Russia and the failure of revolutionary attempts in Germany and Hungary

Very soon after October 1917, Soviet power was confronted with the military offensives of German imperialism, which was not going to listen to any talk about peace.[5] The white armies, with economic support from abroad, were being formed in several parts of the country. And then, new white armies, directly set up abroad, were unleashed against the revolution until 1920. The country was surrounded, hemmed in by the white armies, and was being suffocated economically. The civil war would leave the country totally devastated. Nearly 980,000 Red Army soldiers died and around 3 million from among the civilian population.[6]

In Germany, the axis of the counter-revolution was constituted by the alliance between two major forces: the traitorous SPD (Social Democratic Party) and the army. They contributed in setting up a new force, the Freikorps, the mercenaries of the counter-revolution, the nucleus of which would become the Nazi movement. The bourgeoisie would inflict a terrible blow on the Berlin proletariat by drawing it into a premature insurrection in Berlin, which was brutally suppressed in January 1919. Thousands of Berlin workers and communists – the majority of whom were also workers – were slaughtered (1200 workers were executed by firing squad), tortured and thrown into prison. Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and then Leo Jogisches were murdered. The working class was losing a part of its vanguard and its most perceptive leader in the person of Rosa Luxemburg who would have been a valuable compass in the face of the looming turmoil.

In addition to the inability of the workers' movement in Germany to thwart this manoeuvre, it would also suffer from a glaring lack of coordination between the various centres of the movement: after the Berlin uprising, defensive struggles broke out in the Ruhr involving millions of miners, steel workers, textile workers from the industrial regions of the Lower Rhine and Westphalia (1st quarter of 1919), followed (at the end of March) by struggles in central Germany and again in Berlin. The Executive Council of the Republic of the councils of Bavaria was proclaimed in Munich and then overthrown, opening the door to brutal repression. Berlin, the Ruhr, Berlin again, Hamburg, Bremen, Central Germany, Bavaria, everywhere the proletariat was crushed, everywhere sector by sector. All the ferocity, the barbarism, the cunning, the calls of denunciation and the military technology were put at the service of repression. For example, “to take back Alexanderplatz in Berlin, battlefield weapons were used for the first time in the history of revolutions: namely, light and heavy artillery, bombs weighing up to one hundredweight, aerial reconnaissance and aerial bombardment”.[7] Thousands of workers were shot or killed in the fighting; communists were hunted down and many were sentenced to death.

In March the workers in Hungary also engaged capital in revolutionary clashes. On March 21, 1919, the Republic of Councils was proclaimed but it was crushed during the summer by counter-revolutionary troops. For more information, read our articles in the International Review.[8]

Despite the subsequent heroic attempts of the proletariat in Germany, in 1920 (in the face of the Kapp putsch) and 1921 (the March Action),[9] which testify to the persistence of a strong fighting spirit, the momentum was no longer towards the political reinforcement of the German proletariat as a whole, but the opposite.

The degeneration of the revolution in Russia

 

The ravages of the war against the offensives of the international bourgeoisie, including the considerable losses suffered by the proletariat, its political weakening with the loss of political power by the workers' councils and the dissolution of the Red Guard, and the political isolation of the revolution – all this constituted a favourable ground for the development of opportunism within the Bolshevik party and the Communist International.[10] The repression of the Kronstadt insurrection in 1921, which took place in reaction to the loss of power by the Soviets, was ordained by the Bolshevik party. From being the vanguard of the revolution at the time of the seizure of power, it was to become the vanguard of counter-revolution at the end of an internal degeneration that could not be prevented by the fractions that emerged within this party to fight specifically against growing opportunism.[11]

The broad masses that in Russia, Germany and Hungary had stormed the heavens were no longer present. They were blooded, exhausted, defeated, and could not take anymore. Within the victorious countries of the war, the proletariat had been unable to strike an effective blow. All this would signal the political defeat of the proletariat everywhere in the world.

Stalinism becomes the spearhead of the world bourgeoisie against the revolution

The process of the degeneration of the Russian revolution accelerated when Stalin took control of the Bolshevik party. The adoption in 1925 of the thesis of “socialism in one country”, which became the doctrine of the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International, constituted a breaking point with no return. This betrayal of proletarian internationalism, the basic principle of the proletarian struggle and the communist revolution, would now be adopted and defended by all the Communist Parties of the world,[12] which was totally opposed to the historic project of the working class. And just as it signals the abandonment of the whole proletarian project, the thesis of socialism in one country corresponded with Russia's growing integration into world capitalism.

From the mid-1920s, Stalin would pursue a policy of merciless liquidation of all Lenin's former companions by making maximum use of the repressive bodies that the Bolshevik Party had set up to resist the white armies (notably the political police, the Cheka).[13] The whole capitalist world had recognised in Stalin the right man for the job, the one who would eradicate the last vestiges of the October Revolution and to whom it was necessary to give all the necessary support to smash and exterminate the generation of proletarians and revolutionaries who, in the middle of the world war, had dared to engage in a struggle to the death against the capitalist order.[14]

Revolutionaries were hunted down and suppressed by Stalinism, wherever they were, and this with the help of the great democracies, the same people who had sent their white armies to starve and try to overthrow the power of the soviets.

From this point, Stalin's USSR is seen as socialism, while any consciousness of the real proletarian project starts to disappear

Stalin's Russia was presented by the Stalinist bourgeoisie, as well as by the world bourgeoisie, as the realisation of the ultimate goal of the proletariat, the establishment of socialism. In this endeavour, all the factions of the world bourgeoisie collaborated, both the democratic factions and the various national Communist Parties.

The vast majority of those who still believed in the revolution would identify its purpose as the establishment of a regime like the USSR in other countries. The more the light was shed on the reality of the situation of the working class in the USSR, the deeper would be the division in the world proletariat: those who would continue to defend its “progressive” character (despite all its shortcomings), with the idea that there was “no bourgeoisie” in the Soviet Union; those for whom, on the contrary, the situation in the USSR was seen as a monstrosity, but against which they felt powerless to pose the alternative. Only a smaller and smaller minority of revolutionaries supported the proletarian project and stayed loyal to it.

The proletariat confronted with the crisis of 1929 and the 1930s

The years following the 1929 crisis dramatically affected the living conditions of the world proletariat, especially in Europe and the United States. But generally speaking its reactions to this situation did not provide a sufficiently dynamic class response that could challenge the established order. Far from it. Worse still, notable reactions in France and Spain were diverted into the impasse of the antifascist struggle.

In France, the great wave of strikes that followed the arrival of the Popular Front government in 1936 clearly demonstrated the limitations imposed on the working class by the leaden yoke of the counter-revolution. The wave of strikes had begun with spontaneous occupations of factories and did show a certain combativity of the workers. But, from the very first days, the left would use this gigantic mass to manoeuvre and to impose the measures of state capitalism on the whole French bourgeoisie, measures needed for dealing with the economic crisis and preparing for war. While it was true that for the first time in France there were factory occupations, it was also the first time that we would see the workers singing both the International and the Marseillaise and marching behind both the red flag and the Tricolour.[15] The apparatus constituted by the Communist Party and the unions was in control of the situation, managing to lock up the workers, who had let themselves be lulled by the sound of the accordion inside the factories.

The Spanish proletariat had stayed somewhat isolated from the First World War and the revolutionary wave,[16] so its physical forces remained relatively intact in dealing with the attacks that rained on it throughout the 1930s. There were nevertheless more than a million deaths between 1931 and 1939, of which the most important part would be a consequence of the civil war between the Republican camp and that of General Franco, which had absolutely nothing to do with the class struggle of the proletariat but was on the contrary made possible through its weakening. The situation was precipitated in 1936 with the coup d'état by General Franco. There was an immediate response from the workers: on 19 July 1936, the workers took strike action and went en masse to the army barracks to disarm the coup, without worrying about the contrary directives of the Popular Front and the Republican government. Uniting the struggle for demands with the political struggle, the workers held back Franco's murderous hand, but not that of the bourgeois faction organised in the Popular Front. Barely a year later, in May 1937, the Barcelona proletariat rose up again, but out of desperation, and it was massacred by the Popular Front government, the Spanish Communist Party with its Catalan branch of the PSUC at the helm, while the Francoist troops willingly halted their advance to allow the Stalinist executioners to crush the workers.

This terrible working class tragedy, which is still misrepresented today as “a Spanish social revolution” or “a great revolutionary adventure”, is a mark, on the contrary, of the triumph of the counterrevolution, with the ideological and physical crushing of the last living forces of the European proletariat. This massacre would be a dress rehearsal that paved the royal way to the unleashing of the imperialist war.[17]

The 1930s: the bourgeoisie has its hands free once again to impose its solution to the crisis

The Weimar Republic in Germany had distinguished itself with the introduction of extreme measures to exploit the working class alongside others that gave workers some representation in the company they worked for, with the sole intent of mystifying them.

In Germany, there was no real opposition between the Weimar Republic (1923) and fascism (1933): the former had permitted the revolutionary threat to be crushed, dispersing the proletariat, and clouding its consciousness; the latter, Nazism, would finish the process off, uniting capitalist society by using the iron fist to smash any remaining proletarian threat.[18]

Parties appeared in all the European countries claiming to be either pro-Hitler or pro-Mussolini and they all supported a programme of strengthening and concentrating political and economic power in the hands of a single party state. Their influence grew alongside a widespread anti-working class offensive by the repressive state apparatus reinforced by the army, and by the fascist troops where needed. From Romania to Greece, we saw the development of fascist-type organisations charged with preventing any working class reaction and with the collusion of the national state. The capitalist dictatorship became overt, and most often took the form of the Mussolini or Hitler model.

However, in the industrialised countries least affected by the crisis, retaining the framework of democracy was still possible. Indeed, this was necessary to mystify the proletariat. Fascism, having given rise to “antifascism”, had strengthened the ability of the “democratic powers” to use this mystification. The ideology of the Popular Fronts[19] made it possible to keep the workers disoriented behind the programmes of national unity and preparation for imperialist war; and, in collusion with the Russian bourgeoisie, most of the Communist Parties subservient to the new imperialist order organised a vast campaign on the rise of the fascist peril.[20] The bourgeoisie would only be able to wage war by deceiving the proletariat and making it believe that it was its war too: “With the halt to the class struggle, or more precisely the destruction of the class power of the proletariat, the destruction of its consciousness and the diversion of its struggles, the bourgeoisie used its intermediaries inside the proletariat to empty the class struggles of their revolutionary content and to derail them onto the paths of reformism and nationalism, which was the ultimate and conclusive condition for the outbreak of the imperialist war.”[21]

The massacres of the Second World War

The majority of the soldiers enrolled by both camps did not set out with much enthusiasm, still mindful of the deaths of their fathers just 25 years earlier. And what they were confronted with would not do much to raise their mood: the “Blitzkrieg” caused 90,000 deaths and 120,000 wounded on the French side, 27,000 dead on the German side. The debacle in France would see ten million people die under appalling conditions. One and a half million prisoners were sent to Germany. The conditions for the survivors were totally inhuman: the massive exodus of the people in France and the Nazi state terror bearing down on the German population.

In France as in Italy, many workers joined the maquis at that time. The Stalinist party and the Trotskyists had sold them a fraudulently distorted view of the Paris Commune (shouldn't the workers take a stand against their own bourgeoisie led by Pétain – the new Thiers – when the Germans were occupying France?) With the outbreak of the war and the population terrified and powerless, many French and European workers were recruited into the resistance groups and would now be killed believing they were fighting for the “socialist liberation” of France, Italy... The Stalinist and Trotskyist resistance groups were directing their odious propaganda around the idea that the workers would be “at the forefront of the struggle for a people's independence”.

While the First World War killed 20 million people, the Second World War would kill 50 million, 20 million of whom were Russians killed on the European front. 10 million people died in the concentration camps, 6 million of them as a result of the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews. Although none of the macabre abuses of Nazism are now unknown to the general public, unlike the crimes committed by the great democracies, the Nazi crimes remain an irrefutable illustration of the boundless barbarism of decadent capitalism, and the heinous hypocrisy of the Allied camp. Indeed, during the liberation, the Allies pretended to have just discovered the concentration camps. This was a pure masquerade to conceal their own barbarity by exposing that of the defeated enemy. In fact, the bourgeoisie, both English and American, had known perfectly well of the existence of the camps and what was happening in them. And yet, strange as it may appear, it did not talk about it throughout most of the war and did not make it a central theme of its propaganda. In fact, the governments of Churchill and Roosevelt feared like the plague that the Nazis would empty the camps and massively expel the Jews. And so, they refused offers of an exchange of one million Jews; even in exchange for nothing.[22]

In the final year of the war, the bombardments were directly targeted on areas where the workers were concentrated, in order to weaken the working class as much as possible by decimating and terrorising it.

The world bourgeoisie takes steps to prevent the possibility of a proletarian recovery

The objective was to prevent the repeat of a proletarian uprising like the ones in 1917 and 1918 in response to the horrors of the war. This is why the Anglo-American bombings – mainly in Germany but also in France – were purposely barbaric. The toll of what was undoubtedly one of the greatest war crimes, in the course of the Second World War, was around 200,000 dead,[23] almost all civilians. For example, the bombing in 1945 of Dresden, a hospital town with no strategic interest had no other purpose than terrorising the civilian populations.[24] By comparison, Hiroshima, another heinous crime, killed 75,000 people and the horrific American bombings of Tokyo in March 1945 caused 85,000 deaths!

When Mussolini was overthrown in 1943 and replaced by Marshal Badoglio, who was sympathetic to the Allies, the Allies although they already controlled the south of the country, were in no rush to move northwards. It was a case of letting the fascists settle scores with the working masses who were renewing the struggle against their class oppressors in the industrial regions of northern Italy. When asked about his passivity, Churchill replied: “Let the Italians stew in their own juice”.

From the end of the war, the Allies favoured Russian occupation, especially in areas where workers’ revolts had occurred. The Red Army was the best equipped to restore order in these countries either by slaughtering the proletariat or by diverting it from its class terrain in the name of “socialism”.

A similar division of labour was established between the Red Army and the German army. When it had already reached the suburbs of Warsaw and Budapest, the “Red Army” didn't lift a finger. It let the German army crush the insurrections that were poised to drive them out. Thus Stalin entrusted Hitler with the task of slaughtering tens of thousands of armed workers who could have upset his plans.

Not content with offering Stalin territories where there was a risk of social movements, the “democratic” bourgeoisie of the victorious countries called on the Communist Parties to join the governments in most European countries (notably in France and Italy), allocating them high-ranking positions in various ministries (Thorez – secretary of the French Communist Party – was appointed vice-president of the Council in France in 1944).

Terror was inflicted on the German population immediately after the war

In continuity with the massacres designed to prevent any proletarian uprising in Germany at the end of the war, those that took place after the war were no less barbaric and expeditious.

Germany was transformed into a vast death camp by the occupying powers of Russia, Britain, France and the United States. Many more Germans died after the war than in the battles, bombings and war concentration camps. According to James Bacque, the author of Crimes et Mercies: Le sort des civils allemands sous occupation alliée, 1944-1950”,[25] more than 9 million died as a result of the policy of Allied imperialism between 1945 and 1950.

It was only when this deadly objective had been achieved and American imperialism began to see that the post-war exhaustion of Europe could lead to the domination of Russian imperialism over the whole continent, that the policy of Potsdam was changed. The reconstruction of Western Europe depended on resurrecting the German economy. The Berlin Airlift in 1948 was the symbol of this change of strategy.[26] Of course, just like the bombing of Dresden, considered “...the most beautiful terror raid [that] the victorious Allies carried out in the whole war”, the democratic bourgeoisie did everything possible to obscure the true reality of the barbarism that was broadly shared by the two sides in the World War.

The proletariat was not able to rise up directly against the war

Despite the fact that struggles broke out from time to time in various places, particularly those in Italy in 1943, the proletariat was not able to visibly hold back the barbarism of the Second World War, as it had done with the First. 

The First World War had won millions of workers to internationalism; the Second World War cast them into the depths of the most despicable chauvinism, in the hunting down of the “Boche”[27] and the “collabos”.[28]

The proletariat was at rock bottom. What was presented to it, and what it interpreted as its great “victory”, the triumph of democracy over fascism, was in fact its most complete historical defeat. It made possible the consolidation of the ideological pillars of the capitalist order: the proletariat was overwhelmed by the feeling of victory and euphoria, the belief in the “sacred virtues” of bourgeois democracy – the same democracy that had led it into the butchery of two imperialist wars and crushed its revolution in the early 1920s. Then during the period of reconstruction, and the post-war economic “boom” and with it the short-lived improvement in its living conditions in the West, it was prevented from seeing the extent of the real defeat It had suffered.[29]

In the Eastern European countries, who were not beneficiaries of the manna of the American Marshall Plan because the Stalinist parties refused it on Moscow's orders, the situation took considerably longer to improve. The workers were presented with the mystification of “constructing socialism”. This mystification had some degree of success, such as in Czechoslovakia, where the “Prague coup” of February 1948 – i.e. the Stalinist take-over of the government – met with the approval of many workers.

Once this illusion began to wear thin, workers’ uprisings like the one in Hungary in 1956 broke out, but they were severely repressed by Russian soldiers.

The involvement of Russian troops in the repression then became an additional stimulus for nationalism in the Eastern European countries. At the same time, it was used extensively in propaganda by the “democratic” and pro-American sectors of the bourgeoisie of the Western European countries, while the Stalinist parties of these countries used the same propaganda to present the Hungarian workers' insurrection as a chauvinist, even a “fascist” movement, in the pay of American imperialism.

Moreover, throughout the “Cold War”, and even when it gave way to “peaceful coexistence” after 1956, the division of the world into two blocs was a major instrument for the mystification of the working class.

In the 1950s the working class was still divided and disoriented by the same kind of politics as existed in the 1930s: one part of the working class no longer wanted to know anything about communism (which was identified with the USSR), while the other part continued to suffer under the ideological domination of the Stalinist parties and their unions. Hence, following on from the Korean War, the confrontation between East and West was used to sow divisions inside the working class and to mobilise millions of workers behind the Soviet camp in supporting “the struggle against imperialism”.  At the same time, the colonial wars provided an additional opportunity to deflect workers away from their class terrain, once more behind the “struggle against imperialism” (and not the struggle against capitalism) in which the USSR was presented as the champion of the “rights and the freedom of the people”. This kind of campaign continued in many countries throughout the 1950s and 1960s, particularly during the Vietnam War, where the United States began its large-scale intervention in 1961.[30]

Another consequence of this very long and profound retreat of the working class was the organic rupture with the communist fractions of the past;[31] with the consequence that the burden of responsibility was passed onto future generations of revolutionaries to critically reclaim the acquisitions of the workers' movement.

May 68, the end of the counter-revolution

 

The crisis of 1929 and the 1930s had, at best, provoked a proletarian combativity as in France and Spain, but, as we have seen previously, these movements were diverted from the class terrain into antifascism and the defence of democracy, thanks to the grip of the Stalinists, Trotskyists and trade unions. This only contributed in a further reinforcing of the counter-revolution.

1968 was only the start of the return of the global economic crisis and yet, the effects in France (rising unemployment, wage freezes, the drive for increased productivity, attacks on social security) explain a large part of the rise in workers' combativity in that country from 1967 onwards. Far from being channelled by the Stalinists and trade unions, the renewal of workers' combativity was turning away from union-led strikes and “days of action”. As early as 1967, faced with the violent repression by the employers and police, there were some very fierce confrontations where the unions lost control on several occasions.

The purpose of this article is not to go back over all the important aspects of May 68 in France. For this reason, we refer the reader to the articles, “May 68 and the revolutionary perspective” written on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of these events.[32] Nevertheless, recalling certain facts is important to illustrate the change in the dynamics of the class struggle that took place in May 1968.

In May, the social atmosphere changed radically. “On May 13, every town in the country saw the most important demonstrations since World War II. The working class was massively present alongside the students. (...) At the end of the demonstrations, practically all the universities were occupied, not only by the students but also by many young workers. Everywhere, anyone could speak. Discussions were not limited to questions about universities and repression. They began to confront all the social problems: conditions of work, exploitation, the future of society. (…) On May 14 discussions continued in many firms. After the huge demonstrations the day before, with the enthusiasm and feelings of strength that emanated from them, it was difficult to carry on as if nothing had happened. In Nantes, with the workers of Sud-Aviation carried along by the youngest workers, a spontaneous strike broke out and they decided to occupy the factory. The working class had begun to take up the reins.”[33]

The traditional method of corralling the struggle used by the bourgeoisie wasn't much use faced with the spontaneity with which the working class entered the struggle. Thus, in the three days following the demonstration on 13 May, the strike spread spontaneously to workplaces throughout France. The movement overflowed the unions and left them behind. No specific demands were raised, but a common pattern existed: all-out strike, occupations that were not time-limited, management taken captive, red flags raised. In the end, the CGT called for spreading the strike, aiming to “move things along”.[34]  But even before the CGT's instructions were known, there were already a million workers on strike.

The working class's growing consciousness of its own power stimulated discussion and especially political discussion. This was to some extent reminiscent of the political life that the working class experienced in the revolutionary ferment of 1917, recorded in the writings of Trotsky and John Reed.

The veil of lies woven for decades by the counter-revolution and its supporters, both Stalinist and democratic, was beginning to get very thin. Amateur videos shot in the occupied Sud-Aviation factory in Nantes showed a passionate discussion among a group of workers about the role of the strike committees under “dual power”. The duality of power in 1917 was the product of the struggle for real power between the bourgeois state and the workers’ councils. In many of the factories on strike in 1968, the workers had elected strike committees. It was very far from being in a pre-revolutionary situation, but what was happening was an attempt by the working class to reclaim its own experience, its revolutionary past. Another example bears this out: “Some workers asked those who defended the idea of the revolution to come and argue their point of view in their occupied factories. In Toulouse, the small nucleus that went on to form the ICC's section in France was invited to expound its ideas about workers' councils in the occupied JOB (paper and cardboard) factory. And the most significant thing was that this invitation came from the union militants of the CGT, and those of the French Communist Party. The latter had to negotiate for an hour with the permanent officials of the CGT and the PCF who had come from the big Sud-Aviation factory to ‘reinforce’ the JOB strike picket to get authorisation to allow the ‘leftists’ to enter the factory. For more than six hours, workers and revolutionaries, sitting on rolls of cardboard, discussed the revolution, the history of the workers' movement, the soviets and even the betrayals... of the PCF and the CGT.”[35]

Such a reflection allowed thousands of workers to rediscover the historical role of workers' councils, as well as the accomplishments of the working class struggle, such as the revolutionary efforts in Germany in 1919. Similarly, there was a growing criticism of the role played by the French Communist Party (which then defined itself as a party of order) not only in relation to the events of 1968 itself, but also since the Russian revolution. This was the first time that Stalinism and the Communist Party as guardians of the established order had been called into question on such a scale. The criticism also affected the unions, which increased when they openly showed themselves to be sowing divisions inside the working class in order to get it to go back to work.[36]

It was the start of a new era, characterised by a re-awakening of class-consciousness across the working masses. This break with the counter-revolution did not mean that the latter would not continue to weigh negatively on the subsequent development of the class struggle, nor that workers' consciousness was free of very strong illusions, particularly concerning the obstacles to be overcome on the road to revolution, and indeed it was much further away at the time than the great majority imagined.

Such a characterisation of May 68 as an illustration of the end of the counter-revolutionary period was confirmed by the fact that, far from remaining an isolated phenomenon, these events would on the contrary constitute the starting point for the resumption of the class struggle on an international scale, spurred on by the deepening of the economic crisis, whose corollary was the development of a proletarian political milieu on an international scale.[37] The founding of “Révolution Internationale” in 1968 was an illustration of this, since this group would play a leading role in the process that would lead to the founding of the ICC in 1975, in which Révolution Internationale became its section in France. Unlike the dark period of the counter-revolution, the bourgeoisie was now confronted with a class that was not ready to accept the sacrifices demanded from the economic war between states. It also obstructed the slide towards world war in opposing the sacrifices demanded by imperialist war; this would become clearer later, at least as concerned the main bastions of the class in Europe and the United States.

The international recovery of class struggle from 1968

The ICC has just devoted an article to this question, “The advances and retreats in the class struggle since 1968”,[38] which we recommend to our readers and from which we draw elements necessary to highlight the differences between the counter-revolutionary period and the historical period opened with May 1968. Simply put, the fundamental difference between the period of counter-revolution, starting from a heavy defeat of the working class, and the one that opened with May 68, lies in the fact that since this emergence of the struggle and despite all the difficulties with which the proletariat has been confronted, it has not suffered a decisive defeat.

The deepening of the open economic crisis, which was only in its infancy at the end of the 1960s, has produced a significant development of proletarian combativity and consciousness.

There were three successive waves of struggle over the two decades after 1968.

The first, undoubtedly the most spectacular, gave us the Italian “hot autumn” in 1969, the violent uprising in Cordoba, Argentina, in 1969 and struggles in Poland in 1970, and important movements in Spain and Great Britain in 1972. There was also a “hot autumn” in Germany in 1969 with many wildcat strikes. In Spain in particular, workers began to organise themselves through mass assemblies, a process that culminated in Vitoria in 1976. The international dimension of the wave was demonstrated by echoes in Israel (1969) and Egypt (1972) and, later, by the uprisings in the townships of South Africa, which were led by struggle committees (the Civics).

After a short break in the mid-1970s, there was a second wave with strikes by Iranian oil workers, steel mill workers in France in 1978, the “winter of discontent” in Britain, the dockworkers' strike in Rotterdam, led by an independent strike committee, and steel strikes in Brazil in 1979 which also challenged union control. In Asia there was the Kwangju revolt  in South Korea. This wave of struggles culminated in Poland in 1980, certainly the most important episode of class struggle since 1968, and even since the 1920s.

Although the severe repression of the Polish workers brought this wave to a halt, it did not take long before a new movement took place with the struggles in Belgium in 1983 and1986, the general strike in Denmark in 1985, the miners' strike in Britain in 1984-85, the railway and health workers' struggles in France in 1986 and 1988, and the movement of education workers in Italy in 1987. The struggles in France and Italy, in particular – like the mass strike in Poland – showed a real capacity for self-organisation with general assemblies and strike committees.

This movement of struggles in waves was not going nowhere; it made real advances in class-consciousness expressed in the following characteristics:

• a loss of illusions in the political forces of the left of capital and mainly the unions, with illusions giving way to mistrust and increasingly open hostility;
• the increasing rejection of ineffective forms of mobilisation, dead-ends into which the unions have so often channelled workers' combativity: days of action, demonstrations reduced to tame parades; long and isolated strikes...

But the experience of these 20 years of struggle had not only brought out the “negative” lessons for the working class (of what not to do). It has also provided lessons about what to do:

• seeking to extend the struggle (Belgium 1986 in particular);
• seeking to take the struggle into our own hands, by organising into elected and revocable assemblies and strike committees (France at the end of 1986, Italy mainly in1987).

Similarly, the more sophisticated manoeuvres developed by the bourgeoisie to deal with the class struggle also showed that there has been some development during this period. Thus, to face up to the growing disenchantment with the official unions and the threat posed by self-organisation, it developed forms of unionism which could even appear to be “outside the unions” (the 'Coordinations' set up by the far left in France, for example).

The proletariat puts a brake on war

During the twenty years after May 1968, the bourgeoisie, unable to inflict a decisive historic defeat on the working class, was incapable of implementing a mobilisation for a new world war, contrary to the situation of the 1930's, as we showed above.

In fact it was out of the question that the bourgeoisie would launch a world war without being fully assured of the docility of the proletariat, an indispensable condition for it to accept the sacrifices required for a state of war in which the mobilisation of all the living forces of the nation, as much in production as on the fronts, is demanded. Such an objective was totally unrealistic as long as the proletariat wasn't ready to submit itself obediently to the measures of austerity that the bourgeoisie had to take in order to face up to the consequences of the economic crisis. That's why a third world war didn’t take place during this period, a time where tensions between the blocs were at their height and the alliances amongst them were already firmly established through the two blocs. Further, in none of the historic concentrations of the proletariat did the bourgeoisie try to mobilise the proletariat as cannon-fodder in the local wars relevant to the east-west rivalry which, during this time, had bloodied the world.

This is particularly true of the working class of the West but equally applies to those of the East, although the latter were weaker politically, in the USSR especially, given the damage done by the steamroller of Stalinism. The Stalinist bourgeoisie, mired in a rapidly deteriorating economic swamp, was manifestly incapable of mobilising its workers in a military solution to its economic bankruptcy, a fact particularly illustrated with the strikes in Poland in 1980.

That being said, even if the working class was an obstacle to world war up to the end of the 1980's, given that it had been capable of developing its combats of resistance against the attacks of capital in the two decades after 1968 without submitting to a decisive defeat that would have overturned a global dynamic of towards confrontation between the classes, that's not to say that it was strong enough to prevent wars across the planet. In fact they never stopped during this period. In the majority of cases they were the expression of imperialist rivalries between East and West, not a direct confrontation between them but through client countries. And in these countries on the periphery of capitalism, the proletariat didn't have the strength to paralyse the armed force of the bourgeoisie.

The proletariat faced with the decomposition of capitalism

Despite the advances made in the class struggle, notably through the development of class consciousness and also the inability of the bourgeoisie to dragoon the proletariat into a new world conflict, the working class was nevertheless incapable of developing its perspective of revolution, of posing its own alternative to the crisis of the system.

 Thus, neither of the two fundamental classes could impose their solution to the crisis of capitalism. Deprived of any end result but still sinking into its long-term economic crisis, capitalism began to rot on its feet and this degeneration affected capitalist society at every level. Here capitalism enters into a new phase in its decadence, that of social decomposition. We've often showed how this phase is synonymous with the growing difficulties for the class struggle.[39]

Looking over the three last decades, we can say that the setback in consciousness has been profound, causing a type of amnesia in relation to the advances of the period 1968-1989. This is fundamentally explained by two factors:

• the enormous impact that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989-91 had, lyingly identified by the campaigns of the bourgeoisie as the collapse of communism;
• the characteristics of decomposition itself inaugurated by this collapse, particularly “the constant increase in criminality, inse­curity, and urban violence…the development of nihilism, despair, and suicide amongst young people … and of hatred and xenophobia…the profusion of sects, the renewal of the religious spirit including in the advanced coun­tries, the rejection of rational, coherent thought the invasion of the same media by the spectacle of violence, horror, blood, massacres…the development of terrorism, or the seizure of hostages, as methods of warfare be­tween states…”[40]

Despite the enormous difficulties that the working has experienced since 1990, two elements should be taken into account in order to get the whole picture:

• the growing difficulties and even its partial defeats are not yet tantamount to a historic defeat of the working class and the disappearance of the possibility of communism;
• subterranean maturation continues because, despite decomposition, capitalism goes on and the two fundamental classes of society continue to face one another.

In fact, in the last decades, there have been a certain number of important movements which tend to support this analysis:

• in 2006, the massive mobilisation of high school and university youth in France against the CPE.[41] Its protagonists rediscovered forms of struggle which appeared in May 68, in particular general assemblies where real discussion took place and where the young were ready to listen to the witnesses of older comrades who had taken part in the events of 68. This movement, which had overflowed containment by the unions, held the real risk of drawing in the workers in a similarly “uncontrolled” way as in 68 and that is why the French government withdrew the law;
• again in May 2006, 23,000 metalworkers in Vigo, in the Galician province of Spain, went on strike against work reforms in the sector and instead of staying bottled up in the factory went out to look for solidarity from other workers notably in the naval shipyard and the Citroen factories, organising demonstrations in the town to rally the whole population and above all organising public and daily general assemblies open to all workers whether active, unemployed or retired;
• in 2011, the wave of social revolts in the Middle East and Greece culminated in the movement of the “Indignados” in Spain. The proletarian element in these movements varied from one country to the other, but it was strongest in Spain where we saw the spread of general assemblies, a powerful internationalist élan which saluted the expressions of solidarity of the participants from all parts of the world and where the slogan “world revolution” was taken seriously, perhaps for the first time since the revolutionary wave of 1917; a recognition that “the system is obsolete” and a strong will to discuss the possibility of a new form of social organisation. In numerous animated discussions which took place in the assemblies and commissions on the questions of morals, science and culture, in the all-present calling into question of the dogmas according to which capitalist relations are eternal – here we see once again the real spirit of May 68 taking shape. Evidently, this movement showed plenty of weaknesses that we have analysed elsewhere,[42] not least among those who saw themselves as “citizens” rather than proletarians and thus really vulnerable to bourgeois ideology.

The threats that the survival of capitalism holds over humanity shows that revolution is more than ever a necessity for the human race: from the expansion of military chaos to the ecological catastrophe; from famine to the development of unprecedented diseases. The decadence of capitalism, and its decomposition, certainly increases the danger that the objective basis of a new society could be definitively destroyed if decomposition advances beyond a certain point. But even in its latest phase, capitalism still produces the forces which can be used to overthrow it - in the words of the Communist Manifesto of 1848: “What the Bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers”.

Thus, with the entry of capitalism into its phase of decomposition, even if it brings with it greater difficulties for the proletariat, nothing indicates that the latter has suffered a defeat of irreversible consequences and, from this, has accepted all the sacrifices regarding its living and working conditions that would imply a mobilisation for imperialist war.

We don't know when or with what force the next manifestations of the potentialities of the proletariat will be produced. What we do know is that the determined and appropriate intervention of a revolutionary minority strengthens the future of the class struggle.

Silvio (July 2018)

 

 

Without the events of May 1968, the ICC would not exist. Marc Chirik had already helped to form a group in Venezuela, Internacialismo, which from 1964 onwards had defended all the basic positions which were to be taken up a decade later by the ICC. But Marc was aware from the start that it was the revival of the class struggle in the centres of world capitalism that would be decisive in inaugurating a change in the course of history. It was this understanding that propelled him to return to France and to play an active role in the movement of May-June, and this included seeking out contacts among its politicised avant-garde. Two young members of the Venezuelan group had already moved to France to study at Toulouse University, and it was alongside these comrades and a handful of others that Marc became a founder member of Révolution Internationale in October 1968 – the group that would play a central part in the formation of the ICC seven years later.

Since that time the ICC has never wavered from its conviction concerning the historic significance of May 68, and we have returned to the subject again and again. Every ten years or so we have published retrospective articles in our theoretical organ, the International Review, as well as material in our territorial press. We have held public meetings to mark its 40th and 50th anniversaries and intervened at events organised by others[1]. In this article, we begin by looking back at one of these articles, written at an anniversary which now has a definite symbolic value: 1988

In the first part of this new series[2], we concluded that the initial assessment made by RI -‘Understanding May’, written in 1969, according to which May 68 represented the first major reaction of the world working class to the resurfacing of capitalism’s historic economic crisis – had been entirely validated: despite capital’s often astonishing capacity to adapt to its sharpening contradictions, the crisis which at the end of the 60s could only be detected from its first symptoms has become both increasingly evident and to all intents and purposes permanent.

But what of our insistence that May 68 signalled the end of the previous decades of counter-revolution and the opening up of a new period, in which an undefeated working class would move towards massive and decisive struggles; and that in turn the outcome of these struggles would resolve the historical dilemma posed by the irresolvable economic crisis: world war, in the event of a new defeat for the working class, or world revolution and the construction of a new, communist society?

The 1988 article, ’20 years after May 1968 - Class struggle: the maturation of the conditions for revolution [70]’[3] began by arguing against the dominant scepticism of the day – the idea, very widespread in the bourgeois media and among a whole layer of the intellectual strata,  that May 68 had at best been a beautiful utopian dream which harsh reality had caused to fade and die. Elsewhere in our press around the same time[4], we had also criticised the scepticism which affected large parts of the revolutionary milieu, and had done so since the events of 68 themselves – a tendency notably expressed by the refusal of the main heirs of the tradition of the Italian communist left to see in May 68 anything more than a wave of petty bourgeois agitation which had done nothing to lift the dead-weight of the counter-revolution.

Both the Bordigist and Damenist wings[5] of the post-war Italian left tradition responded in this manner. Both tend to see the party as something outside of history, since they consider that it is possible to maintain it whatever the balance of forces between the classes. They thus tend to see the struggle of the workers as essentially circular in nature, since it can only be transformed in a revolutionary sense by the intervention of the party, which begs the question of where the party itself comes from. The Bordigists in particular offered a caricature of this approach in 68, when they issued leaflets insisting that the movement would only go anywhere if it put itself behind the banners of The Party (i.e, their own small political group). Our current, on the other hand, has always countered that this is an essentially idealist approach which divorces the party from its material roots in the class struggle. We considered ourselves to be carrying on the real acquisitions of the Italian communist left, in its most fruitful period theoretically – the period of the Fraction in the 1930s and 40s, when it recognised that its own diminution from the preceding stage of the party was a product of the defeat of the working class, and that only a revival of the class struggle could provide the conditions for the transformation of the existing communist fractions into a real class party.

These conditions were indeed developing after 1968, not only at the level of politicised minorities, which went through an important phase of growth in the wake of the 68 events and subsequent upsurges of the working class, but also at a more general level. The class struggle that erupted in May 68 was not a flash in the pan but the starting signal of a powerful dynamic which would quickly come to the fore on a world wide scale.

The advances in the class struggle between 1968 and 1988

Consistent with the marxist view that has long noted the wave-like process of the class movement, the article analyses three different international waves of struggle in the two decades after 68: the first, undoubtedly the most spectacular, encompassed the Italian Hot Autumn of 69, the violent uprisings in Cordoba, Argentina, in 69 and in Poland in 1970, and important movements in Spain and Britain in 1972 In Spain in particular the workers began to organise through mass assemblies, a process which reached its high point in Vitoria in 1976. The international dimension of the wave was demonstrated by its echoes in Israel (1969) and Egypt (1972) and, later on, by the uprisings in the townships of South Africa which were led by committees of struggle (the Civics)

After a short-pause in the mid-70s, there was a second wave, which included the strikes of the Iranian oil workers and the steel-workers of France in 1978, the ‘Winter of Discontent’ in Britain, the Rotterdam dock strike, led by an independent strike committee,  and the steelworkers’ strikes in Brazil in 1979 which also  challenged the control of the trade unions. This global movement culminated in the mass strike in Poland in 1980, whose level of self-organisation and unification marked it as the most important single episode in the world class struggle since 1968, and even since the 1920s. And although the severe repression of the Polish workers brought this wave to a halt, it was not long before a new upswing which took in the struggles in Belgium in 1983 and 1986, the general strike in Denmark in 1985, the miners’ strike in Britain in 1984-5, the struggles of rail and then health workers in France in 1986 and 1988, and the movement of education workers in Italy in 1987. The struggles in France Italy in particular – like the mass strike in Poland – displayed a real capacity for self-organisation through general assemblies and strike committees.

This was not a simple list of strikes. The article also highlights the fact that this wave-like movement  was not going round in circles but was generating real advances in class consciousness:

• “A simple comparison on the characteristics of the struggles of 20 years ago with those of today will allow us to see the extent of the evolution which has slowly taken place in the working class. Its own experience, added to the catastrophic evolution of the capitalist system, has enabled it to acquire a much more lucid view of the reality of its struggle. This has been expressed by;
• a loss of illusions in the political forces if the left of capital and first and foremost in the unions, towards which illusions have given way to distrust and, increasingly, an open hostility;
• the growing tendency to abandon ineffective forms of mobilisation, the dead-ends which the unions have used so many times to bury the combativity of the workers, such as days of action, token demonstrations, long and isolated strikes …

But the experience of these 20 years of struggle hasn’t only produced negative lessons for the working class (what should not be done). It has also produced lessons on what is to be done:

• the attempt to extend the struggle (especially Belgium ’86);
• the attempt by workers to take the struggle into their own hands, by organizing general assemblies and elected, revocable strike committees (France ’86, Italy ’87 in particular)”.

At the same time, the article did not neglect the bourgeoisie’s responses to the danger of the class struggle: although it had been surprised by the outbreak of the May 68 movement, resorting to crude forms of repression which acted as a catalyst for the extension of the struggle, it had subsequently learned or re-learned a great deal in how to manage the resistance of its class enemy. It did not renounce the use of repression, of course, but it found more subtle means to present and justify its use, such as the scarecrow of terrorism; meanwhile, it developed its arsenal of democratic mystifications to derail struggles – particularly in countries which were still ruled by overt dictatorships – towards bourgeois political goals. At the level of the struggles themselves, it countered workers’ growing disenchantment with the official unions and the threat of self-organisation by developing more radical forms of trade unionism, which could even include ‘extra-union’ forms (the ‘coordinations’ set up by the extreme left in France for example).

The article had begun by recognizing that much of the optimistic talk about revolution in 1968 had indeed been utopian. This was partly because the whole discussion about the possibility of revolution was distorted by leftist notions that what was happening in Vietnam or Cuba were indeed socialist revolutions to be actively supported by the working class in the central countries; but also, even when revolution was understood as something that really involved the transformation of social relations, because in 1968 the objective conditions, above all the economic crisis, had only just begun to provide the material basis for a revolutionary challenge to capital. Since then, things had become more difficult, but more profound:

• “Perhaps it is less easy to talk about revolution in 1988 than in 1968. But when today the word is shouted out in a demonstration in Rome where workers are denouncing the bourgeois nature of the unions, or at an unemployed workers demonstration in Bilbao, it has a much more profound and more concrete meaning than when it was banded about in the feverish assemblies, so full of illusions, of 1968.
  1968 affirmed the return of the revolutionary objective. For 20 years the conditions for its realization haven’t stopped maturing. Capitalism’s descent into an impasse, the increasingly unbearable situation this creates for all the exploited and oppressed classes, the experience accumulated through the fighting spirit of the workers, all this is leading to that situation of which Marx spoke, ‘in which any retreat is impossible’.”

The turning point of 1989

There is much in this analysis that we can still stand by today. And yet, we cannot help but be struck by a phrase which sums up the article’s assessment of the third wave of struggles:

• “Finally, the recent mobilisation of the workers of the Ruhr in Germany and the resurgence of strikes in Britain in 1988 (see editorial in this issue) confirmed that this third international wave of workers struggles, which has now lasted for more than four years, is far from over”.

In fact, the third wave, and indeed the entire period of struggles since 1968, was to come to a sudden halt with the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989-91 and the accompanying tide of campaigns about the death of communism. This historic change in the world situation marked the definitive onset of a new phase in the decline of capitalism – the phase of decomposition.

The ICC had noted the symptoms of decomposition earlier on in the 80s, and a discussion about its implications for the class struggle was already underway in the organisation. However, the article about May 68 in IR 53, as well as the editorial in the same issue, provide evidence that its deeper significance had not been grasped. The article on 68 has a sub-heading “20 years of decomposition” without providing an explanation for the term, while the editorial only applies it to its manifestations at the level of imperialist conflicts – the phenomenon which was then termed “Lebanonisation”, the tendency for entire nation states to disintegrate under the weight of increasingly irrational imperialist rivalries. It’s probable that these imprecisions reflected real differences which had appeared at the 8th Congress of the ICC towards the end of 1988.

The dominant mood at this Congress had been one of over-optimism and even a kind of euphoria. Partly this reflected the understandable enthusiasm created by integration of two new sections of the ICC at the Congress, in Mexico and India.  But it was expressed above all in certain analyses of the class struggle that were being put forward: the idea that new bourgeois mystifications were wearing out in a matter of months; exaggerated hopes in the struggles then taking place in Russia; the conception of a third wave that was marching ever onwards and upwards; and above all a reluctance to accept the idea that, in the face of growing social decomposition, the class struggle seemed to be “marking time” or stagnating (which, given the seriousness of the stakes involved, could only imply a tendency towards retreat or regression). This viewpoint was defended by Marc Chirik and a minority of comrades at the Congress. It was based on a clear awareness that the development of decomposition expressed a kind of historic stalemate between the classes. The bourgeoisie had not inflicted a decisive historic defeat on the working class and was not able to mobilise it for a new world war; but the working class, despite 20 years of struggle, which had held back the drive towards war, and which had indeed seen important developments in class consciousness, had been unable to develop the perspective of revolution, to raise its own political alternative to the crisis of the system. Deprived of any way forward, but still sunk in a very long-drawn out economic crisis, capitalism was beginning to rot on its feet, and this putrefaction was affecting capitalist society at every level[6].

This diagnosis was powerfully confirmed by the collapse of the eastern bloc. On the one hand, this momentous event was a product of decomposition. It highlighted the profound impasse of the Stalinist bourgeoisie, which was stuck in an economic mire but patently unable to mobilise its workers for a military solution to the bankruptcy of its economy (the struggles in Poland in 1980 had clearly demonstrated that to the Stalinist ruling class). At the same time, it exposed the severe political failings of this section of the world working class. The proletariat of the Russian bloc had certainly demonstrated its ability to fight on the defensive economic terrain, but faced with an enormous historical event which expressed itself largely at the political level, it was completely unable to offer its own alternative and as a class it was drowned in the democratic upsurge falsely described as a series of “people’s revolutions”

In turn, these events dramatically accelerated the process of decomposition on a world scale. This was most evident at the imperialist level, where the rapid break-up of the old bloc system allowed the tendency for “every man for himself” to increasingly dominate diplomatic and military rivalries. But this was also true in relation to the balance of class forces. In the wake of the debacle in the eastern bloc, the world bourgeoisie’s campaigns about the death of communism, about the impossibility of any working class alternative to capitalism, rained further blows on the ability of the international working class - notably in the central countries of the system - to generate a political perspective.

The ICC had not foreseen the events of 89-91, but we were able to respond to them with a coherent analysis based on previous theoretical work. This was true with regard both to understanding the economic factors involved in the downfall of Stalinism[7], and to predicting the growing chaos that, in the absence of blocs, would now be unleashed in the sphere of imperialist conflicts[8]. And on the level of the class struggle, we were able to see that the proletariat now faced a particularly difficult period:

• “The identification which is systematically es­tablished between Stalinism and communism, the lie repeated a thousand times, and today being wielded more than ever, according to which the proletarian revolution can only end in disaster, will for a whole period gain an added impact within the ranks of the working class. We thus have to expect a momentary retreat in the con­sciousness of the proletariat; the signs of this can already be seen in the unions' return to strength. While the incessant and increasingly brutal attacks which capitalism can't help but mount on the proletariat will oblige the workers to enter the struggle, in an initial period, this won't result in a greater capacity in the class to develop its consciousness. In particular, re­formist ideology will weigh very heavily on the struggle in the period ahead, greatly facilitating the action of the unions.
  Given the historic importance of the events that are determining it, the present retreat of the proletariat - although it doesn't call into question the historic course, the general perspective of class confrontations - is going to be much deeper than the one which accompanied the defeat of 1981 in Poland. Having said this, we cannot foresee in advance its breadth or its length. In particular, the rhythm of the col­lapse of western capitalism - which at present we can see accelerating, with the perspective of a new and open recession - will constitute a de­cisive factor in establishing the moment when the proletariat will be able to resume its march towards revolutionary consciousness[9].

This passage is very clear about the profoundly negative impact of the collapse of Stalinism, but it still contains a certain underestimation of the depth of the retreat. The estimate that this would be “momentary” already weakens the ensuing statement that the reflux will be “much deeper than the one which accompanied the defeat of 1981 in Poland”, and this problem was to manifest itself in our analyses in the years that followed, notably in the idea that certain struggles in the 90s – in 92, and again in 98 – heralded the end of the retreat. In reality, looking back over the past three decades, we can say that the retreat in class consciousness has not only continued, but has got deeper, resulting in a kind of amnesia about the acquisitions and advances of the 1968-89 period.

What are the main indicators of this trajectory?

• The impact of the economic crisis in the West has not been as straightforward as the above passage implies. The repeated convulsions of the economy have certainly weakened the boasts of the ruling class in the early 90s that, with the end of the eastern bloc, we would now enter a period of unmitigated prosperity. But the bourgeoisie has been able to develop new forms of state capitalism and economic manipulation (typified in the concept of “neo-liberalism”) that have maintained at least an illusion of growth, while the real development of the Chinese economy in particular has convinced many that capitalism is infinitely adaptable and can always find new ways of extricating itself from its crisis.  And when the underlying contradictions returned to the surface, as they did with the great financial crash of 2008, they may have stimulated certain proletarian reactions (in the period 2010-2013 for example); but at the same time, the very form this crisis took, a “credit crunch” involving a massive loss of savings for millions of workers, made it harder to respond to it on a class terrain, since the impact seemed to be more on individual householders than on an associated class[10];
• Decomposition undermines this self-awareness of the proletariat as a distinct social force in a number of ways, all of which exacerbate the atomisation and individualism inherent in bourgeois society. We can see this, for example, in the tendency towards the formation of gangs in the urban centers, expressing both a lack of any economic prospects for a considerable part of the proletarian youth, and a desperate search for a replacement community which ends up creating murderous divisions between young people based on rivalries between different neighbourhoods and estates, on competition for control of the local drug economy, or on racial and religious differences. But the economic policies of the ruling class have also deliberately attacked any sense of class identity – both through breaking up old industrial centers of working class resistance and through introducing much more atomised forms of labour, as in the so-called “gig economy” where workers are routinely treated as self-employed “entrepreneurs”.
• The mounting number of bloody and chaotic wars that characterize this period, while again flatly disproving the assertion that the end of Stalinism would gift humanity with a “peace dividend”, do not provide the basis for a general development of class consciousness as they did, for example, during World War One when the proletariat of the central countries was directly mobilised for the slaughter. The bourgeoisie has learned the lesson of past social conflicts provoked by war (including the resistance against the Vietnam war) and, in the key countries of the West, has done its best to avoid the use of conscript armies and to quarantine its wars in the peripheries of the system. This has not prevented these military confrontations from having a very real impact on the central countries, but this has mainly taken forms which tend to reinforce nationalism and reliance on the “protection” of the state: the enormous increase in the number of refugees fleeing the war zones, and the action of terrorist groups aiming to hit back at the populations of the most developed countries[11].
• At the political level, in the absence of a clear proletarian perspective, we have seen different parts of the working class being influenced by the phony critiques of the system offered by populism on the one hand and jihadism on the other. And the growing influence of “identity politics” among more educated layers of the working class is a further expression of this dynamic: the lack of class identity is made worse by the move towards fragmentation into racial, sexual and other identities, reinforcing exclusion and division, when only the proletariat fighting for its own interests can be truly inclusive.

We have to face the reality of all these difficulties and to draw their political consequences for the struggle to change society. But in our view, while the proletariat cannot avoid the harsh school of defeat, growing difficulties and even partial defeats do not yet add up to a historic defeat for the class and to the obliteration of the possibility of communism.

In the last decade or so, there have been a number of important movements which provide support for this conclusion. In 2006, we saw the massive mobilization of educated youth in France against the CPE[12]. The ruling class media often describes struggles in France, even when they are tightly controlled by the unions as in the most recent case[13], as raising the spectre of a “new May 68”, the better to distort the real lessons of May. But the 2006 movement did, in a sense, revive the genuine spirit of 68: on the one hand, because its protagonists rediscovered forms of struggle that had appeared at that time, notably general assemblies where real discussions could take place and where the young participants were eager to hear the testimony of older comrades who had taken part in the events of 68. But at the same time, this student movement, which had outflanked the trade unions, contained the real risk of drawing in the employed workers in a similarly “uncontrolled” way, precisely as in May 1968, and this is why the government withdrew the CPE legislation which had provoked the revolt in the first place.

Also in May 2006, 23000 metal workers in Vigo, in the Galician province of Spain, came out on strike against new labour rules in this sector, and instead of remaining shut up in the factories went to look for solidarity from other enterprises, in particular the shipyards and Citroën factories, organising demonstrations in the town to rally the whole population, and above all creating daily public general assemblies completely open to other workers, employed, unemployed and pensioners. These proletarian assemblies were the lungs of an exemplary struggle for a week, until the movement was caught between violent repression on the one hand and the negotiating manoeuvres of the unions and bosses.

In 2011, we saw the wave of social revolts in the Middle East and Greece, culminating in the Indignados movement in Spain and “Occupy” in the USA. The proletarian element in these movements varied from country to country, but it was at its strongest in Spain, where we saw in the widespread adoption of the assembly form; a powerful internationalist impulse which welcomed expressions of solidarity by participants from all round the world and where the slogan of “world revolution” was taken seriously, perhaps for the first time since the 1917 revolutionary wave; a recognition that “the system is obsolete” and a strong will to discuss the possibility of a new form of social organisation. In the many animated discussions that took place in the assemblies and commissions about questions of morality, science and culture, in the ubiquitous questioning of the dogma that capitalist relations are eternal -  here again we saw the real spirit of May 68 taking shape.

Of course, most of these movements had many weaknesses, which we have analysed elsewhere[14] , not least a tendency for the participants to see themselves as “citizens” rather than proletarians, and thus a real vulnerability to democratic ideology, which would enable bourgeois parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain to present themselves as the true heirs of these revolts. And in some ways, as with any proletarian defeat, the higher you climb, the further you fall: the reflux of these movements further deepened the general retreat in class consciousness. In Egypt, where the movement of the squares inspired the movement in Spain and Greece, illusions in democracy have prepared the way to the restoration of the same kind of authoritarian rule which was the initial catalyst of the “Arab spring”; in Israel, where mass demonstrations once raised the internationalist slogan “Netanyahu, Mubarak, Assad, same enemy”, the brutal militarist policies of Netanyahu’s government have now regained the upper hand. And most serious of all, in Spain, many of the young people who took part in the Indignados movement have been dragged towards the absolute dead-ends of Catalan or Spanish nationalism.   

The appearance of this new proletarian generation in the movements of 2006 and 2011 also gave rise to a new search for communist politics among a minority, but the hopes that this would give rise to a whole new influx of revolutionary forces have not, for the present at least, been realised. The communist left remains largely isolated and disunited; among the anarchists, where some interesting new developments began to take place, the search for class positions is being undermined by the influence of identity politics and even nationalism. In a third article in this series, we will look in more detail at the evolution of the proletarian political camp and its environs since 1968.

But if May 1968 teaches us anything, it shows that the working class can arise again from the worst of defeats, return from the deepest of retreats. The moments of proletarian revolt which have taken place despite the advancing threat of capitalist decomposition reveal the possibility that new movements will arise which, by regaining the perspective of revolution, can forestall the multiple dangers that decomposition poses for the future of the species.

These dangers – the spread of military chaos, of ecological catastrophe, of starvation and disease on an unprecedented scale – prove that revolution is more than ever a necessity for the human race. Capitalism’s decline and decomposition certainly magnify the threat that the objective basis of a new society will be definitively destroyed if decomposition advances beyond a certain point. But even in its last phase, capitalism still produces the forces that can be used to overthrow it – in the words of the Communist manifesto of 1848, “what the bourgeoisie produces, above all, is its own gravediggers”. Capitalism, its means of production and communication are more global than ever – but then so is the proletariat more international, more capable of communicating with itself on a world wide scale. Capitalism has become increasingly advanced technologically – but then it must educate the proletariat in the use of its science and technology which can be taken in hand ina future society for human needs rather than for profit. This more educated, internationally minded layer of the class  made its appearance again and again in recent social movement, above all in the central countries of the system, and will certainly play a key role in any future resurgence of the class struggle, as will the new proletarian armies created by capitalism’s dizzying but diseased growth in Asia and other previously “underdeveloped” regions. We have not seen the last of the spirit of May 68.

Amos, June 2018