During the 1970s, we were asked to believe that the economic crisis was due to a shortage of oil; then in the early 80s we were promised that "Reaganomics" would get us out of the crisis. But never since capitalism was once again confronted with its open crisis 30 years ago have we witnessed such a massive ideological campaign aimed at convincing us that the crisis is over, and that a new era of prosperity is opening up. The propaganda of the last few years would even have us believe in a 3rd Industrial Revolution. According to one particularly puffed protagonist of this campaign, "This is a historic event at least as vital as the industrial revolution of the 18th century (...) The industrial era was founded on the introduction and the use of new sources of energy; the "informational" era is based on the technology of knowledge production, information treatment, and the communication of symbols". On the basis of US growth figures in recent years, the media tell us endlessly that unemployment is about to disappear, that what they call the "economic cycle", characterised since the beginning of the 70s by low growth and periodic, ever-deeper, recessions, has given way to a period of uninterrupted growth, for which only the most superlative adjectives are adequate, and all that because we have entered a "new economy" born by a major technical innovation: the Internet.
What then is the content of this "revolution" that so enchants the ruling class? It is based essentially on the fact that the Internet, and the development of telecommunications networks generally, allows information to be stocked, and delivered instantly whatever the distance. Supposedly, this will bring buyers and sellers together on a planetary scale, whether they be individual consumers or companies. Since companies can thus do away with commercial services in order to buy and sell, commercial costs will diminish considerably. Markets will thus get bigger, since thanks to the Internet every producer will have instantaneous access to a planetary market. The appearance on the Internet of commodities requiring significant technical knowledge of a new kind will encourage the creation of new companies: the famous "start-ups" have a bright future before them in terms of growth and profits. This will encourage greater productivity within industry, since the circulation of information will allow better and cheaper co-ordination of services and factories. It will also be possible to reduce stocks, since production and sale will be instantaneously related, whence savings in the cost of buildings and storage. The costs of marketing will be reduced, since advertisements published on the Internet can potentially reach everyone connected to it. Another point, whose political consequences are particularly important, is the media's insistence on the new impetus given to innovation, since the Internet is based on knowledge alone and not on costly machinery; this is supposedly going to democratise innovation, and since innovation makes it possible to create start-ups, everyone will be able to get rich.
Yet despite these cries of triumph in the media, there are nonetheless a series of discordant notes which suggest thaat there may be some doubt as to the imminence of this wonderful new period: for one thing, everybody agrees that poverty is growing throughout the world, that "inequality" is getting worse in the developed countries, and that far from rising to their fabulous destiny in the new economy more and more start-ups are turning into shut-downs. A number of these new entrepreneurs, up to their necks in debt, are likely to join their employees in the army of the "new poor". Moreover, the extravagant rise in share prices, especially those associated with the new technologies, is a cause for alarm among many economic leaders who fear that such a rise runs the risk of causing a financial crisis which the world economy will be unable to absorb.
The myth of increasing productivity
If we are to examine the significance of the "new economy" seriously, we need to take account of the fact that many experts believe that the growth in the labour productivity of the US economy, after falling from its level of 2.9% annually at the end of the 1960s, has risen again for several years, to reach 3.9% during the 1990s. This is supposed to mean that capitalism has entered a new period.
First of all, these figures are debatable: for example, R. Gordon of North-western University in the US (writing in the Financial Times of 4th August 1999) estimates that growth in hourly labour productivity has risen from 1.1% prior to 1995, to 2.2% between 1995 and 1999. Moreover, for many statisticians these figures are not very strong arguments, for several reasons:
Spurred on by competition, capitalism achieves technical progress, which does indeed increase labour productivity. But capitalism has always done this, and the figures certainly do not show us to be in an exceptional period that constitutes a real divide with the decades that went before.
Most importantly, however, the comparisons between the industrial revolution at the end of the 18th century and what is happening today are completely false. Steam power, and all the great inventions of the 19th century, made it possible for the worker to produce a far greater quantity of use values with the same amount of labour time; this allowed the bourgeoisie to extract a higher surplus value - which of course was the object of the exercise. Labour productivity has certainly risen during the 20th century, especially during the last 30 years, thanks to the automation of production. This has given the bourgeoisie and its specialists an argument to claim that the white-coated computer operator glued to his screen on the factory floor is not a worker (presumably the robots work by themselves!), and that the working class is consequently a disappearing species.
This is not what is happening with the Internet. The worker still produces the same quantity of goods in a given time. The Internet changes absolutely nothing from the point of view of production. With all its noise about the "new economy", the bourgeoisie is trying to make us believe that capitalism is a world of traders, and to make us forget that before a commodity can be sold, it first has to be produced; they are thus trying to blind us to the fact that the working class is the real heart of society today, the class which for the most part keeps the rest of society alive.
The decline in commercial costs is not going to stop the crisis
Even if the Internet, or any other invention, were to reduce the cost of marketing in a manner analogous to the railways in the 19th century which divided the cost of transport by 20, thus reducing the price of goods, it would still not create new economic growth. The railways made powerful economic growth possible, because they transported goods for which there existed an expanding market: capitalism was in the process of conquering the entire planet, and using it as a source of new markets. Today, no such new markets exist. Selling on the Internet will simply lead to the disappearance of a whole series of commercial activities. The result? Jobs will disappear, and will not be replaced by new Internet jobs, precisely because the Internet makes it possible to reduce the cost of selling to the consumer or to other companies. The same is true of the progress that the Internet is supposed to bring to company reorganisation. None other than John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, one of the biggest companies in the new technology sector, tells us so: "We have got rid of thousands of unproductive jobs by using the Internet for relations with our employees, our suppliers, and our clients (...) the same is true for expense claims. As a result, there are now only two people checking the expense claims of our 26,6,000 employees (...) We have been able to cut 3,000 jobs from after-sales service" (quoted in Le Monde, 28/03/2000). And to make the message absolutely clear, he adds: "In ten years, any company that has not moved completely onto the network [ie has not eliminated all these jobs] will be dead". This implies a reduction in the wages distributed by these companies, which of course does nothing in itself to increase global solvent demand, which would be necessary for an economic recovery. In the absence of new external outlets, which is the case overall in decadent capitalism, innovation - whether at the commercial level or not - cannot resolve the crisis, just as it cannot create new jobs. True, Chambers tells us that he has "redeployed these 3,000 people to research and development", but this is only possible due to the sharp rise in Cisco's sales thanks to the wave of Internet and network installations; as soon as these installations near completion, Cisco will obviously no longer be able to pay for such substantial R&D.
The Internet bubble collapses
There is thus nothing really new in today's economic evolution, and however desperately the bourgeoisie seeks for signs of a new and rising "Kondratieff cycle", they won't find salvation there. We can see a proof in what can only be called a crash in technology shares during spring 2000. Between 10th March and 14th April 2000, the NASDAQ (the US high-tech stock exchange) lost 34% of its value; Internet companies like boo.com (financed by powerful financial groups such as J.P. Morgan Bank and the French businessman B. Arnault) went bust. This bankruptcy will be followed by others; the markets are already circulating lists of Internet companies in difficulty, one of the best-known being Amazon, the online bazaar as famous in its home town of Seattle as Boeing, and whose growing financial difficulties are causing new jitters on Wall Street. According to the Gartner Group, between 95% and 98% of companies in the sector are under threat (Le Monde, 13th June 2000), which is merely a confirmation of the fact that their apparently extraordinary take-off is nothing but a speculative bubble full of hot air.
And if the "new economy" does not exist, neither is the Internet the means to re-launch the economy as a whole, known today as the "old economy". One of the reasons that Amazon.com is on the verge of bankruptcy is that its entry into competition with the distribution majors has led the latter to react: Wal-Mart, the world's number one distributor, is also selling now on the Internet. Faced with the competition of these new companies threatening to "cannibalise" their markets, the "old" companies hhave not been long to react, as a manager in one of France's big distribution companies explains: "At Promodes, we came to the conclusion that if we didn't do so, somebody else would cannibalise our activity" (Le Monde, 25th April 2000). As this manager recognises implicitly, when he speaks of "cannibalising", the companies which decide to sell on the Internet (as we have already seen in the case of Cisco) do not create jobs but eliminate them. In the same issue of Le Monde, we read that the Internet is at least partially responsible for the loss of 3,000 jobs in the UK bank Lloyd's TSB, 1,500 jobs at Prudential Insurance, and that the American distributor of computer software, Egghead, has closed 77 shops out of 156.
These are the real effects of the so-called "new economy". The real measures that companies are adopting as regards the Internet are nothing but a moment in the deadly competition among capitalists, for a market which was saturated long ago. This trade war can also be seen in the wave of mergers and buy-outs, which has been going on for a decade and which is now on the increase. Today, the best way to dominate in the world market is to buy out the competition's market and productive apparatus: "During 1999, this market exploded by 123%, to reach 1,870 billion francs (...) a planetary race to increase in size has begun" (Le Monde, 11th April 2000). Within the framework of decadent capitalism, during these bouts of competitive fever every sector of the bourgeoisie always has at least one method of confronting the competition: attacking the living conditions of the working class. For example, it is well known that these monster mergers almost invariably lead to job losses.
The huge increase in "new technology" share prices, which boosted share prices in general throughout the developed world's stock markets, far from heralding a new period of economic growth is merely the fruit of the bourgeois state's attempts to confront an ever-deepening crisis by using debt: according to the managing director of Altavista France, you needed merely "to get together 200,000 francs with a few friends to attract 4 million francs from a venture capitalist; then you spend half of that on advertising in order to launch on the stock exchange and raise another 20 million" (L'Expansion, 27th April 2000); from the point of view of accumulation, this is simply absurd. Since there is no really productive outlet for investment, money can only be placed in unproductive activities such as advertising, which are connected to competition, and end up turning to speculation - whether on the stock exchange, the financial markets, or in oil futures. This is the only explanation for thhe way in which new technology share prices - before they collapsed - increased by 100% during the year, when most of the issuing companies had only ever lost money. There is nothing new in this either, since the bourgeoisie has been developing non-productive activity ever since it first understood that the 1929 crisis would not end in a spontaneous recovery as had been the case with the crises of the 19th century. Some bourgeois journals have been forced to recognise this: "The Net economy may correct the long-term tendency to [a decline in] productivity (...), but the mainspring of economic activity is the debt economy (...) The ascendant phase was prolonged by credit far more than by the rise in new technologies, which are merely an alibi for speculation" (L'Expansion, 13th April 2000). And this speculation can only, as we have seen for 20 years, lead to new financial convulsions like the one we are witnessing today.
The "new economy" hides economic attacks on the working class
The media propaganda around the Internet's transformation of society would see us all networking, taking part in the process of innovation, and contributing to the progress of our companies by becoming shareholders. The reality of the "new economy" shows us that this is all an immense bluff. There is every chance that the founding share-holderers of bankrupt start-ups will find themselves reduced to poverty, while all those who were conned by advertising into speculating in shares on the Internet - supposed to increase their income at the cost of a mere 20% down-payment on the price of their shares - have been forced, since the crash, to reduce their income for years to come in order to repay the bank loans they contracted to buy the shares in the first place. Paying wage-earners with stock options, or forcing them to buy shares in the company, does not transform workers into shareholders; on the contrary, it represents a two-fold reduction in wages. Firstly, the part of their income that the wage-earners accept to leave in the hands of the employer is nothing less than an increase in surplus-value and a wage reduction in the short term. Secondly, however enticing the offers made to get wage-earners to accept the idea of owning shares in "their" company, this in fact makes their income dependent on the company's future success: if share prices fall, the wage-earner's income falls also. Today's fashion for "people's capitalism" is a myth: it is the bourgeoisie, whether through the state apparatus or company management, which owns the means of production which function as capital, and it can only valorise the capital by exploiting the working class. The worker cannot gain all or part of this valorisation, precisely because for capital to be valorised, and to make a profit, the worker can only be paid the value of his labour power. If the bourgeoisie has created pension funds, or worker share-holding, it is because today's capitalist crisis is so deep that all methods are good to reduce the value of labour power today and tomorrow, by making it dependent on share prices. The collapse in technology shares today gives an idea of what will happen in the future to the workers' incomes which, in one way or another, are dependent on share prices.
In the final analysis the bourgeoisie's efforts to promote worker share-holding is nothing but another attack on their living and working conditions. The casualisation of employment allows capital, whenever necessary, to eject the worker from production overnight. Worker share-holding allows it to reduce the income of active or retired workers whenever the situation of the company, or of capital in general, deteriorates.
There is another economic attack hidden behind the deafening campaign over the "new economy". Connecting the company to the Internet means that information becomes instantly available, and that there is no longer any pause between two tasks: once one task is finished, the next is immediately presented via the network, any task can be instantaneously modified, etc.; tasks are assigned more and more rapidly, the rhythm becomes infernal to the point that we can easily understand that "at least one third of employees connected to the Internet work at least 6.5 hours a week at home - to get some peace and quiet�" (Le Monde, 13th April 2000). The apparently generous gift of a computer that some large companies are offering their employees (Ford 300,000, Vivendi 250,000, Intel 70,000) is particularly revelatory of this desire to have the workforce permanently at work. Repeated denials of any such desire are disingenuous to say the least, when Ford management declares that the aim is to make its employees "better able to respond to customers", and to give them "the habit of a greater exchange of information". More and more experts in workplace organisation consider that in the "information society" it is increasingly difficult to tell where work begins or ends, and that the notion of working time itself is becoming vague; this is confirmed by employees themselves, who say that since they can be contacted at home, "they never stop working" (Liberation, 26th May 2000). In fact the bourgeoisie's ideal is that all workers should become like the founders of a Silicon Valley start-up, who "work 13-14 hours per day, 6 days a week, in a workspace 2 metres square (...) who never take a break or even lunch, and never stop to chat in the cafeteria" (L'Expansion, 16th March 2000). And these working conditions are the general rule in every start-up in the world.
The attack on working class consciousness
The monstrous media campaign has yet another aim, still more important. The reality behind the "new economy", where everyone networks, is transformed into an "innovator" or a shareholder, shows that this is all a great bluff, but it is a bluff with a purpose.
First of all, it claims that society, at least in the developed countries, is undergoing a real improvement, and that if working conditions come under attack in this or that company or state administration then this is an exception, a special case. It claims that if the workers try to resist, then their struggle can only be an anachronistic rearguard action, and that as a result they are bound to be isolated. The propaganda about the "new economy" is first and foremost a means to demoralise the workers, to avoid their discontent being transformed into combativity.
Moreover, it claims that society is changing to such a point that capitalism itself is being transformed, so that any project of overthrowing capitalism has become meaningless. We are told that whoever takes part in the "new economy" will become rich: he will go beyond his condition as a member of the working class. But whoever does not enter this network-innovator-shareholder trilogy will become the victim of a "greater inequality of income", a new "fracture" in society, which is no longer divided into bourgeoisie and working class, but into the members of the "new economy" and those excluded from it. To drive the point home, we are told that participation in the "new economy" is a matter of intelligence and determination. According to the review Business 2000, "You are either rich or a cretin".
All this is completed by propaganda proclaiming the transformation of the company, where value is created, where labour power is exploited, and where classes are defined. Just as someone who has access to wealth thanks to his participation in the "new economy" cannot be described as a worker, so the enterprise - where wealth is produced - is no longer divided into the bourgeois (who possess capital) and the workers (who possess nothing but their labour power): "the 'new economy' means more teamwork: the employees are a real 'team', they are associated with the wealth of the company by stock options", according to the director of BVRP Software (Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2000).
In fact, the underpaid, casual, or unemployed workforce, who are not part of the "new economy", represent the vast majority of the working class. The wealth-producing class is not represented by the student in Silicon Valley or elsewhere, who is conned by the mirage of riches just within his grasp. The wealth-producing class, the working class, is exploited more and more by the bourgeoisie, and when it can no longer be exploited it is ejected from production by unemployment. Confronted with these attacks, the working class has no choice but to fight back. And for this, the workers' consciousness of the struggle's necessity and perspectives is essential.
In the final analysis, the themes and objectives of the propaganda around the "new economy" are the same as that around the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989.
On the one hand, there is the attempt to strip workers of their class identity, by presenting society as a community of "citizens", where social classes, and the division and conflict between exploiters and exploited have disappeared. Yesterday this claim was supposedly proven by the bankruptcy of the "socialist", "workers'" regimes, today by the myth that workers and bosses have the same interests because they are all shareholders in the same company.
On the other hand, the aim is to deprive the working class of any perspective outside capitalism. Yesterday this was supposedly demonstrated by the "bankruptcy of socialism". Today,ay, by the idea that even if capitalism has its faults, even if it is incapable of eliminating poverty, or wars, or disasters of every kind, it is nonetheless capable of functioning, of guaranteeing progress and of overcoming its crises.
But the very fact that the bourgeoisie needs to use such extensive ideological campaigns, the fact that it is preparing new economic attacks, means that it scarcely believes itself in the fairytale land of the "new economy". The sophisticated economic policy deployed by Alan Greenspan, head of the US Federal Reserve, to ensure a "soft landing" for the US economy, after years of debt and trade deficits and just as inflation is on the rise, is scarcely an indication of a new period of unimaginable economic growth. "Soft landing", or a more serious recession: these real facts confirm what marxism has already shown: that capitalism's reconstruction after World War II has been followed by a decline into a new economic crisis, which capitalism is absolutely incapable of overcoming, and that this crisis is plunging an ever-growing part of humanity into absolute pauperisation, and making life ever more difficult for the whole of the working class. Capitalism's future offers us nothing more than a continuing degradation. Only the proletariat can create a society ruled by abundance, because it alone can be the basis for a society which produces for the satisfaction of human need and not for the profits of a minority. This society is called communism.
JS, June 2000
Resolution on the international situation
The international situation in the year 2000 confirms the tendency, already analysed by the ICC at the beginning of the last decade, for a gap to open up between a growing open crisis of the decadent capitalist economy, and an abrupt acceleration of imperialist antagonisms on the one hand and a retreat in class struggle and class consciousness on the other.
Marxism has never claimed or expected th claimed or expected that there would be a mathematical connection between these phenomena that characterise the "epoch of wars and revolutions" (to use the Communist International's phrase); that X amount of crisis would always be equal to Y amount of class struggle. Its task instead is to understand the perspective of proletarian revolution by assessing the inherent tendencies of each of these three factors and their reciprocal action, where the economic factor is the determinant one in the last analysis.
The open crisis that began at the end of the 1960s brought to an end the post-Second World War reconstruction period. The class struggle re-emerged after 40 years of counter-revolution as a consequence of this crisis, with a perspective of decisive class confrontations with the bourgeoisie that would lead either to the communist revolution of the proletariat, or, as the Communist Manifesto put it, the "ruin of the contending classes" (through imperialist war or other catastrophes).
Marxism is not dismayed that this historical tendency towards class confrontations is not verified by the appearance of the relative passivity of the proletariat at the present time. It goes beneath the surface to fully understand social reality.
1) Capitalism's historic crisis is progressively exhausting the palliatives intended to overcome it. The Keynesian expansionist solution to the problems of the world economy ran out of steam at the end of the 70s. Neo-liberal austerity was mainly a creature of the 80s, although the ideology of globalisation after the collapse of the USSR extended its life span into the 90s. The latter half of this decade and the current period are characterised mostly however by the collapse of these economic models and their replacement by a pragmatic response to the inexorable deepening of the crisis that swings between overt state intervention and allowing the "sanction of the market".
State capitalism, the characteristic form of decadent capitalism has no intention of giving up its ability to phase in the economic crisis, but it cannot overcome it due to the insufficiency of solvent markets which results in a permanent crisis of overproduction.
2) New markets have failed to materialise. After the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the break-up of Stalinism, the world victory of western capitalism in 1989 has failed to open up unheard-of possibilities for selling its products, as promised by the architects of the new world order.
The eastern European countries have failed to provide the expected opportunities for capitalist expansion. Instead there has been a collapse of production in Russia and most of its ex-satellites. The poverty of its population, the absencsence of any business legality has seen a flow of wealth in the reverse direction to western banks, and a de-investment in Russian industry.
All the wars of the decade, from the Gulf to Kosovo, despite their massive destruction, have failed to create the expected opportunities for reconstruction. Instead the slaughter of populations, the destruction and dislocation of the economy, further contracts the market.
3) The various locomotives of the world economy have been derailed. The reunification of Germany has finally ended the economic "miracle": mass unemployment, sluggish growth and massive debts testify to it. East Germany turned out to be a heavy burden, not a new field for capital accumulation.
Japan, the world economy's most important supplier of liquidity and the second largest economy in the world, has failed to emerge from stagnation throughout the decade, not least because of the contraction and then collapse of the South East Asian economies in 1997.
After the crash of these economic "tigers" and "dragons" in the east, weakening the emerging Chinese "economic powerhouse", other growth engines in the third world, like Mexico and Brazil, broken down.
Only the United States has apparently reversed this trend, with the longest period of economic expansion in its history. But instead of re-ignie-igniting the embers of the world economy the expansion of the American economy has only prevented them from being extinguished entirely and at an enormous cost. There has been a new explosion of the US trade deficit and new levels of indebtedness.
4) The gadgets of technological innovation do not overcome capitalism's inherent contradictions. In decadent capitalism the main driving force behind technological change, the growth of the productive forces, has been the needs of the military sector, the means of destruction.
Both the computer "revolution" and now the Internet "revolution" are attempts to graft these spin-offs of war (the Pentagon has always been the world's leading user of computers and the Internet was originally created for military purposes) onto the capitalist economy as a whole to give it a new lease of life.
The Internet gold rush is still in full swing, as indicated by the fantastic worth assigned to "technology stocks" by the Dow Jones to companies which have sometimes made no profits but are valued entirely on the basis of hypothetical future wealth. Indeed most of the growth in stock market speculation today is driven by e-commerce. Enormous investments and record mergers are being carried through in the hope of finding a new Eldorado.
Developments in technology certainly can speed up production, cut cut distribution costs, and provide new sources of advertising revenue, better exploiting existing markets. But unless the consequent expansion of production can find new solvent markets the development of the productive forces that new technology promises will remain fictional. Its benefits can only be partially utilised by capitalism, to centralise and rationalise certain sectors of the economy - usually those in the service sector.
It has to be emphasised that the "new economy" frenzy which has seized hold of investors is itself an expression of capitalism's economic impasse. Marx already showed this in his day: stock exchange speculation does not reveal the sound health of the economy but the fact that it is sliding towards bankruptcy.
5) The impasse of the capitalist economy is much sharper than in the 1930s but it is disguised and drawn out by a number of factors. In the 30s the crisis hit the two strongest capitalist nations, the United States and Germany, the first and worst, and led to a collapse of world trade and a depression. Since 1968 however the bourgeoisie has profited from the lessons of this experience in facing up to the re-emergence of the crisis, drawing lessons that have not been forgotten in the 90s. The world bourgeoisie under the domination of the US has not resorted to protectionism on the scale of the 30s.
By using measureures of international capitalist co-ordination — the IMF, World Bank, WTO, new currency blocs — it has been possible to avoid this outcome and instead push the crisis onto the weakest and most peripheral areas of the world economy.
6) In understanding the point which the decay of capitalism has reached we must distinguish between its conjunctural manifestation in the cycles of crisis, war, reconstruction, new crisis - and the "business cycles" that still punctuate the life of the capitalist economy.
It is these recessions and recoveries (four since 1968) that enable the bourgeoisie to pretend that the economy is still healthy by pointing to continued or renewed growth. The bourgeoisie can conceal this growth's diseased dependence on massive "super-debt", and the parasitic expansion of various waste industries (arms, advertising, etc). It can thus hide the weaker nature of each recovery and the increasing strength of each recession under a mass of misleading statistics about real growth, unemployment, etc
For revolutionaries the proof of capitalism's bankruptcy therefore does not lie only in the increasingly severe but temporary official falls in production during recessions, or in stock market "corrections", but in the worsening manifestations of an insoluble and permanent crisis of overproduction taken as an historic whole. It is the open crisis sis of capitalist decadence that propels the proletariat onto the road that leads to the seizure of power on the one hand, or if it fails, makes the present slide into militarist barbarism irreversible.
7) It is only in the moral imperatives of vulgar materialism that the class struggle should inevitably answer the deepening of the economic crisis with a corresponding force.
For marxism, it is certainly the economic crisis that reveals to the proletariat the nature of its historic tasks in their entirety. However the tempo of the class struggle, as well as having its own "laws of motion", is also profoundly effected by developments in the "superstructural" regions of society: at the social, political and cultural levels.
The non-identity between the rhythm of the economic crisis and that of the class struggle was already apparent in the period between 1968-89. The successive waves of struggle for example did not correspond directly to the hills and troughs of the economic crisis. The ability of state capitalism to slow down the acceleration of the crisis has often interrupted the rhythm of the class struggle.
But, more importantly, unlike the period 1917-23, the class struggle has not developed overtly at the political level. The fundamental break that the proletariat made with the counter-revolution after May 68 in France wnce was expressed essentially in a determined defence by the working class at the economic level, where it began to re-learn many lessons about the anti-working class role of the trade unions. But the weight of the parties that had, at different stages, gone over to the counter-revolution during the past century - of the social democratic, Stalinist and Trotskyist varieties - and the minuscule influence of the left communist tradition on the other - prevented the "politicisation" of the struggles.
The stalemate in the class struggle that has resulted - a bourgeoisie unable to unleash another world war (because of the continued resistance of the working class to the demands of capitalism in crisis), a working class unable to finish off the bourgeoisie, has led to the period of the decomposition of world capitalism.
8) For certain narrow conceptions of marxism, the evolution of the superstructure of society can only be an effect not a cause. But the decomposition of capitalist society at the social, political and military levels has significantly retarded the evolution of the class struggle. While mechanical materialism looks for the cause of class peace in a supposed reorganisation of capitalism, marxism shows how the absence of perspective that characterises today's period delays and obscures the development of class consciousness.
The campaigns abs about the death of communism and the victory of capitalist democracy that have flowered on the ruins of USSR have disoriented the world proletariat. The working class has felt its impotence in the face of a succession of bloody imperialist conflicts whose real motives have been obscured behind humanitarian or democratic propaganda and a facade of unity among the major powers.
The gradual decay of the social infrastructure in education, housing, transport, health, environment, and food has created a climate of despair that affects proletarian consciousness.
Likewise the corruption of the political and business apparatus and the decline of artistic culture strengthens cynicism everywhere.
The development of mass unemployment particularly amongst youth, leading to lumpenisation and the normalisation of drug culture, begins to corrode the solidarity of the proletariat.
9) In place of the language of truth of the right wing governments of the 80s, the bourgeoisie now speaks with a neo-reformist and populist dialect in order to smother the class identity of the proletariat. Bringing the left of the bourgeoisie into government has proved to be the ideal means of making the most of the proletariat's disarray. No longer speaking the language of struggle as it did in opposition in the eighties, the left parties in government are ware well equipped to give a softer edge to the attacks on working class living standards. They are better able to obscure militarist barbarism with a humanitarian rhetoric. And they are more suited to correcting the failures of neo-liberal economic policies with more direct state intervention.
10) Nevertheless the working class suffered no lasting defeat in 1989, and since 1992 it has taken up the struggle to defend its interests.
The proletariat is slowly and unevenly regaining confidence in its capacities. And through the development of combativity we can expect to see an increasing distrust of the trade unions, who, in concert with the left governments, are trying to isolate and fragment the struggles and give them the political agenda of the ruling class.
Nevertheless, we cannot expect to see, at least in the short to medium term, a decisive shift in advantage toward the proletariat, one that would put the present strategy of the bourgeoisie in question.
11) In the longer term the potential for the proletariat to strengthen itself politically and close the gap on its class enemy is intact, linked to the following factors:
12) And while it is undeniable that there has been over the last decade an ebbing of class consciousness in the proletariat as a whole, on the other hand, the events of these years have led to a profound questioning and reflection in the most advanced sections of the working class - even if they are still only tiny minorities. This has tended to lead them towards the positions and history of the communist left. The international development of discussion circles confirms this.
Of course, at present, the bourgeoisie can officially ignore these developments and present today's revolutionary organisations as completely irrelevant.
But the ideological campaigns on the supposed death of communism, the end of thend of the working class and its history; the attempt to equate proletarian internationalism with negationism; the attempt to infiltrate and destroy revolutionary organisations; all this testifies to the bourgeoisie's concern for the long term maturation of the revolutionary consciousness of the working class. As a historical class, the proletariat is much more than the level of its struggles at any particular time would suggest.
In the 30s, in another period, the Italian left grappled with the lessons of the defeat of the Russian revolution, when the proletariat had been mobilised behind the bourgeoisie. Today's revolutionary minorities must complete the foundations of the future party, not least by accelerating the process of unification of today's proletarian political milieu.
In future insurrections of the proletariat, the revolutionary party will be as decisive as it was in 1917.
13) The course of history is still towards decisive class confrontations, but the collapse of the bi-polar imperialist world in 1989, rather than ushering a new epoch of peace, has made it more likely than before that the scales of history will be tipped in favour of the bourgeoisie's "solution" to the economic crisis - the destruction of humanity through imperialist war or environmental catastrophe. The imperialist blocs required the adhesion of the proletariat to the res respective camps and thus the prior defeat of the working class. The imperialist free-for-all since 1989, and the growing decomposition of society, means that irreversible barbarism can occur without this kind of mobilisation.
14) The tendency toward the re-formation of imperialist blocs remains an important factor of the world situation. But the collapse of the old Eastern bloc has given the centrifugal tendencies of world imperialism the upper hand. The removal of the counter-weight to the US bloc has led the former satellites of the two post-Yalta constellations to spin off in different directions and pursue their conflicting interests autonomously. And for this very reason the US has been obliged to resist the threat to its hegemony. The military weakness of Germany or Japan, in particular their lack of nuclear weapons and their political difficulty in developing them, means that these powers are unable to provide a sufficient magnet for the formation of a rival bloc.
15) Consequently imperialist tensions are exploding in the most chaotic way under the impulse of decadent capitalism's economic impasse, that accentuates competition between each nation. Those who are wrongly expecting a period of relative peace within which capitalist blocs will re-form are vastly underestimating the danger of imperialist war that is developing both at the qualitative and qua quantitative levels.
The NATO war in Kosovo in 1999 has in particular led to a marked acceleration in imperialist tensions and conflict around the world. It saw the first bombing of a European city, and the first armed intervention of German imperialism since the 2nd World War. The immediate launching of a second Chechnyan war by Russia showed imperialist terror had been given a new respectability.
There is a gradual but increasingly simultaneous extension of imperialist conflict to all the great strategic zones of the planet:
Although imperialist war is as yet mainly confined to the peripheral areas of world capitalism, the increasing participation of the great powers indicates that its ultimate logic is to consume most of the main industrial and population centres of the globe.
16) Bloody as the present conflicts already are, the recent development of a new arms race means that the imperialist powers are preparing for future wars of real mass destruction. The brief hiatus in increased military expenditure after 1989 is coming to an end. Lord Robertson, the new Secretary General of NATO, has warned the European powers that they must increase defence spending to be able to keep a war going "for at least a year". The new central European NATO powers - Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary - are having to upgrade their ageing military airforce.
The United States is providing an important stimulus to this deathly spiral. Its decision to push ahead with its "missile defence" system has already brought forth a more aggressive nuclear policy by Russia and threatens to tear up the SALT 1 and 2 agreements. And the United States already spends $50 billion a year on maintaining its existing nuclear arsenal.
The significance of the nuclear arming of India and Pakistan, as far as new wars between these two rivals are concerned, hardly needs comment.
17) We will look in vain for a serious economic rationale for today's growing military chaos. The decadence of capitalism signified that the growing appetites of the industrialised imperialist powers could henceforth only be satisfied by a re-division of the world market, in direct competition with rivals of comparable strength. Wars to open up new markets against pre-capitalist empires were replaced by world wars of survival. Thus strategic motives had taken the place of directly economic objectives in waging imperialist war. War had become the way of life of capitalism, reinforcing its economic bankruptcy on a global scale.
Even so the world wars of the 20th century and the preparation for them still had a logic and order: the forging of blocs and spheres of influence in order to reorganise and reconstruct the world after militarily defeating the enemy. Consequently, despite the tendency for mutual ruination, there was still a certain economic logic in the military posture of the competing powers. It was the have-not nations who had the most interest in militarily disturbing the status quo, and the haves who opted for a defensive strategy.
18) Today, this long term strategic rationalityality of purpose has been replaced by a more short term survival instinct, dominated by the particular interests of each state.
The United States can no longer play the role it did between 1914-17 and 39-41, waiting for its rivals and allies to exhaust themselves before entering the fray. Thus the main economic beneficiary of the two world wars will have to increasingly exhaust itself in the military effort to preserve its world hegemony without the hope of re-creating a stable bloc around it.
Germany, the main contender to rival the US, is economically strong, but has no realistic hope of creating a rival military pole.
The rival secondary imperialisms have no possibility of offsetting their weaknesses by coalescing around rival superpowers. Instead each one has to go it alone - to punch above its weight - with more hope of frustrating the alliances of rivals than of forging its own, and even being forced into wars against its allies - as Britain and France were against Serbia in the Kosovo war - in order to stay in the game.
19) In this situation war today increasingly appears purposeless, as war for its own sake. The destruction of towns and villages, the devastation of regions, ethnic cleansing, turning whole populations into refugees or the direct massacring of defenceless civilians seems to be the objective of imperialerialist war rather than the consequence of actual military, let alone economic, goals. There are no lasting or clear-cut victors but a temporary stalemate, before renewed battles of increased destruction.
The reconstruction of war-devastated countries that used to be the only possible and temporary economic benefit of war is today a fantasy. Old war zones will remain as rubble.
But ultimately this situation is only the logical outcome of an economic system whose tendencies to self-destruction have become dominant.
This is what is meant by the irrationality of war in the decadence of capitalism. The period of decomposition has only taken it to an anarchic conclusion. War is no longer undertaken to further economic goals, or even for organised strategic objectives, but as short term, localised and fragmented attempts to survive at each other's expense.
But humanity's time has not run out yet. The world proletariat has not yet been defeated in its main concentrations in the advanced capitalist countries nor been turned into canon-fodder. Despite the retreat which the working class has been through since 1989, it is still possible for it to catch up with history. The ineluctable aggravation of the economic crisis will act on the growth of class militancy and the development of consciousness about the historic bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, which are the preconditions for the working class to fulfil its capacity to carry out the communist revolution.
Anarchism today has the wind in its sails. Anarchist ideas, in the form both of the emergence and strengthening of anarcho-syndicalism, and of the appearance of numerous small libertarian groups, are getting off the ground in several countries (and are getting more and more attention from the capitalist media). This is perfectly explicable inperfectly explicable in the present historic period.
The collapse of the Stalinist regimes at the end of the 1980s allowed the bourgeoisie to unleash unprecedented campaigns proclaiming the "death of communism". These had a definite impact on the working class, and even on elements who rejected the capitalist system and hoped to see its revolutionary overthrow. According to the bourgeoisie's campaigns, the bankruptcy of what has been presented as "socialism" or even "communism" marks the bankruptcy of Marx's ideas, which the Stalinist regimes had transformed into an official ideology (by systematically falsifying them, needless to say).
Marx, Lenin, Stalin - all the same enemy: this is the theme rehashed for years by every fraction of the ruling class. The anarchist current has defended exactly the same theme ever since the creation in the USSR of one of the most barbaric regimes that decadent capitalism has produced. The anarchists have always considered marxism as "authoritarian" by nature, and for them the Stalinist dictatorship was the inevitable result of the application of Marx's ideas. In this sense, the present success of the anarchist and libertarian currents is essentially a fall-out from the bourgeoisie's campaigns, a sign of their impact on those elements who refuse to accept capitalism, but who are trapped by all the lies that have inundated us dururing the last ten years. The current that presents itself as the most radical opponent of bourgeois order thus owes a large part of its progress to the concessions which it makes, and has always made, to the classic ideological themes of the bourgeoisie.
That being said, there are many anarchists and libertarians today who feel somewhat uncomfortable with all this.
On the one hand, they find it hard to swallow the behaviour of the most important organisation in the history of anarchism, which had the most determining influence on the working class of a whole country: the Spanish CNT. It is obviously difficult to lay claim to the tradition of an organisation which, after years of propaganda for "direct action", of denouncing any kind of participation in the bourgeois political game of parliamentarism, of fiery speeches against the state in all its forms, found nothing better to do in 1936 than to send four ministers to the bourgeois government of the Spanish Republic and several councillors to the Catalan Generalitat. In May 1937, when the Barcelona workers rose against the government's police (controlled by the Stalinists), these anarchist ministers called on them to lay down their arms and "fraternise" with their executioners. In other words, they stabbed the workers in the back. This is why some libertarians today prefer to look back to the currents that emerged within anarchism, and which tried to oppose the criminal policies of the CNT: currents like the Friends of Durruti, which in 1937 fought the CNT's official line, to the point where the Spanish CNT denounced them as traitors and excluded them. It is to clarify the nature of this current that we are publishing the article that follows, drawn from a pamphlet on the war of 1936 published by the ICC's section in Spain.
On the other hand, some of those who turn towards libertarian ideas realise (it's not too difficult) the emptiness of anarchist ideology, and look for other reference points to reinforce its classic thinkers (Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, etc). And what better reference could they find than Marx himself, whose "disciple" Bakunin once declared himself to be? Determined to reject the bourgeois lies, which make marxism responsible for all the woes that have befallen Russia since 1917, they try to oppose Lenin to Marx, and so fall under the influence of these same campaigns, which always portray Stalin as Lenin's faithful heir. To promote a "libertarian marxism", they therefore try to return to the tradition of the German and Dutch Communist Left, whose main theoreticians - such as Otto Rühle to begin with, and Anton Pannekoek later - considered that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a bourgeois revolution, led by a bourgeois Bolshevik Party, which itself was inspired by a bourgeois-Jacobin thinker, Lenin. The comrades of the German and Dutch Lefts were always very clear on the fact that they drew wholly from marxism, and nothing from anarchism, and rejected any attempt to reconcile the two currents. This does not prevent some of today's anarchists from trying to annex the Dutch and German Lefts, nor certain - often sincere - elements from trying to work out a "libertarian marxism", and succeeding in the impossible synthesis between anarchism and marxism.
Just such an attempt is to be found in the text published below, an "open letter" written by a small French group called the "Gauche Communiste Libertaire" (GCL), in response to our article "German/Dutch left is not a branch of anarchism [6]", published in WR 231. After it, we also publish substantial extracts from our (non-exhaustive) reply.
ICC
(The last two texts mentioned in this Presentation are not yet available on our website, although they soon will be)
The Anarchist group "The Friends of Durruti" has often been used to demonstrate the vitality of Anarchism during the events in Spain after 1936, since its members played a prominent role during the struggle of May 1937, opposing and denouncing the CNT's collaboration with the government of the Republic and the Generalitat. Today the CNT boasts about the group's achievements, sells its best-known publications, and endorses its positions.
For us however, the essential lesson of the experience of this group is not the "vitality" of Anarchism, but on the contrary, the impossibility of posing a revolutionary alternative from within it. Although the Friends of Durruti opposed the CNT's policy of "collaboration", they did not understand its role as an active factor in the defeat of the proletariat, its alignment in the bourgeois camp; and therefore did not denounce the CNT as a weapon of the enemy. They always maintained that they were militants of the CNT and that there was a possibility of bringing it back to the proletariat.
The fundamental reason for this difficulty was the Friends of Durruti's inability to break with Anarchism. This also explains why all the efforts and revolutionary courage of the group's members sadly did not lead it to a clarification about the events in Spain in 1936.
1936: Proletarian revolution or imperialist war?
In the history books the events in Spain from 1936 are described as a "civil war". The Trotskyists and the Anarchists see them as the "Spanish Revolution". For the ICC they were neither a "civil war" nor a "revolution" but an imperialist war. It was a war between two fractions of the Spanish bourgeoisie: on the one hand, Franco backed by German and Italian imperialism; and on the other, the Republic of the Popular Front, which in Catalonia, in particular, included the Stalinists, the POUM and the CNT, backed by the USSR and the democratic imperialisms. In July 1936 the working class mobilised against Franco's coup, and in May 1937 in Barcelona against the attempt by the bourgeoisie to crush the proletariat's resistance. However, on both occasions the Popular Front managed to defeat it and divert the proletariat towards the military slaughter using the excuse of "anti-Fascism".
This was the analysis of Bilan, the publication of the Italian Communist Left in exile. For Bilan, it was essential to see the international context within which the events in Spain unfolded. The international revolutionary wave which had put an end to World War One and had spread across five continents had been defeated, even though in 1926 it still echoed in the workers' struggles in China, the General Strike in Britain, and in Spain. Nevertheless, the dominant feature of the 1930s was the preparation by all the main imperialist powers for another global conflict. This was the international framework for the events in Spain: a defeated working class and the road open towards World War II.
Other proletarian groups such as the GIK-H defended similar positions, despite also giving space in its publications for positions close to Trotskyism, which thought that the proletariat, starting from the struggle for a "bourgeois revolution", could carry out a revolutionary intervention. Bilan patiently discussed with these groups, including its own minority, who defended the position that a revolution could arise from the war and who mobilised in order to struggle as part of the Lenin Column in Spain.
For all the confusions of their positions, none of these groups was compromised by support for the republican government. None of them participated in the subjection of the workers to the Republic, none took the side of the bourgeoisie. Unlike the POUM and the CNT!
Today the bourgeoisie tries to use these errors of the proletariat to present the political treason and counter-revolutionary role of the POUM and CNT during the events from 1936 in Spain as a "proletarian revolution" led by them, when in reality they were the bourgeoisie's last line of defence against the workers' struggle, as we have already shown:
"But it was above all the POUM and the CNT which played the decisive role in enrolling the workers for the front. The two organisations ordered an end to the general strike without hat having played any part in unleashing it. The strength of the bourgeoisie was expressed not so much by Franco, but by the existence of an extreme left able to demobilise the Spanish proletariat" (In our book The Italian Communist Left 1926-45, page 95).
The Anarchist foundations of the CNT's betrayal in 1936
For many workers, it is hard to understand that the CNT, which regrouped the most combative and determined proletarians, and whose positions were the most radical, betrayed the working class by taking the side of the bourgeois Republican state and enrolling the class in the anti-fascist war.
Confused by the amalgam and heterogeneity of positions that characterise the Anarchist milieu, they come to the conclusion that the problem was not the CNT but the "treason" of the 4 ministers (Montseny, Garcia Oliver etc) or the influence of currents such as the Trentists.
It is true that during the international revolutionary wave that followed the Russian Revolution, the main forces of the proletariat in Spain regrouped in the CNT (the Socialist Party had allied itself with the social patriots who had led the world proletariat into the imperialist war, and the Communist Party represented a very small minority). Fundamentally, this expressed a weakness of the proletariat in Spain, due to the characteristics of the developmlopment of the national capital (poor national cohesion, disproportionate weight of the landowning sectors of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy).
This environment had been a breeding ground for Anarchist ideology, which expressed the thinking of the radicalised petty-bourgeoisie and its influence on the proletariat. This weight had been aggravated by the influence of Bakuninism in the First International in Spain. This had disastrous consequences, as Engels made clear in his book The Bakuninists at Work [7], in which he showed how they dragged the proletariat behind the radical bourgeois adventure of the 1873 Cantonist movement in Spain. Then, when Anarchism had to choose between the working class taking political power or the government of the bourgeoisie, it had preferred the latter:
"...the same people who call themselves autonomists, anarchist revolutionaries, etc., have on this occasion flung themselves into politics, bourgeois politics of the worst kind. They have worked, not to give political power to the working class - on the contrary this idea is repugnant to them - but to help to power a bourgeois faction of adventurers, ambitious men and place-hunters who call themselves Intransigent Republicans" ("Report on the Madrid Federation of the IWMA", in Engels' book, Collected Works vol.23, p582).
During the revolutiutionary wave that followed World War I, the CNT felt the influence of the Russian Revolution and the Third International. The 1919 CNT Congress clearly took position on the proletarian nature of the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary character of the Communist International, within which it decided to participate. With the defeat of the revolutionary wave and the opening of a course towards counter-revolution, the weaknesses of its Anarchist and Syndicalist foundations deprived the CNT of the theoretical and political strength to draw the lessons of the succession of defeats in Germany, Russia etc and to give revolutionary leadership to the enormous combativity of the proletariat in Spain.
After its 1931 Congress, the CNT preferred its "hatred of the dictatorship of the proletariat" to its previous positions on the Russian Revolution, whilst seeing the Constituent Assemblies as "the product of a revolutionary action" (Report of the Congress: position of the CNT towards the Constituent Assembly), despite its formal opposition to the bourgeois parliament. With this, it began to move towards supporting the bourgeoisie, most explicitly through such fractions as the Trentists; and despite the fact that elements who adhered to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat continued to exist within it.
In February 1936, the CNT flouted its abstentntionist principles, through indirectly calling for a vote for the Popular Front: "Naturally, Spain's working class, which has for many years been advised by the CNT not to vote, placed upon our propaganda the construction we wanted, which is to say, that it should vote, in that it would be easier to stand up to the fascist right, if the latter revolted, once they were defeated and out of government".
With this we can clearly see its move towards support for the bourgeois state, its involvement in the policy of defeating and isolating the proletariat in preparation for the imperialist war.
Thus we should not be surprised by what happened in July 1936. The Generalitat was at the mercy of the workers in arms, but the CNT handed the power to Companys, called for a return to work and sent the workers to be massacred on the Aragon front. No more surprising was what happened in May 1937, when the workers responded to the bourgeoisie's provocation by spontaneously setting up barricades and taking control of the streets; once again the CNT called on them to abandon the struggle, and stopped workers from returning from the front to support their comrades in Barcelona.
What happened in Spain demonstrates that in the era of wars and revolutions, sections of Anarchism are won over by the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, but that Anarchism as as an ideological current is incapable of confronting the counter-revolution and posing a revolutionary alternative; it even reveals an attachment for the defence of the bourgeois state. Bilan understood this and expressed it brilliantly "...it is necessary to openly say that: in Spain the conditions don't exist for transforming the actions of the Spanish proletariat into the signal for the reawakening of the world proletariat, even when there certainly exist some more profound and exacerbated contrasts in economic, social and political conditions than in other countries... The violence of these events must not lead us into making errors in the evaluation of their nature. They demonstrate the life and death struggle that the proletariat has entered with the bourgeoisie, but they also prove the impossibility of replacing it by violence alone - which is an instrument of struggle and not a programme of struggle - a historic vision which the mechanism of class struggle is unable to render fertile. Because the social movement has not the strength to bring to fruition a final vision of the proletariat's goals, and because there is no communist intervention oriented in this direction, it can only drop back into the pitfalls of capitalist development, dragging down in its bankruptcy the social and political forces which hitherto had been the classic representation of the workers' class skirmishes: the anarchists".
The Friends of Durruti were Anarchist elements, who despite the bourgeois orientation of the CNT within which they had always been militants, continued to adhere to the revolution and, in this sense, are testimony to the resistance of proletarian elements who refused to go down the same path as the Anarchist union.
For this reason the CNT and the bourgeoisie in general, try to present this group as an example of the revolutionary flame that still burnt in the CNT, even during the worst moments of 1936-37.
However this idea is completely false. What marked the revolutionary approach of the Friends of Durruti was precisely its struggle against the positions of the CNT and its reliance on the strength of the proletariat, of which it formed a leading part.
The Friends of Durruti were on the class terrain, not as militants of the CNT, but as militant workers who felt the force of their class on the 19th July and who, on this basis, opposed the positions of the Confederation.
On the contrary, their attempts to reconcile this proletarian impulse with their commitment to the CNT and its Anarchist orientation, made it impossible for them to take up a revolutionary alternative or to be able to drew clear lessons from these evese events.
The Friends of Durruti group was an Anarchist affinity group, and was formally constituted in March 1937. It was formed from the convergence of a current which took position, in the CNT's own press, against its collaboration with the government, and another current which returned to Barcelona in order to struggle against the militarisation of the militias.
The group was directly linked to the course of the workers struggles, upon which its reflection and struggle rested. It was not a group of theorists, but of workers in struggle, of activists. Therefore, they basically upheld the struggle of July 1936 and its "conquests" - the Control Patrols which arose in the workers areas and the arming of the working class - although for them the movement's fundamental importance lay in the spirit of the July days, and in the spontaneous strength of the workers' struggle, when they took up arms against Franco's attack and took control of the streets of Barcelona.
In the May Days in 1937, the Friends of Durruti group struggled on the barricades and issued a leaflet which made it famous, demanding the formation of a revolutionary junta, the socialisation of the economy and the shooting of the guilty. In the struggle, its positions converged with those of the Trotskyist-leaning Bolshevik-Leninist group, within which Munis was a militant, and with which it maintained discussions that fed its reflection, but which were not able to push the group to break with Anarchism.
After the May Days it began to publish El Amigo del Pueblo (15 issues in all), which expressed its attempt to clarify the questions posed by the struggle. The most prominent theoretician of the group was Jaime Balius, who in 1938 published a pamphlet Towards a new revolution [8], which took up a more developed defence of the positions put forward in El Amigo del Pueblo.
However, the group was dependent on the oxygen of the workers' struggle and when this was defeated by the Republican state, it disappeared back into the folds of the CNT.
Although it represented a workers' response to the CNT's treason its evolution was truncated by its inability to carry out a break with Anarchism and Syndicalism. Although the struggle and strength of the class kept it alive and fed it, the Friends of Durruti were unable to go beyond that.
An incomplete break with Anarchism
On the two central questions for the class struggle that were debated between July and May, the relationship between the war on the anti-fascist front and the social war, and the question of collaboration with the Republican government or its overthrow, the Friends of Durruti opposed the politics of the CNT and struggled against thst them.
Unlike the CNT, which had openly opposed the workers' actions on the 18th July, the Friends of Durruti defended the revolutionary nature of these events: "It has been stated that the days of July were a response to fascist provocation, but we, the Friends of Durruti, have publicly supported the position that the essence of those memorable July days resides in the proletariat's thirst for absolute emancipation". (All quotes from Towards a new revolution).
They also struggled against the policy of subordinating the revolution to the needs of the anti-fascist war; a question that had played a large part in the group's formation:
"Counter-revolutionary work is facilitated by the lack of consistency amongst many revolutionaries. We have given a clear account of the large number of individuals who think that in order to win the war it is necessary to renounce the revolution. This decline has intensely accentuated since the 19th of July (...) It is inadmissible that in order to lead the masses to the battle front they want to silence their revolutionary desires. It should be the other way round. Strengthen the revolution even more in order that the workers with a rare spirit launch upon the conquest of the New World, which in these moments of indecision remains mains nothing more than a promise".
And in May 1937 they opposed the CNT's orders to its militants at the front to stop their march on Barcelona in order to defend the workers struggling in the streets and instead to continue the war at the front.
This determination in the struggle, however clashed with the poverty of the Friends of Durruti's theoretical reflections on the war and revolution. In reality they never broke with the position that the war was united with the proletarian revolution, and that it was therefore a question of a "revolutionary" war opposed to imperialist wars, which from the beginning made them victims of the bourgeoisie's policy of defeating and isolating the proletariat:
"From the first moment of clashes with the military, it was already impossible to disentangle the war and the revolution (...) As the weeks and months passed, it became clearer and clearer that the war which we support against the fascists has nothing in common with the wars waged by states (...) We anarchists cannot play the game of those who pretend that our war is only a war of independence with purely democratic aspirations. To these ideas we, the Friends of Durruti, respond that our war is a social war".
With this, they placed themselves in the orbit of the CNT, whose "radical" version of bourgeois ois positions about the struggle between dictatorship and democracy dragged the most combative workers into the slaughterhouse of the anti-fascist war.
In fact the Friends of Durruti's considerations on the war were made on the basis of anarchism's the narrow and ahistorical nationalist thinking. This led them to a vision of the events in Spain as the continuation of the bourgeoisie's ludicrous revolutionary efforts against the Napoleonic invasion of 1808. Whilst the international workers' movement was debating the defeat of the world proletariat and the perspective of a Second World War, the Anarchists in Spain thought about Fernando VII and Napoleon:
"What is happening today is a re-enactment of what happened in the reign of Ferdinand VII. Once again in Vienna there has been a conference of fascist dictators for the purpose of organising their invasion of Spain. And today the workers in arms have taken up the mantle of El Empecinado. Germany and Italy need raw materials. They need iron, copper, lead and mercury. But these Spanish mineral deposits are the preserves of France and England. Yet even though Spain faces subjection, England does not protest. On the contrary - in a vile manoeuvre, she tries to negotiate with Franco (...) It is up to the working class to ensure Spain's independence. Native capitalism will not do it, since international capital crosses all frontiers. This is Spain's current predicament. It is up to us workers to root out the foreign capitalists. Patriotism does not enter into it. It is a matter of class interests".
As we can see, it takes a clever piece of work to turn an imperialist war into a patriotic war, a "class" war. This is an expression of Anarchism's political disarming of such sincere worker militants as the Friends of Durruti. These comrades who wanted to struggle against the war and for the revolution, were incapable of finding the point of departure for an effective struggle. This would have meant calling on the workers and peasants, enlisted in both gangs - the Republic and the Franquistas - to desert, to turn their guns on the officers who oppressed them and to return to the rear and struggle through strikes and demonstrations, on a class terrain, against the whole of capitalism.
For the international workers' movement however, the question of the nature of the war in Spain was a crucial one, which polarised the debate both between the Communist Left and Trotskyism and also within the Communist Left's own ranks:
"The war in Spain has been decisive for everyone: for capitalism, it has been the means to enlarge the front of forces working for war, to incorporate anti-fascism, the Trotskyists, the so-called Left Communists and to stifle the workers' awakening which appeapeared in 1936; for the left fraction it has been the decisive test, the selection of men and ideas, the necessity to confront the problem of war. We have held on, and, against the stream, we are still holding on." (Bilan no44; quoted in "The Italian Communist Left" page 105-06)
The Friends of Durruti were much clearer in their opposition to the CNT's policy of collaboration with the Republican government than on the question of the war.
They denounced the CNT's treason in July:
"There was a precious opportunity in July. Who was going to oppose the CNT and FAI imposing themselves in Catalonia? Instead of putting confederal thinking into action, wrapping themselves in the folds of black-red flags and the shouts of the multitude, our committees made a round trip official places, but without deciding a position that matched our strength in the streets. After weeks of doubt they begged to participate in power. We remember perfectly well that at the regional level they proposed the constitution of a revolutionary organism which was to be called the National Defence Junta at the national level and Regional Juntas at the local level. However they did not carry out the decisions that had been adopted. They hushed this up by not mentioning the infringement of the decisions taken at the plenary session. First of all they entered the Generalitat, and then later they joined the government in Madrid".
And more forcefully in the manifesto they distributed on the barricades in May:
"The Generalitat stands for nothing. Its continued existence bolsters the counterrevolution. We workers have carried the day. It defies belief that the CNT's committees should have acted with such timidity that they ventured to order a 'cease-fire' and indeed forced a return to work when we stood on the very threshold of total victory. No account was taken of the provenance of the attack no heed paid to the true meaning of the present events. Such conduct has to be described as treason to the revolution which no one ought to commit or encourage in the name of anything. And we know how to categorize the noxious work carried out by Solidaridad Obrera and the CNT's most prominent Militants"
This manifesto led to the CNT repudiating the group and threatening it with expulsion, although the threat was not put into practice. The Friends of Durruti withdrew their accusation of treason in El Amigo del Pueblo no 3 "In the last issue the Friends of Durruti retracted the idea of treason, in the interests of Anarchist and revolutionary unityity" (El Amigo del Pueblo no 4). This was not for lack of courage '-they had shown plenty of that - but because they could not see beyond the CNT, which they considered to be an expression of the working class and not an agent of the bourgeoisie.
In this sense, the limitations of their thinking were those of the CNT and Anarchism and therefore when they finally did criticise the CNT, based on a more serene reflection away from the struggle on the barricades, it was for not having a platform:
"The vast majority of the working population stood by the CNT. In Catalonia, the CNT was the majority organisation. What happened, that the CNT did not make its revolution, the people's revolution, the revolution of the majority of the population...
"What happened was what had to happen. The CNT was utterly devoid of revolutionary theory. We did not have a concrete programme. We had no idea where we were going. We had lyricism aplenty, but when all is said and done, we did not know what to do with our masses of workers or how to give substance to the popular effusion which erupted inside our organisations. By not knowing what to do, we handed the revolution on a platter to the bourgeoisie and the Marxists (read Socialists and Stalinists) who support the farce of yesteryear. What is worse, we allowed the bourgeoisie a breathing space, to ro return, to re-form and to behave as would a conqueror.
"The CNT did not know how to live up to its role. It did not want to push ahead with the revolution with all its consequences" (from Towards a new revolution).
However, the CNT did have a well defined theory: the defence of the bourgeois state. Balius' assertion applies to the whole proletariat (in the sense that Bilan also understood - its lack of a revolutionary vanguard and orientation) but not to the CNT. At least from February 1936, the CNT was unequivocally compromised with the bourgeois government of the Popular Front:
"When the moment came in February 1936, all the forces active within the proletariat, joined together in one front: the necessity to bring about the victory of the Popular Front in order to get rid of the domination of the Right and to gain an amnesty. From the Social democrats to Centrism, to the CNT and the POUM, without forgetting all the parties of the republican left, all were agreed to channel the explosion of class antagonisms into the parliamentary arena. And here we see written in flaming letters the incapacity of the Anarchists and the POUM, as well as the real function of all the democratic forces of capitalism" (Bilan, The lessons of the events in Spain).
From July, far from not knowing how to mto make the revolution as the Friends of Durruti believed, the CNT was very clear about what it was doing:
"For our part, and this was the CNT-FAI's view, we held that Companys should stay on as head of the Generalitat, precisely because we had not taken to the streets to fight specifically for the social revolution, but rather to defend ourselves against the fascist mutiny" (Garica Oliver's response to Bolloten's questionnaire, quoted in Agustín Guillamón: The Friends of Durruti Group [9], page 13).
If during the May Days in 1937 the Friends of Durruti confronted the CNT, called for a "revolutionary junta" against the Generalitat government, and for the "shooting of the guilty", this was not the product of a break with Anarchism, nor an evolution from Anarchism towards a revolutionary alternative (as Guillamón claims), but the expression of the proletariat's resistance. It was no more than an observation, not an orientation towards the seizure of power: this question could not be posed at a time when the bourgeoisie held the initiative, and had launched a provocation to finish off the workers' resistance. But as Munis pointed out, they could go no further:
"In La Voz Leninista n°2 (23rd August 1937), Munis made a critique of the notion of the "revolutionary junta" set out in no.6 of El Amigo del Pueblo (12thAugust 1937). In Munis' view, the Friends of Durruti suffered from a progressive theoretical decline and a practical inability to influence the CNT, which led them to abandon some of the theoretical positions which the May experience had enabled them to adopt. Munis noted that in May 1937 the Friends of Durruti had issued the call for the "revolutionary junta" alongside "all power to the proletariat"; whereas in no.6 of El Amigo del Pueblo (August 12, 1937) the slogan "revolutionary junta" was invoked as an alternative to the "failure of statist forms". According to Munis, this represented a theoretical retreat from the Friends of Durruti's assimilation of the May experience, taking them further away from the marxist notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and drawing them back into the ambiguities of the anarchist theory of the State".
Once the agitation of the workers struggle had passed and their defeat had been consummated, the reflections and proposals of the Friends of Durruti returned, without trauma, towards the CNT, and the "revolutionary junta" ended up being turned into the Committee of the Anti-fascist Militias, which they had previous denounced as an organ of the bourgeoisie:
"The group harshly criticised the dissolution of the Defense committees, thehe Control Patrols, the Committee of militias and directly criticised militarisation, it understood that these organs had their roots in the July days and that they would be the base - along with the unions and Municipalities - for a new structuring, that is to say, that they should be the model of a new order of things, naturally this includes the modifications brought about by the lessons of the course of events and revolutionary experience" .
Compare the above with the following quote from the same author's 1938 pamphlet Towards a new revolution: "In July a Committee of Antifascist Militias was set up. It was not a class organ. Bourgeois and counter-revolutionary factions had their representatives on it".
The Friends of Durruti group was not an expression of the revolutionary vitality of the CNT or Anarchism, but an effort by militant workers, despite the dead weight of Anarchism, that had never been nor could be the revolutionary programme of the working class.
Anarchism can trap within its ranks sectors of the working class, weakened by a lack of experience or trajectory, as can be seen with young proletarians today, but its proposals cannot not lead to a revolutionary alternative. In the majority of cases, as with the Friends of Durruti, they show courage and combativity, but as the the history in Spain has demonstrated on two occasions, during two decisive moments its ideological speculations were in the service of the Bourgeois State.
Worker elements may think they can join the revolution from Anarchism, but in order to adopt a revolutionary programme they have to break with Anarchism.
Rs, 31/3/00.
We are a small group based in the Vaucluse [south of France, ed.], and we identify with libertarian marxism.
In your article, you say that some parts of council communism had “an incorrect analysis of the defeat of the Russian revolution, considered (…) as a bourgeois revolution whose defeat is attributed (…) to ‘bourgeois’ conceptions defended by the Bolshevik party and by Lenin, such as the necessity of the revolutionary party”.
In fact, we are in agreement with those components of council communism who see the Russian revolution as a bourgeois revolution led by Jacobins.
It seems to us that Pannekoek would agree with us, so let us quote him: “There are many who persist in imagining the proletarian revolution in the guise of past bourgeois revolutions, in other words as a series of phases, each one engendering the next: first, the conquest of political power and the creation of a new government; then the expropriation by decree of the capitalist class; finally, a reorganisation of the process of production. But in this case, it is impossible to end up with anything other than state capitalism. For the proletariat to become truly master of its destiny, it must create simultaneously its own organisation and the forms of the new economic order. These two elements are inseparable and constitute the process of social revolution”.
Is it not because the Russian revolution was a bourgeois revolution that it took on the shape that Pannekoek describes?
In what way are these conceptions a serious theoretical weakness? You don’t say…
By contrast, Lenin’s conceptions remain Jacobin and bourgeois: a minority, a vanguard, the elite of a party ends up substituting itself for the working class, which was moreover in the minority in Russia. This substitutionism led to the repression of Kronstadt in 1921, the repression of a soviet which demanded political freedom and the liberation of the anarchist and Socialist-Revolutionary oppositionists. This substitutionism led to the repression of all the currents of the workers’ movement: the anarchists (Makhno, Voline…), the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the centrists (Dan and Martov…).
Need we remind you that within the Bolshevik party, only Miasnikov defended the freedom of the press. The same Miasnikov was excluded by a commission of the Orgburo that included Trotsky and Bukharin!
Otto Rühle shared our views on the Bolshevik party: “The Party was considered as a military academy of professional revolutionaries. Its main pedagogical principles were the undisputed authority of the leader, a rigid centralism, iron discipline, conformism, militarism, and the sacrifice of the personality to the interests of the Party. What Lenin developed in reality was an elite of intellectuals, a nucleus which, thrown into the revolution, would seize the leadership and would take the power to themselves” (text quoted in La contre-revolution bureaucratique, ed: 10/18).
Lenin’s conception of an active minority of professional revolutionaries is opposed by Otto Rühle, an anti-authoritarian marxist excluded from the KAPD on Moscow’s orders and theoretician in 1920 of the General Workers’ Union (AAUE), which was neither a trades union, nor a vanguard, but a union of revolutionaries within the councils in Germany. This “Union” was based on the precept: “The emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves”, as Marx wrote in 1864.
This conception of Lenin’s, of an active minority, is not the only spoonful of tar in the honey-pot of Leninist theory. Lenin also defended the bourgeois right of the self-determination of nations. His text published in June 1914 is nothing but a polemic against Rosa Luxemburg. Lenin supported Polish nationalism, that poison dividing the proletariat. In Germany, these conceptions of Lenin ended up in a support for German nationalism during the occupation of the Ruhr, and the celebration of the German national hero Schlageter (a nationalist shot by French troops during the occupation of the Ruhr). The German Communist Party thus made common cause with the fascists! Similarly, in Leftism, an infantile disorder, Lenin defended bourgeois parliamentarism, compromises with the bourgeoisie, and the entry of “communists” into the reactionary bourgeois trades unions.
Worse still, Lenin’s text Materialism and Empirio-criticism represents a return to 18th-century bourgeois materialism, and forgets the historical materialism of Marx expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach.
So, what is historical materialism?
You say that it is a method for analysing the class contradictions of any society… very well! But an analytical method for action, and action for the liberation of human beings from all exploitation and oppression. Marx defended “the abstract principle of individual freedom” just as much as the anarchists. Marx appears to us today as a libertarian, a moralist of freedom. He criticises a capitalism that denies the personality, and the freedom of the individual. A “marxist” must defend liberty and respect the liberty of others. Respect for equality means nothing. Men are different from women. All individuals are different from each other.
This is a position of principle that goes beyond the struggle of the proletariat. Some of the non-industrialised tribes of the Indonesian or Amazonian forests are right from a marxist viewpoint to oppose the destruction of nature and of their life environment, even if as a result they oppose the particular interests of the proletarians who are lumberjacks or road-builders…
Similarly, non-working mothers are exploited by the class system; they work to raise their children even if they don’t sell their labour power. Their struggle for the liberation of women from exploitation is necessary to the arrival of communism. Prostitutes are also exploited as sexual objects; their struggle for the disappearance of prostitution seems like a struggle for council socialism. Real marxism is always anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical, for the disappearance of psychiatric asylums, the disappearance of prisons, and the destruction of all systems of punishment in the school or the family.
When you describe the tendencies of anarchism, you leave out anarcho-syndicalism. Did not the philosopher Georges Sorel consider the anarchists entry into the trades unions as one of the greatest events of his day? You confuse Bakunin, an anti-authoritarian and rarely a Jacobin, with his disciple Netchaev, a real putschist. You ignore the Berne Congress of 1876 which gave anarchism its substitutionist deviation of “propaganda by the deed”. You also ignore the work of Daniel Guerin on the French Revolution, fascism, anarchism… You ignore also that libertarians like Erich Muhsam were at the head of the Bavarian workers’ councils in 1919. When you describe the struggle of tendencies within the Social Democracy, you caricature this as a struggle between the marxists and the revisionists. In fact, there were four tendencies within the pre-1914 Social Democracy:
- a marxist wing: Rosa Luxemburg, Pannekoek defending the proletarian struggle, the mass strike and the destruction of the state;
- reformist revisionists like Edward Bernstein defending capitalism’s “peaceful evolution” through reforms;
- an “orthodox” centre, including Karl Kautsky, characterised by economic fatalism and a cult of the productive forces, which for this kind of degenerated marxism became a sort of god. For Karl Kautsky, it was the intellectuals who were to bring socialist consciousness to the proletariat from the outside: a real revision of marxism!
- finally, Kautsky’s Russian Bolshevik disciples, a typically Russian amalgam of Jacobinism and Blanquism.
The workers’ councils did not exist during the Paris Commune. Marx therefore doesn’t talk about them. But when they appeared during the 1905 Russian Revolution, Lenin (1907) saw them not as an organ of proletarian self-government, but as mere struggle committees…
The phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” no longer means anything today: the words have covered the facts. Facts have changed the meaning of the words.
In 1871, the Paris Commune was the destruction of the state by a government where a debate existed between Proudhonists and Blanquists.
The 1917 October Revolution was the Jacobin dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party.
It would therefore be better to use the expression “the power of the councils”.
Jean-Luc Dallemagne, an orthodox Trotskyist theoretician who defends the Stalinist USSR (and China, Cuba, etc…) as “workers’ states” also accuses the ultra-left currents of being petty-bourgeois: “The various ultra-left currents, that came out of the opposition to Lenin, come together again in the moralising and petty-bourgeois demand for ‘freedom’” (Construction du socialisme et revolution, Jean-Luc Dallemagne, Ed. Maspero).
This same Dallemagne defends the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party and the repression of Kronstadt as the realisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat!
Let us not confuse state capitalism with the power of the workers’ councils!
Let us conclude on the Spanish Revolution of 1937: during a revolutionary period, the “Friends of Durrutti” had a mass influence, like the AAUE in Germany in 1920. But try to understand them, rather than curling up in your own convictions. Don’t accuse them peremptorily of having revolutionary positions “despite themselves and their own confusions”, by accident, “by class instinct rather than out of a real understanding of the situation of the proletariat as a whole”.
In short, it seems to me that the ICC wants to close prematurely a fertile debate between anarchism and marxism.
Gauche Communiste Libertaire
In the summer of 1927, replying to a series of articles in Pravda which rejected the possibility of any ‘Thermidorian degeneration’ of the USSR, Trotsky defended the validity of this analogy with the French revolution, in which an element of the Jacobin party itself became the vehicle for the counter-revolution. Despite the historical differences in the two situations, Trotsky argued that the isolated proletarian regime in Russia could indeed succumb to a “bourgeois restoration”, not only through an outright, violent overthrow by the forces of capitalism, but also in a more gradual and insidious manner. “Thermidor”, he wrote, “is a special form of counter-revolution carried out on the instalment plan through several instalments, and making use, in the first stage, of elements of the same ruling party – by regrouping them and counterposing them to others” (‘Thermidor’, published in The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1926-7, Pathfinder Press, 1980). And he pointed out that Lenin himself had fully accepted that such a danger existed in Russia: “Lenin did not think that the possibility was excluded that economic and cultural shifts in the direction of bourgeois degeneration could take place over a long period even with power remaining in Bolshevik hands; it could happen through an inconspicuous cultural-political assimilation between a certain layer of the Bolshevik party and a certain layer of the rising new petty bourgeois element”.
At the same time Trotsky was quick to argue that, at this juncture, Thermidor, though a growing danger posed by the growth of bureaucratism and of openly capitalist influences within the USSR, was still far from being completed. In the Platform of the United Opposition which was published not long after this article, he and his co-authors expressed the view that the perspective of international revolution was far from exhausted and that within Russia itself there persisted considerable gains from the October revolution, in particular the Russian economy’s “socialist sector”. The Opposition therefore remained committed to the struggle for the reform and regeneration of the Soviet state, and to its unconditional defence from imperialist attack.
In historical hindsight, however, it is clear that Trotsky’s analyses lagged behind reality. By the summer 1927, the forces of bourgeois counter-revolution had all but completed their annexation of the Bolshevik party.
Why did Trotsky underestimate the danger?
There are three key elements in Trotsky’s misreading of the situation facing the Opposition in 1927.
Trotsky underestimated the depth and extent of the counter-revolution’s advance because he was unable to go back to its historical origins – in particular, to recognise the role played by the Bolshevik party’s political errors in accelerating the degeneration of the revolution. As we have shown in previous articles in this series, while the fundamental reason for the weakening of proletarian power in Russia lay in its isolation, in the failure of the revolution to extend and in the devastation caused by the civil war, the Bolshevik party had itself made matters worse through its entanglement with the state machine and its willingness to substitute its own authority for the authority of the unitary organs of the class (soviets, factory committees, etc). This process was already discernible in 1918 and reached a particularly grave point with the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt in 1921. And Trotsky found it all the harder to criticise these policies in that he had often played a prominent role in implementing them (eg his calls for the militarisation of labour in 1920-21).
Trotsky clearly understood that the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy had been greatly facilitated by the succession of international defeats suffered by the working class - Germany 1923, Britain 1926, China 1927. But he was unable to see the historic scale of this defeat. In this he was by no means unique: it was not until the advent of Hitler to power in Germany, for example, that it became clear to the Italian left fraction that the course of history had been overturned and that it was running towards war. Trotsky, on the other hand, was never really able to see that such a profound reverse had occurred and throughout the 1930s continued to see signs of impending revolution when in fact the workers were more and more being taken off their own terrain and led onto the slippery slope of anti-fascism, and thus of imperialist war (Popular Fronts, war in Spain…). In any case, Trotsky’s unfounded ‘optimism’ about the possibilities of revolution led him to misinterpret the causes and effects of Stalinist foreign policy and the reactions of the great capitalist powers. The Platform of the United Opposition in 1927 (influenced, without doubt, by the ‘war scare’ of the day, which considered a declaration of war by Britain on the USSR to be imminent), insisted that the imperialist powers would be compelled to launch an attack on the Soviet Union, since the latter, despite the domination of the Stalinist bureaucracy, still constituted a threat to the world capitalist system. In such circumstances, the Left Opposition remained wholeheartedly committed to the defence of the USSR. It had of course made many incisive criticisms of the way the Stalinist bureaucracy had sabotaged the workers’ struggle in Britain and China. Indeed, the disastrous results of Comintern policies in those two countries had been a decisive element in spurring the 1926-7 Opposition to regroup and intervene. But what Trotsky and the United Opposition did not grasp was that Stalinist policy in Britain and China, where the class struggle was directly undermined in favour of cementing an alliance with bourgeois factions ‘friendly’ to the USSR (the trade union bureaucracy in Britain, the Kuomintang in China), marked a qualitative step even in comparison to the CI’s opportunist bungling in Germany in 1923. These events expressed a decisive turn towards the insertion of the Russian state into the world wide power games of capital. From now on, the USSR was to act on the world arena as another contending imperialism, and the defence of the USSR was to become more and more indefensible from the communist point of view, since the USSR’s very reason for existence – to serve as a bastion of the world revolution – had been liquidated.
Closely linked to this error was Trotsky’s failure to identify the real spearhead of the counter-revolution. His defence of the USSR was based on a false criterion: not, as it was with the Italian left, on the consideration of its international role and effect, and not even on whether the working class actually retained political power, but on a purely juridical criterion: the retention of nationalised property forms at the centres of the economy and a state monopoly over foreign trade. From this standpoint, Thermidor could only take the form of an overthrow of these juridical forms and a return to classical expressions of private ownership. The real ‘Thermidorian’ forces, therefore, could only be those elements outside the party who were pushing for a return to private (or rather, individual) ownership, such as the kulaks, NEPmen, political economists like Ustryalov, and their most overt points of support within the party, in particular the faction around Bukharin. Stalinism was characterised as a form of centrism, without any real policy of its own, perpetually balancing between the right and the left wings of the party. With his own attachment to the identification between nationalised property forms and socialism, Trotsky was unable to see that the capitalist counter-revolution could establish itself on the basis of state property. This condemned the current he led to misunderstanding the nature of the Stalinist project, and to perpetually ‘warning’ about a return to private property forms which never came (at least not until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and even then only partially). We can see this fatal delay in understanding very clearly in the way the Opposition responded to Stalin’s declaration of the infamous theory of “socialism in one country”.
In the autumn of 1924, in a long and turgid opus entitled Problems of Leninism, Stalin formulated the theory of “socialism in one country”. Basing his argument on a single phrase written by Lenin in 1915, a phrase which could in any case be interpreted in different ways, Stalin broke with a fundamental principle of the communist movement from its inception – that the classless society could only be established on a world wide scale. His innovation made a mockery of the October revolution itself, because as Lenin and the Bolsheviks had never tired of saying, the workers’ insurrection in Russia had appeared as an internationalist response to the imperialist war; and it was, and could only be, the first step towards a world wide proletarian revolution.
The proclamation of socialism in one country was not a mere theoretical revision; it was the open declaration of the counter-revolution. The Bolshevik party as a whole had already been caught in the contradiction of interests between its internationalist principles and the demands of the Russian state, which was increasingly representing the needs of capital against the working class. Stalinism solved this contradiction at a single stroke: henceforth, it would owe loyalty only to the requirements of Russian national capital, and woe to those in the party who still clung to its original proletarian mission.
Two crucial events had enabled the Stalinist faction to show its true intentions so plainly: the defeat of the German revolution in October 1923, and the death of Lenin in January 1924. More than any of the previous reverses in the post-war revolutionary wave, the defeat in Germany in 1923 showed that the retreat of the European proletariat was more than a temporary affair, even if no one at the time could guess just how long the night of the counter-revolution would endure. This result could only strengthen the hand of those for whom the idea of extending the revolution across the globe was not merely a distraction from but an obstacle to the task of building Russia into a serious economic and military power.
As we saw in the last article in this series, Lenin had already initiated a struggle against the rise of Stalinism, and he would certainly not have countenanced the open abandonment of internationalism that the bureaucracy proclaimed with such indecent haste after his death. Certainly Lenin alone would not have been a sufficient barrier to the victory of the counter-revolution. As Bilan wrote in the 1930s, given the objective limitations facing the Russian revolution, his fate as an individual would no doubt have been that of the rest of the opposition: “If he had survived, centrism would have had the same attitude towards Lenin as it took towards the numerous Bolsheviks who paid for their loyalty to the internationalist programme of October 1917 with deportation, prison and exile” (Bilan 18, April-May 1935, p 610, ‘L’Etat Proletarien’). All the same, his death removed a major obstacle to the Stalinist project. Once Lenin was dead, Stalin not only buried his theoretical heritage; he also set about creating the cult of “Leninism”. His notorious “we vow to thee, comrade Lenin” speech at the funeral already set the tone, modelled as it was on the rituals of the Orthodox Church. Symbolically, Trotsky was absent from the funeral. He had been recuperating from illness in the Caucasus, but he also fell for a little manoeuvre of Stalin consisting in misinforming Trotsky about the date of the ceremony. Thus Stalin was able to present himself to all the world as Lenin’s natural successor.
Crucial as Stalin’s declaration was, its full import was not immediately grasped within the Bolshevik party. This was in part because it had been put forward unobtrusively, somewhat buried in an indigestible helping of Stalin’s ‘theoretical’ work. But more importantly, it was because the Bolsheviks were insufficiently armed theoretically to combat this new conception.
We have already noted during the course of this series that confusions between socialism and the state centralisation of bourgeois economic relations had long haunted the workers’ movement, particularly in the period of social democracy; and the revolutionary programmes of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave had by no means exorcised this ghost. But the ascendant tide of revolution had kept the vision of authentic socialism well to the fore, above all the necessity for it to be established on an international basis. In contrast, as the retreat of the world revolution left the Russian outpost high and dry, there was an increasing trend towards theorising the idea that by developing the statified ‘socialist’ sector of its economy, the Soviet Union could take major steps towards building a socialist society. The Italian left, in the same article as the one just cited, noted this tendency in some of Lenin’s later writings: “Lenin’s final articles on cooperation were an expression of the new situation resulting from the defeats suffered by the world proletariat, and it is not at all astonishing that they could be made use of by the falsifiers who came up with the theory of ‘socialism in one country’”.
These ideas were further theorised by the left opposition, particularly Trotsky and Preobrazhensky, in the ‘industrialisation debate’ of the mid-20s. This debate had been provoked by the difficulties encountered by the NEP, which had exposed Russia to the more open manifestations of capitalist crisis, such as unemployment, price instability, and disequilibrium between the different branches of the economy. Trotsky and Preobrazhensky criticised the cautious economic policy of the party apparatus, its failure to adopt any long term plans, its over-reliance on light industry and the spontaneous operation of the market. To rebuild the Soviet economy on a healthy and dynamic basis, they argued, it was necessary to allocate more resources to the development of heavy industry, which also required long term economic planning. Since heavy industry was the core of the state sector, and the state sector was defined as inherently ‘socialist’, industrial growth was identified with progress towards socialism and thus corresponded to the interests of the proletariat. The ‘industrialisers’ of the left opposition were convinced that this process could be kick-started in Russia’s predominantly agrarian economy, not by becoming too dependent on the import of foreign capital and technology, but by a kind of ‘exploitation’ of layers of the peasantry (the richer ones in particular) through taxation or price manipulations. This would generate sufficient capital to finance investment in the state sector and the growth of heavy industry. This process was described as “primitive socialist accumulation”, comparable in its content, if not in its proposed methods, to the period of primitive capitalist accumulation described by Marx in Capital. For Preobrazhensky in particular, “primitive socialist accumulation” was no less than a fundamental law of the transitional economy, and was to be understood as a counter-weight to the operation of the law of value: “Every reader can count on his fingers the factors that counter-act the law of value in our country: the foreign trade monopoly; socialist protectionism; a harsh import plan drawn up in the interests of industrialisation; and non-equivalent exchange with the private economy, which ensures accumulation for the state sector, notwithstanding the highly unfavourable conditions created by its low level of technology. But all of these, given their basis in the unified state economy of the proletariat, are the external means, the outward manifestations of the law of primitive socialist accumulation” (‘Economic Notes III: On the Advantage of a Theoretical Study of the Soviet Economy’, 1926, published in The Crisis of Soviet Industrialisation, a collection of Preobrazhensky’s essays edited by Donald A Filtzer, Macmillan, 1980)
This theory was flawed in two key respects:
it was a fundamental error to identify the growth of industry with the needs and class interests of the proletariat, and to argue that socialism would arise in a quasi-automatic manner on the basis of a process of accumulation which, though dubbed ‘socialist’, actually had all the essential features of capitalist accumulation, based as it was on the extraction and expanding capitalisation of surplus value. Industry, state-owned or otherwise, does not equal the working class; on the contrary, industrial growth carried out on the foundations of the wage labour relation can only signify the increasing exploitation of the proletariat. This false identification on Trotsky’s part paralleled his identification between the working class and the transitional state which he had theorised during the trade union debate of 1921. Its logic was to leave the proletariat with no justification for defending itself against the demands of the ‘socialist’ sector. And as with the problem of the state, the Italian left fraction in the 1930s was able to show the profound dangers inherent in such an identification. Although at the time it shared some of Trotsky’s illusions that the ‘collectivised’ sector of the economy conferred a proletarian character on the Soviet state, it did not at all agree with Trotsky’s enthusiasm for the industrialisation process per se, insisting that progress towards socialism should be measured not in the rate of growth of constant capital, but by the extent to which production was geared towards the satisfaction of the proletariat’s immediate material needs (prioritising the production of consumer goods rather than producer goods, shorter working day, etc). Taking this argument one step further, we would say that progress towards socialism demands a complete overturning of the logic of the accumulation process;
secondly, if Russia was able to take decisive steps towards socialism on the basis of its vast peasantry, what was the actual role of the world revolution? With the theory of “primitive socialist accumulation”, the world revolution appears merely as a means of speeding up a process already well underway in a single country, rather than being a sine qua non even for the political survival of a proletarian bastion. In some of his writings, Preobrazhensky comes perilously close to this conclusion, and this was to leave him entirely vulnerable to the demagogy of Stalin’s ‘left turn’ in the late 20s, when the latter appeared to be carrying through the programme of the industrialisers within the party.
Since it was itself carrying these confusions, it was not accidental that the left current around Trotsky did not immediately grasp the full counter-revolutionary significance of Stalin’s declaration.
In fact, the first explicit attack on the theory of socialism in one country came from an unlikely source – Stalin’s former ally Zinoviev. In 1925, the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev fell apart. Its only real unifying factor had been “the struggle against Trotskyism” - as Zinoviev later admitted, this bugbear of “Trotskyism” was really an invention of the apparatus, aimed mainly at preserving the triumvirs’ position in the party machine against the figure who, after Lenin, most obviously embodied the spirit of the October revolution – Leon Trotsky. But as we saw in the last article in this series, the initial stand of the left opposition around Trotsky had been broken because of its inability to answer the charge of “factionalism” thrown at it by the apparatus, a charge backed up by the measures that all the main tendencies in the party had voted for at the 10th Congress in 1921. Faced with the choice of constituting itself into an illegal grouping (such as Miasnikov’s Workers’ Group), or retreating from any organised action within the party, the opposition adopted the latter course. But as the counter-revolutionary policies of the apparatus became more and more overt, those who retained a loyalty to Bolshevism’s internationalist premises - even, as in some cases, a very tenuous one – were compelled to become more overt in their opposition.
The emergence of the opposition around Zinoviev in 1925 was one expression of this, even if Zinoviev’s sudden turn to the left also reflected his anxiety to retain his own personal position within the party and the power base of his party machinery in Leningrad. Naturally enough, Trotsky, who in 1925-26 had gone into a phase of semi-retreat from political life, was highly suspicious of this new opposition, and at first remained largely neutral in the initial exchanges between the Stalinists and the Zinovievists, as for example at the 14th Congress, where the latter admitted that they had been largely mistaken in their diatribes against Trotskyism. Nevertheless, there was a basic element of proletarian clarity in Zinoviev’s criticisms of Stalin – as we have said, he actually denounced the theory of socialism in one country before Trotsky, and began to talk about the danger of state capitalism. And as the bureaucracy strengthened its grip over the party and over the entire working class, and particularly as the catastrophic results of its international policy became apparent, the push towards a common front between the different opposition groupings became more and more urgent.
Despite their misgivings, Trotsky and his followers joined forces with the Zinovievists in the United Opposition in April 1926. The United Opposition also at first comprised Sapranov’s Democratic Centralism group (known as the Decists); indeed Trotsky claimed that “the initiative for the unification came from the Democratic Centralists. The first conference with the Zinovievists took place under the chairmanship of Comrade Sapranov” (‘Our Differences with the Democratic Centralists’, November 11 1928, in The Challenge of the Left Opposition, 1928-29, Pathfinder Press 1981). At some point in 1926, however, it appears that the Decists were expelled – supposedly for advocating a new party, although this does not accord with the demands contained in the group’s 1927 platform, which we will return to later1.
Despite its formal agreement not to organise as a fraction, the Opposition of 1926 was obliged to constitute itself as a distinct organisation, with its own clandestine meetings, bodyguards and couriers; and at the same time, it made a far more determined attempt than the 1923 opposition to get its message across, not just to the party leadership, but to the rank and file of the party. Each time it took a step in the direction of forming itself into a definite fraction, however, the party apparatus redoubled its maneouvres, slanders, demotions and expulsions. The first wave of these repressive measures came after the spies of the apparatus exposed an Opposition meeting in the woods outside Moscow in the summer of 1926. The initial response of the Opposition was to reiterate its criticisms of the policies of the regime at home and abroad, and to take its case to the mass of the party’s membership. In September and October, delegations of the Opposition spoke at factory cell meetings throughout the country. The most famous of these was at the Moscow aircraft factory, where Trotsky, Zinoviev, Piatakov, Radek, Sapranov and Smilga defended the Opposition’s standpoint against the heckling and abuse heaped on it by the goons of the apparatus. The response of the Stalinist machinery was even more vicious. It moved to eliminate the leading Oppositionists from their most important posts in the party. Its warnings against the Opposition became more and more explicit, hinting not only at expulsion from the party but at physical elimination. The ex-Oppositionist Larin spoke Stalin’s hidden thoughts at the 15th party conference in October-November 26: “Either the Opposition must be excluded and legally suppressed, or the question will be settled with machine guns in the streets, as the Left Socialist Revolutionaries did in Moscow in 1918” (cited in Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, Simon and Schuster, 1960, p 282).
But as we have already said, Trotsky’s Opposition was also shackled by its own fatal flaws: its dogged loyalty to the banning of factions adopted at the 1921 Party Congress and its hesitations in seeing the really counter-revolutionary nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Following the condemnation of its factory cell demonstrations in October, the Opposition leaders signed a statement admitting that they had violated party discipline and abjuring future “factional” activity. At the plenum of the ECCI in December, the last time that the Opposition was allowed to state its case in the International, Trotsky was again hamstrung by his unwillingness to put the unity of the party into question. As Anton Ciliga put it: “notwithstanding the polemic brilliance of his oratory, Trotsky wrapped his exposition of the debate in too great a prudence and diplomacy. The audience was unable to appreciate its depth, the tragedy of the divergences separating the Opposition from the majority (…) The Opposition – I was struck by this at the time – was not aware of its weakness; it was also to underestimate the magnitude of its defeat and to neglect to draw the lessons from it. Whereas the majority, led by Stalin and Bukharin, manoeuvred to obtain the total exclusion of the Opposition, the latter constantly sought for compromise and amicable arrangements. This timid policy of the Opposition was instrumental, if not in bringing about its defeat, certainly in weakening its resistance” (The Russian Enigma, first published as Au pays du grand mensonge in 1938, first English edition 1940; this edition 1979, p 7-8).
The same pattern repeated itself towards the end of 1927. Stirred into action by the bureaucracy’s fiasco in China, the Opposition formulated its formal platform for the 15th Congress. This attempt was met by a typical manoeuvre of the apparatus. Having obliged the Opposition to resort to a clandestine printing press to produce the platform, the press was raided by the GPU; the latter conveniently discovered that a “Wrangel officer”, in touch with foreign counter-revolutionaries, was involved in the press. Although this “officer” proved to be a GPU agent provocateur, the discredit heaped upon the Opposition was exploited to the maximum. Under increasing pressure, the Opposition decided once again to make a direct appeal to the masses – speaking at various rallies and party meetings, and in particular intervening in the demonstrations celebrating the October revolution (November 1927) with its own banners. At the same time, the Opposition made an attempt finally to raise the issue of Lenin’s testament. In fact it was too little, too late. The mass of workers were descending into political apathy and could make little of the Opposition’s differences with the regime. As Trotsky himself realised against Zinoviev’s short-lived optimism at this juncture, the masses were weary of revolutionary struggle and were more likely to be swayed by Stalin’s promises of socialism in Russia than by any calls for further political upheaval. But in any case, the Opposition was unable to present a clearly distinct revolutionary alternative, a point underlined by the mildness of the banners raised in the November demonstration, which raised slogans such as “down with Ustryalovism” “against a split”, and so on - in other words, stressing the need for “Leninist unity” in the party at a time when Lenin’s party was being annexed to the counter-revolution! Once again, the Stalinists exhibited no such mildness. Their thugs beat up many of the demonstrators on the day, and soon afterwards Trotsky and Zinoviev were summarily expelled from the party. It was the beginning of a spiral of expulsions, exiles, imprisonment, and finally, massacres against the proletarian vestiges of the Bolshevik party.
Most demoralising of all was the effect that the mounting repression had on the morale of the Opposition itself. Almost immediately after the expulsions, the Zinoviev-Trotsky alliance came apart, with the weakest component breaking first: Zinoviev, Kamenev and the majority of their followers capitulated abjectly, confessed their “errors”, and begged to be readmitted into the party. Many of the more right wing Trotskyists also capitulated at this time2.
Having destroyed the left within the party, Stalin soon turned on his allies on the right – the Bukharinists, whose policies were most openly favourable to the private capitalist and the kulak. Facing a series of immediate economic problems, in particular the so-called goods famine, but above all urged forward by the need to develop Russia’s military capacities in a world heading towards new imperialist conflagrations, Stalin announced his “left turn” – a sudden lurch towards rapid industrialisation and the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” – the forced expropriation of the upper and middle peasants.
Stalin’s new turn, accompanied as it was by a campaign against the “rightist danger” in the party, had the effect of further decimating the ranks of the opposition. Those like Preobrazhensky who had laid so much emphasis on industrialisation as the key to advancing towards socialism, were rapidly seduced into the idea that Stalin was objectively carrying of the programme of the left and urged the Trotskyists to return to the party fold. Such was the political fate of the theory of “primitive socialist accumulation”.
The events of 1927-28 clearly marked a turning point. Stalinism had triumphed definitively through the destruction of any opposition forces in the party; there were now no further obstacles to the pursuit of his essential programme - the construction of a war economy on the basis of a more or less integral state capitalism. This effectively spelt the death of the Bolshevik party, its total fusion with the state capitalist bureaucracy. With its next stroke, Stalinism asserted its final domination over the International, and the latter’s complete transformation into an arm of Russian foreign policy. By adopting the theory of socialism in one country at its 6th Congress in August 1928, the CI signed its death warrant as an International just as surely as the Socialist International had done in 1914. This was true even if, as in the period after 1914, the death agony of the individual Communist parties outside Russia was a more drawn-out process, only reaching its end in the mid-30s with the routing of their own left oppositions and the open adoption of a position of national defence in preparation for the second world holocaust.
But while the above conclusion may be crystal clear in hindsight, the question was still being hotly debated in the surviving opposition circles. In 1928-9 this largely took the form of a debate between Trotsky and the Democratic Centralists, whose growing influence on his followers can probably be measured by the amount of energy he put into polemicising against their ‘ultra left, sectarian’ errors.
The Decists had existed since 1919 and had consistently criticised the dangers of bureaucratism in party and state. Having been ejected from the United Opposition they presented their own platform to the 15th congress of the party – a crime for which they were immediately expelled from its ranks. According to Miasnikov, writing in the French paper L’Ouvrier Communiste in 1929, this text, which was signed “The Group of Fifteen”3, was not in direct continuity with the Decist group which had preceded it and showed that Sapranov had moved towards the analyses of his Workers’ Group: “In its main points, in its estimation of the nature of the state in the USSR, its ideas about the workers’ state, the programme of the Fifteen is very close to the ideology of the Workers’ Group”.
At first sight however the platform does not differ radically from the stance adopted by the platform of the United Opposition, even if it is perhaps more thoroughgoing in its castigation of the oppressive regime facing the working class in the factories, the growth of unemployment, the loss of all proletarian life in the soviets, the degeneration of the internal party regime and the catastrophic effects of the policy of ‘socialism in one country’ on the international level. At the same time it is still situated within the problematic of radical reform, identifying itself with the call for more rapid industrialisation and putting forward a number of measures aimed at regenerating the party and restoring the proletariat’s control over the state and the economy. At no point does it call for a new party or for a direct struggle against the state. What is noticeable however is that the text attempts to go to the root of the problem of the state, reaffirming the marxist critique of the weak side of the state as an instrument of the proletarian revolution and warning of the dangers of the state totally detaching itself from the working class. Moreover, in its treatment of the question of state ownership, it points out that there is nothing inherently socialist about this: “For our state enterprises the sole guarantee against their development in a capitalist direction is the existence of the proletarian dictatorship. Only the fall of this dictatorship, or else its degeneration, can alter the direction of their development. In this sense, they represent a solid base for building socialism. That doesn’t mean that they are already socialist (…) To characterise such forms of industry, where labour power still remains a commodity, as socialism, even as bad socialism, would be to embroider reality, to discredit socialism in the eyes of the workers; it would be to present tasks as well established when they are not yet and pass off the NEP for socialism”. In short, without the political domination of the proletariat, the economy, including its statified components, can only proceed in a capitalist direction, a point that was never clear with Trotsky for whom nationalised property forms could themselves guarantee the proletarian character of the state. Finally, the platform of the Fifteen appears to be much more alert to the imminence of Thermidor. In fact it puts forward the view that the final liquidation of the party by the Stalinist faction would signify the end of any proletarian character to the regime: “The bureaucratisation of the party, the degeneration of its leading elements, the fusion of the party apparatus with the bureaucracy of the government, the reduced influence of the proletarian element of the party, the introduction of the governmental apparatus into the internal struggles of the party – all this shows that the Central Committee has, in its policies, already gone beyond the limits of muzzling the party and is beginning its liquidation, the transformation of the party into an auxiliary apparatus of the state. The execution of this liquidation could mean the end of the proletarian dictatorship in the USSR. The party is the vanguard of and essential arm of the proletarian class struggle. Without it, neither victory, nor the maintenance of the proletarian dictatorship is possible”.
Thus even if the Platform of the Fifteen still appears to underestimate the degree to which capitalism had already triumphed in the USSR, it was far easier for the Decists, or at least a substantial part of them, to draw rapid conclusions from the events of 1927-28: the destruction of the opposition at the hands of Stalin’s state terror signified that the Bolshevik party had become a “stinking corpse”, as the Decist V Smirnov described it, and that there was nothing left to defend in the regime. Certainly this was the view that Trotsky combats in the letter ‘Our Differences with the Democratic Centralists’, in which he writes to the Decist Borodai that “your Kharkov colleagues, from what I am informed, have addressed themselves to the workers with an appeal based upon the false idea that the October revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat are already liquidated. This manifesto, false in essence, has done the greatest harm to the Opposition" . No doubt Trotsky also defined as “harm” the fact that a growing wing of the Opposition was coming round to such conclusions.
In the same way, the Decists were able to grasp that there was nothing socialist in Stalin’s sudden ‘left turn’ and to resist the wave of capitulations that it provoked. But they were by no means left unscathed and these events produced splits in their ranks as well. According to Ciliga and others, Sapranov himself capitulated in 1928, believing that the offensive against the kulaks expressed a turn towards socialist policies. However, there are also indications that he soon concluded that Stalin’s industrialisation programme was state capitalist in nature. Among other things, Miasnikov wrote in L’Ouvrier Communiste in 1929 that Sapranov had been arrested that year, and also announced a regroupment between the Workers’ Group, the Group of Fifteen and remnants of the Workers’ Opposition. Smirnov, on the other hand, lost his bearings in a different way:
“The young Decemist Volodya Smirnov even went so far as to say: ‘there never has been a proletarian revolution, nor a dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, there has simply been a ‘popular revolution’ from below and a dictatorship from above. Lenin was never an ideologist of the proletariat. From beginning to end he was an ideologist of the intelligentsia’. These ideas of Smirnov were bound up with the general view that the world was steering straight towards a new social form – state capitalism, with the bureaucracy as the new ruling class. It put on the same level Soviet Russia, Kemalist Turkey, fascist Italy, Germany on the march to Hitlerism, and the America of Hoover-Roosevelt. ‘Communism is an extremist fascism, fascism is a moderate Communism’, he wrote in his article ‘Comfascism’. That conception left the forces and perspectives of socialism somewhat in the shade. The majority of the Decist fraction, Davidov, Shapiro, etc considered that the young Smirnov’s heresy had gone beyond all bounds, and he was expelled from the group amid uproar” (Ciliga, op cit, p 280-282). Ciliga added that it was not hard to see Smirnov’s idea of a ‘new class’ as a precursor of Burnham; likewise his view of Lenin as the ideologist of the intelligentsia was later taken up by the council communists. What may have begun as a valuable insight – the universal scope of state capitalism in the epoch of capitalist decadence – had in the circumstances of defeat and confusion become a route towards the abandonment of marxism.
In a similar way, those in the milieu of the Russian communist left who called for the immediate formation of a new party, while motivated by correct concerns, had lost sight of the realities of the period. A new party could not be created by an act of will in a period of deepening defeat for the world proletariat. What was required above all was the formation of left fractions capable of preparing the programmatic bases for a new party when the conditions of the international class struggle permitted it; but this was a conclusion that only the Italian left was able to draw with any real consistency.
All this testifies to the extreme difficulties facing the opposition groups at the end of the 20s, who were more and more forced to develop their analyses inside the jails of the GPU, which ironically remained as oases of political debate in a country that was being silenced by an unprecedented state terror. But through the whole trauma of capitulations and splits, a definite process of convergence was taking place around the clearest positions of the communist left, involving the Decists, surviving members of the Workers’ Group and the Workers’ Opposition, and the ‘intransigents’ of the Trotskyist opposition. Ciliga himself belonged to the extreme left of the Trotskyist opposition and described his break with Trotsky in the summer of 1932, after receiving an important programmatic text by Trotsky, entitled ‘The problems of the development of the USSR: outline of a programme for the International Left Opposition as regards the Russian question’: “Since 1930 it [the left wing of the Trotskyist current] had been waiting for its leader to speak up openly, and declare that the present Soviet state was not a workers’ state. Now, in the very first chapter of his programme, Trotsky clearly defined it as a ‘proletarian state. A further defeat awaited the left wing in the treatment of the Five Year Plan: its socialist character, the socialist character of its aims and even of its methods were vigorously asserted in the programme (…) It was henceforward an idle hope to expect Trotsky ever to distinguish between bureaucracy and proletariat, between state capitalism and socialism. Those among the left ‘negators’ who could not possibly see any socialism in what was being built up in Russia had no other course open to them than to break with Trotsky and leave the Trotskyist collective. About ten – among them myself – took a decision to that effect (…) Thus, having shared in the ideological life and in the struggles of the Russian Opposition, I ended – as so many others before me and after me – with the following conclusion: Trotsky and his supporters are too closely linked with the bureaucratic regime of the USSR to be able to conduct the struggle against this regime to its final consequences (…) to him, the task of the opposition was to improve, not to destroy the bureaucratic system, to fight against the ‘exaggeration of privileges’ and the extreme inequalities of the standards of life’ – not to fight against privileges and inequalities in general….
‘Bureaucratic or proletarian opposition?’ was the title I gave to the article in which, in prison, I expressed my new attitude towards Trotskyism. Henceforward I belonged to the camp of the Russian extreme left wing opposition: ‘Democratic Centralism’, ‘Workers’ Opposition’, ‘Workers’ Group’.
What separated the opposition from Trotskyism was not only in the way of judging the regime and of understanding the present problems; it was, before all, the way in which the part played in the revolution by the proletariat was being considered. To the Trotskyists it was the party, to the extreme left wing it was the working class which was the mover of the revolution. The struggle between Stalin and Trotsky concerned party politics and the directing personnel of the party; to one as to the other the proletariat was but a passive object. The groups of the extreme left wing communists, on the other hand, were above all interested in the actual conditions of the working class and the part played by it, in what it actually was in Soviet society and what it should be in a society which sincerely set itself the task of building socialism. The ideas and the political life of these groups opened up new perspectives to me and confronted me with problems unknown to the Trotskyist opposition; how should the proletariat set about conquering the means of production taken from the bourgeoisie, efficaciously to control both party and government, to establish a workers’ democracy and safeguard the revolution from bureaucratic degeneracy” (ibid, p 271).
Ciliga’s conclusions may have had a certain councilist flavour and in later years he too was to become disillusioned with marxism. Nonetheless he was describing a real process of proletarian clarification in the most difficult of conditions. Of course it is particularly tragic that much of the fruits of this process have been lost and that it they had no immediate impact on the demoralised Russian proletariat. Some indeed would dismiss these efforts as irrelevant and testimony to the sectarian and abstentionist nature of the communist left. But revolutionaries work on the scale of history and the struggle of the Russian left communists to understand the terrible defeat that had befallen them retains a theoretical importance that is still very much relevant to the work of revolutionaries today. And it is worth pondering the negative significance of the fact that it was not the theses of the intransigents, but Trotsky’s attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, to find something proletarian in the Stalinist regime, that were to predominate in the opposition movement outside Russia. His failure to recognise the completion of Thermidor was to have disastrous consequences, contributing to the ultimate betrayal of the Trotskyist current through the ideology of ‘defence of the USSR’ in the second world war.
With the eventual silencing of the Russian communist left, the search to solve the ‘Russian enigma’ during the 30s and 40s was essentially taken up by revolutionaries outside the USSR. It is to their debates and analyses that we will turn in the next article in this series.
CDW
1 In fact, there is much that remains obscure about the history of the Decists and other left currents in Russia, and a great deal of further research is required. The ICC’s sympathiser, Ian, who died in 1997, was engaged in extensive research into the Russian communist left, and was convinced in particular of the importance of the role played by Sapranov’s group. It can only be regretted that he did not live to complete these inquiries. The ICC is attempting to take up some of the strands of this work; we also hope that the re-emergence of a proletarian political milieu in Russia will make it easier to carry this research forward.
2 These were not the first of the old oppositionists to make their peace with the regime. In the preceding year the leaders of the Workers’ Opposition, Mevdiev, Shliapnikov and Kollontai, and even the once resolute Left Communist and Democratic Centralist Ossinski, together with Lenin’s widow Krupskaya, had renounced all oppositional activity.
3 The Platform of the Group of Fifteen was originally published outside Russia by that branch of the Italian left which produced the journal Reveil Communiste in the late 20s. It appeared in German and in French under the title A la Veille de Thermidor, Revolution et Contre-revolution dans la Russie des Soviets, Plateforme de l’Opposition de Gauche dans le parti Bolshevique (Sapranov, Smirnov, Obhorin, Kalin, etc), in early 1928. The ICC intends to produce an English version of the text in the near future.
In this article, we criticise anarchism because it begins from “abstract eternal principles”. You reply that “Marx appears to us today as a libertarian, a moralist of freedom. He criticises a capitalism that denies the personality, and the freedom of the individual. A ‘marxist’ must defend liberty and respect the liberty of others”. And indeed there can be no real communism which is not driven by the ideal of freedom, by the will to rid society of all forms of oppression, of the whole weight of corruption and inhumanity produced by social relations based on the exploitation of man by man. Marx and Engels made this quite explicit, denouncing human alienation and the scale it had reached under capitalism, defining communism as the realm of freedom, an association of free and equal producers where the “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Communist Manifesto) (…).
However, according to Marxism, the revolution will be carried out not in the name of individual freedom but as the emancipation of a class. How can this contradiction be resolved? The first element of this resolution is that the individual is not conceived as an abstract entity, which would leave intact the opposition of individual interests, but as the concrete manifestation of a social condition in which each individual sees the other as a reflection of himself. In contrast to primitive communism, the individual will no longer be subordinated to the community, nor to the majority as in bourgeois democracy. Communism is the resolution of the conflict between particular interest and general interest.
You know how hostile Marx and Engels were to the mouthing of empty phrases about “duty, rights, truth, morality, justice” etc. Why was this? Because these notions are not in any way the roots of human action. While human will and consciousness indeed play a considerable role, human beings are above all driven to act under the impulsion of material necessity. Sentiments about justice and equality animated the men of the French revolution, but this was a profoundly mystified form of consciousness for those who were about to consolidate a new society of exploitation. And the more fiery their phrases, the more sordid reality proved to be. Thus, the notions of freedom and equality do not have the same content nor do they occupy the same place for communists. Proletarian struggles and revolutions show concretely how moral values have been profoundly modified. What characterises the workers when they affirm themselves as a class is solidarity, the taste for combat, and consciousness. Thus we cannot go along with you in your reading of Marx here.
Anarchism has borrowed a lot from various other socialist schools and from marxism in particular. But what characterises it, what forms its basis, is the speculative method which it took over from the French materialists of the 18th century. According to this conception, if society is unjust it is because it does not conform to human nature. We can see what insoluble problems this position lands us in. Because nothing is more variable than this human nature. Man acts on external nature and in doing so transforms his own nature. Man is a rational, sensitive being, said the French materialists. But the fact is that man reasons and feels differently in different historical epochs and in different social classes. All the previous schools of thought up to Feuerbach, from the most moderate to the most radical, began from this notion of human nature and from concepts derived from it, such as education, the rights of man, the absolute idea, human passions, the human essence. Even those who saw history as a process regulated by laws, like Saint Simon and Hegel, always ended up appealing to some abstract eternal principle.
With Marx and the emergence of the modern proletariat we see things turned the right way round. It is not human nature that explains the historic movement, but the historic movement which fashions human nature in various ways. And this materialist conception is the only one which places itself firmly on the terrain of the class struggle. Anarchism by contrast has never managed to break from the speculative method and what it draws on from past philosophies is always their most idealist elements. What better abstraction could there be than the “Ego and its Own” that Stirner developed from his critique of Feuerbach! It was by imitating Kant that Proudhon arrived at the notion of “absolute liberty”, and then went on to forge beautiful abstractions at the level of economics - “constituted value” - and politics - “the free contract”. To the abstract principle of “liberty”, Bakunin, on the basis of what he had understood from Hegel, added that of “equality”. What has this in common with the historical materialism that you claim to defend?
With abstract contrasts like liberty/authority, federalism/centralism, not only do you lose sight of the historical movement and the material needs which are its basis, but you also end up turning the real, concrete contrast, between classes themselves, into an abstraction that can be corrected, limited, replaced by other abstractions, such as “Humanity” for example. This was also the method of “real socialism” in “The French socialist and communist literature (…) ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other; he felt conscious of having overcome ‘French onesidedness’ and of representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of Truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy” (Communist Manifesto). In our view you fall into this kind of trap when you talk about “a position of principle which goes beyond the struggle of the proletariat” and which applies to primitive tribes, mothers and prostitutes.
Many anarchists were genuine working class militants, but because of their ideology they were constantly drawn towards abandoning the class terrain as soon as the proletariat was defeated or disappeared momentarily from the social scene. For anarchism, in the final analysis it is not the proletariat that is the revolutionary subject, but the people in general, which is yet another abstract, unreal notion. But what is behind the world ‘people’, which has lost all meaning in bourgeois society where classes have a much more distinct outline? Nothing other than the idealised petty bourgeois individual, an individual who oscillates between the two historic classes, sometimes towards the bourgeoisie, sometimes towards the proletariat, who would like to reconcile the classes, find an area of agreement, a slogan for a common struggle. Did Marx himself not say that all individuals in this society suffer from alienation? No doubt you know what conclusion he drew from this fact.[1] [28] This was the origin for the demand for “the social and economic equalisation of classes” raised by Bakunin, and it was also why Proudhon and Stirner concluded their theses with a defence of small-scale property. In the genesis of anarchism you have the standpoint of the worker who has just been proletarianised and who rejects his new status with every fibre of his being. Having only just emerged from the peasantry or the artisans, often half-way between worker and artisan (like the Jura watchmakers for example[2] [29]), these workers expressed a regret for the past faced with the drama of their descent into the condition of the working class. Their social aspiration was to turn the wheel of history backwards. At the heart of this conception was a nostalgia for small-scale property. This is why, following Marx, we analyse anarchism as the expression of the penetration of petty-bourgeois ideology into the ranks of the proletariat. The rejection of proletarianisation remains central to the anarchist movement today which reflects in general the enormous pressure on the proletariat coming from the intermediate strata which surround it, and from which it also derives to some extent. For these heterogeneous petty-bourgeois strata, lacking in any historical perspective, the dominant aspect, alongside despair and plaintive laments, is the spirit of every man for himself, of high self-opinion, impatience and immediatism, radical revolt that leads nowhere. These kinds of behaviour and ideology do have an influence on the proletariat, weakening its sense of solidarity and collective identity.
The healthiest components of anarchism, those who have been most involved in the workers’ movement, have always been obliged to demarcate themselves from those who have taken the logic of individualism to its conclusions. But without being able to get to the roots of the problem: “It is however necessary to demarcate ourselves resolutely from the purely individualist anarchists who see the strengthening and egoistic triumph of the person as the only way of negating the state and authority, and who reject socialism itself as well as any general organisation of society as a form of oppression of a self which can have no other foundation than itself” (…).[3] [30]
It is the same for democracy and dictatorship as it is for truth and liberty: taken as abstract principles they lose all meaning. These notions also have a class content: there is bourgeois dictatorship and the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is bourgeois democracy and workers’ democracy. We disagree with you when you write: “The phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ no longer means anything today: the words have covered the facts. Facts have changed the meaning of the words”. The word “communism” has also been dragged through the mud. Should we therefore abandon it? The whole question lies in defining what we understand by the dictatorship of the proletariat. As you will see from reading our press, we share many of the criticisms that Rosa Luxemburg directed at the Bolsheviks and we defend workers’ democracy in the struggle and in the revolution.[4] [31] Before discussing all the questions posed by the Russian experience, we have to begin with Marx’s definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. For him the term meant the political regime established by the working class after the insurrection, and it implied that the proletariat was the only class that could carry through the transformation of society in the direction of communism. Therefore it had to guard its autonomy, its power and its weapons jealously vis-à-vis all other classes. It also implied that the proletariat must firmly suppress any attempt to re-establish the old order. For us the dictatorship of the proletariat is the most complete democracy for the proletariat and all the non-exploiting classes. The lessons of the Commune were confirmed and deepened by the emergence of workers’ councils and the 1917 insurrection. The proletarian revolution is indeed “a series of phases, each one engendering the next” as you say, quoting Pannekoek. The first phase is the mass strike which poses the problem of the internationalisation of struggles and which reaches its summit with the appearance of the councils. The second phase is characterised by a situation of dual power, which is resolved by the insurrection, the destruction of the bourgeois state and the unification of the power of the workers’ councils on a world scale. The third phase is the transition towards communism, the abolition of classes and the withering away of the semi-state which inevitably arises as long as classes still exist. In what sense can this sequence correspond to a bourgeois revolution? Because, according to Marx and the marxists, the political factor is still dominant? The slogan “all power to the soviets” launched by the working class in 1917 provides the most concrete demonstration of the primacy of politics in the proletarian revolution. Inversely, the occupation of the factories in Italy in 1920, the disastrous experience in Spain 1936, clearly show the impotence of the proletariat as long as it does not hold political power. In our view what was shown to be bankrupt here was self-management, not the dictatorship of the proletariat. A first difference with the bourgeois revolution can be seen here. The transition towards capitalism took place inside feudal society; the seizure of political power by the bourgeoisie was only the culmination of this transition. The proletarian revolution is quite different. Here the councilists commit the most classic kind of teleological error. According to them, the end of the 1920s saw the triumph of state capitalism in Russia, therefore the Russian revolution must have been bourgeois from the start.
The idealist method of anarchism is trapped in such inextricable contradictions that many anarchists have been forced to break with it at moments when the proletariat affirmed itself as a force to be reckoned with. Or else they had to twist the whole sacrosanct dogma. Thus in September 1919, in the midst of the revolutionary wave, Erich Muhsam[5] [32] wrote: “The theoretical and practical theses of Lenin on the accomplishment of the revolution and the communist tasks of the proletariat have given a new basis to our action There are no more insurmountable obstacles to the unification of the entire revolutionary proletariat. It’s true that the anarchist communists have had to give ground on the most important disagreement between the two great tendencies in socialism: they have had to renounce Bakunin’s negative attitude towards the dictatorship of the proletariat and on this point rally to the opinion of Marx”.[6] [33] Thus many anarchists joined the camp of communism. But the counter-revolution was a terrible test which saw numerous militants melt away like snow in the sun, and a profound distortion of communist principles. Many were those who returned to their old loves; this included a lot of anarchists, but also many communists who went back to the social democratic fold. Only the communist left was able to draw the lessons of the defeat while remaining loyal to Red October, and capable of distinguishing those elements in the experience of the revolution which belonged to a past period from those which remained very much alive for today and tomorrow. Here the combat of Gorter and Miasnikov was exemplary.[7] [34]
You take up the theses of council communism from its main animator, Pannekoek. In The Dutch Left and the last issue of our International Review (no.101, “The council communists faced with the war in Spain”) you can acquaint yourselves with our criticisms of this current. But it was clearly an authentic component of the communist left. It remained faithful to proletarian internationalism during the Second World War whereas many anarchists and the whole Trotskyist current took the side of the allied imperialist camp, some even taking part in the resistance. Pannekoek remained a real Marxist when, in Lenin as Philosopher, he criticised the mechanistic conception which appears in Materialism and Empirio-criticism with the theory of reflection and you are right to say that Lenin “forgets the historical materialism of Marx expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach”. But Pannekoek himself left the terrain of historical materialism when, on the basis of theoretical error which he correctly detected in Lenin, he deduced from this the bourgeois nature of the Russian revolution. In our International Review we have republished a detailed reply to Pannekoek’s text (which appeared somewhat after the event in 1938[8] [35]), by the Gauche Communiste de France. For us it is a serious error to confuse a proletarian revolution that has degenerated with a bourgeois revolution. This was never the position of Gorter and Miasnikov, nor was it that of Pannekoek at the beginning. For all militants, the overwhelming reality of the facts demonstrated without any possible doubt the proletarian nature of the revolutionary wave which gave rise to workers’ councils throughout central and eastern Europe (…).
Gorter and Miasnikov,[9] [36] and Pannekoek to begin with, had the same attitude towards this degeneration: like true communists, they fought it to the end, without repudiating the proletarian revolution nor concluding over-hastily that the Bolshevik party had passed over to the bourgeois camp. The only responsible attitude is to fight the party’s opportunist course as a Fraction within it, to go on fighting even after being excluded, and until facts demonstrate incontrovertibly that the party has adopted the interests of capital. Only this attitude can save the original revolutionary programme and enrich it, to win over to its cause a number of militants, and to learn the lessons of defeat. Although he abandoned it later, Pannekoek adopted this attitude at first, following in this the example of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg confronted with the betrayal of the Social-Democracy in 1914.
We are not Leninists,[10] [37] but we come from Lenin’s tradition, especially as far as his unyielding internationalism at the outbreak of World War I is concerned. The Bolsheviks, and Rosa Luxemburg’s current to which Pannekoek belonged, fought against centrism and opportunism within the Social-Democracy before the war, and in doing so were an international and historical phenomenon of the greatest importance. We find the same tradition within the Left of the Communist International; we find it passed down from one generation to the next, and in much more difficult conditions, to the present day. The most creative currents, those who have bequeathed us the richest lessons, are those that remained firm on the proletarian nature of the Russian Revolution, and which were able to break with Trotsky’s Left Opposition, which quickly sank into opportunism.[11] [38] You are right to bring up the existence of a centrist current, represented by Kautsky, within the pre-war Social-Democracy. But for us, centrism is only a variant on opportunism. Moreover, the fact that Lenin was slower than Luxemburg in identifying Kautsky’s centrism does not contradict the Bolsheviks’ membership of the Second International’s marxist current.
You write: “Lenin’s conception of an active minority of professional revolutionaries is opposed by Otto Ruhle, an anti-authoritarian marxist excluded from the KAPD on Moscow’s orders…”; for us, this passage contains two inaccuracies. The Communist International intervened on two organisational problems: the problem of Ruhle and other elements closer to revolutionary syndicalism than marxism, and that of Wolffheim and Laufenberg’s “National Bolshevik” current. But on both questions, the KAPD was in complete agreement with the CI. Pannekoek was the first to argue for the expulsion of the Hamburgers, whose anti-Semitic leanings were unacceptable. His attitude was radically different from Ruhle’s, and he adopted a clear party position when, with the rest of the KAPD, he considered himself a member in every sense of the CI, the symbol of internationalism and the world revolution. And in line with the party spirit, the KAPD was to struggle against the rise of opportunism within the CI, for the victory of its own positions, rather than deserting the combat.
The “orders from Moscow” that you mention are part of a myth, as is Ruhle’s description of the Bolshevik party which you adopt. The party was criss-crossed by innumerable discussions and crises which bear witness to its rich internal life. The elitist conception is completely foreign to Lenin, and the idea of a “professional revolutionary” is a contradiction in terms. What was important for the Bolshevik fraction was to fight the Mensheviks’ dilettantism and conceptions based on personal affinity. It demanded that the Party’s affairs be conducted with a minimum of coherence and seriousness. Substitutionism is another problem, and Lenin does indeed sometimes fall into Jacobin errors. We have criticised this conception at length in our press. Suffice it to say here that this was a conception shared by the all the marxists of the Second International, including Rosa Luxemburg.[12] [39]
This brings us to your second inaccuracy. You say that Lenin’s envisaged the Party as an “active minority”. Now, you can heap every sin in the world on Lenin’s head, but not this: the notion of the “active minority” belongs to anarchism. Because anarchism is not based on historical materialism, which recognises the proletariat’s historic mission, but on the revolt of the oppressed masses against authority, it needs an enlightened minority to direct this heterogeneous mass towards the realm of absolute freedom. Just as the workers’ movement was breaking with the period of secret societies, Bakunin’s International Alliance for Socialist Democracy upheld the conception of an enlightened conspiratorial elite. For marxism, the proletariat in freeing itself will emancipate the whole of humanity, whereas for anarchism it is humanity that uses the proletarian struggle as a means to emancipate itself. For marxism, the revolutionary vanguard is the most conscious fraction of the proletariat, a part of the whole; for anarchism, the “active minority” transcends the class, expressing the “superior” interests of humanity seen as an abstract entity. This conception is expressed explicitly by Kropotkin and Malatesta, and summarised well by Max Nettlau: “Knowing the masses’ authoritarian habits, [Kropotkin] thought that the masses needed to be infiltrated and given an impetus by libertarian militants such as the Alliance within the International”.[13] [40] You point out Bakunin’s Jacobin failings, so you know very well how hierarchically organised the Alliance was. It may have taken on different forms, but the theory of the “active minority” has remained a constant characteristic of anarchism. Once again, this conception sees the revolution as the work, not of a conscious class but of elementary forces, the most disinherited layers of society – poor peasants, the jobless, etc. – and of this enlightened elite which is to infiltrate the organs of the revolution to give them an impetus in the right direction; this elite is completely external to the proletariat, it is based on nothing other than “eternal principles”. This has nothing to do with the myriad links between the communists and the working class, which made the former a collective secretion of the latter, and which found expression in the open and frank political struggles within both the workers’ councils and the communist parties during the revolutionary wave. In the anarchist vision, two kinds of organisation come together: an enlightened minority which hides its positions and objectives – here it falls into monolithism and is deprived of the collective control and elaboration of positions by the general assembly of its militants – and a large and open organisation, where every group and individual is “free and autonomous” and obliged to accept no responsibility for its actions or positions. This conception explains why Muhsam and Landauer were prepared to cohabit with the worst opportunists during the Bavarian Council Republic. Political confrontation, collective militant responsibility, which make it possible to correct the organisation’s mistakes and to allow a minority position to triumph when it turns out to be correct, and to gather together on a clear basis the forces ready to resist the organisation’s degeneration – all these healthy organisational foundations are rejected by anarchism. This organisational conception of the “active minority” is at the antipodes of the anti-hierarchical ideas, the “organic” centralisation, the intense political life, which characterise marxist organisations (…).
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[1] [41] “The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of human existence. The latter feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence” (The Holy Family, Chapter 4).
[2] [42] Within the IWA, the Jura Federation, whose membership was largely made up of watchmakers, was one of the most important supporters of Bakunin’s “Alliance for Socialist Democracy”.
[3] [43] Vers une société libérée de l’Etat, La Digitale/Spartacus, Quimperle-Paris, 1999, pp94, 134.
[4] [44] International Review nos.99-101, October 1999 – April 2000, “Understanding the defeat of the Russian Revolution”. Révolution Internationale no.57, January 1979, “Le démocratie ouvrière: pratique du proletariat”
[5] [45] German anarchist who took part in the Bavarian Republic of Workers’ Councils in 1919.
[6] [46] Quoted by Rosmer in Moscou sous Lénine, Petite Collection Maspéro, Paris 1970.
[7] [47] Among the Communist Lefts, Gorter and Miasnikov were among the first to struggle within the International and the Communist Parties against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution.
[8] [48] “Politics and philosophy from Lenin to Harper”, in International Review nos.25, 27, 28, 30: 1981-82.
[9] [49] We have given an account of the struggle of Miasnikov and his “Worker’s Group” in an article published in International Review no.101, “1922-23: the communist fractions against the rise of the counter-revolution”, as well as in our newly published book: The Russian communist left.
[10] [50] See “Have we become Leninists?” in International Review nos.96-97, 1999.
[11] [51] See our book on The Italian Communist Left.
[12] [52] See our pamphlet on Communist Organisations and Class Consciousness.
[13] [53] Histoire de L’anarchie, Paris 1971
This article is the first part of a study published in the review Bilan in 1934, by the Left Fraction of the Italian Communist Party. The study’s aim was to “better penetrate the meaning of the crises which have periodically shaken the whole capitalist apparatus, and in conclusion to try to characterise and define as precisely as possible the era of definitive decadence which capitalism fills with the bloody upheavals of its death-agony”.
The intention was to update and deepen the classic marxist analysis, in order to understand why capitalism is condemned to cyclical crises of production, and why with the 20th century and the progressive saturation of the world market, it had entered into another phase: the phase of irreversible decadence. The cyclical crises did not disappear, but gave way to a phenomenon that was at once more serious and more profound: the historic crisis of the capitalist system, a situation of permanent contradiction that sharpened with time, between capitalist social relations and the development of the productive forces. The capitalist form of production had become not only a barrier to progress, but a threat to the very survival of humanity. Mitchell’s1 study returns to the foundations of the marxist analysis of profit and the accumulation of capital. It shows the continuity between the analyses of Marx and those of Rosa Luxemburg who, in The accumulation of capital, explained capitalism’s tendency towards ever more deadly convulsions, and the historic limits of a system which has entered an era of “crises, wars, and revolutions”2.
Mitchell’s work of updating and deepening remains entirely valid in the present period. Bilan could not imagine today’s dimension of debt, financial speculation, currency manipulation, company mergers and concentration. Nonetheless, this analysis provides all the foundations for understanding their mechanisms. This document thus allows us to restate the foundations of the analyses developed in the article on “The new economy” published in this issue; they will be clearer still with the second part of the study, which will be published in the next issue of the International Review: “The analysis of the general crisis of decadent imperialism”.
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The marxist analysis of the capitalist mode of production aims to deal essentially with the following points:
the critique of the remains of feudal and pre-capitalist modes of production and exchange;
the need to replace these backward forms by the more progressive capitalist form;
the demonstration of the capitalist mode of production’s progressive nature, by revealing the positive aspect and social usefulness of the laws that rule its development;
the examination, from the standpoint of a socialist critique, of these same laws’ negative aspect and their contradictory and destructive action, leading the evolution of capitalism into a dead end;
the demonstration that the capitalist forms of appropriation in the end form a hindrance to the full flourishing of production, and that consequently the mode of production creates an ever more intolerable class situation, expressed in an increasingly profound rift between the CAPITALISTS, ever richer and less numerous, and the propertyless WAGE-EARNERS, ever more numerous and more wretched;
finally, the recognition that the immense productive forces developed by the capitalist mode of production can only flourish harmoniously in a society organised by the only class that expresses no particular caste interest: the PROLETARIAT.
In this study, we will not analyse in depth the organic evolution of capitalism’s ascendant phase. We will limit ourselves to following the dialectical process of its internal forces, the better to penetrate the significance of the crises which have periodically shaken the whole capitalist productive apparatus. Finally, we will try to define as precisely as possible capitalism’s era of definitive decadence, in which it is being shaken by the bloody upheavals of its death-agony.
We will also examine how the decomposition of the pre-capitalist economies – feudalism, craft production, the peasant community – creates the conditions for the extension of the market for capitalist commodities.
Let us summarise the essential preconditions for capitalist production.
It is this SURPLUS VALUE equivalent to his SURPLUS LABOUR that the proletarian is obliged to give the capitalist for free, by virtue of the fact that he sells his labour power “freely” and contractually. This is what constitutes the capitalist’s PROFIT. This is not therefore something abstract, a fiction, but LIVING LABOUR.
We apologise for this insistence on what is after all the ABC of marxist economic theory. If we do so, it is because we must not lose sight of the fact that all the economic and political problems that capitalism confronts (and in a period of crisis, these are numerous and complex) all boil down to this central objective: how to produce the MAXIMUM of SURPLUS VALUE. Capitalism cares not a jot for production for the needs of humanity, for the its consumption and its vital needs. ONE CONSUMPTION ALONE excites its interest and passion, stimulates its energy and its will, gives it reason to exist: the CONSUMPTION OF LABOUR POWER!
Capitalism uses this labour power to obtain the highest return possible, corresponding to the greatest quantity of labour power possible. But this is not all: it must also raise to the maximum the ratio of free to paid labour, the ratio of profit to the wages and capital employed, the RATE OF SURPLUS VALUE. The capitalist achieves his ends, on the one hand by increasing total labour, by lengthening the working day and intensifying working practice, and on the other by paying for labour power as cheaply as possible (even below its value), thanks above all to the development of labour productivity which lowers the cost of goods of primary necessity and subsistence. Capitalism of its own free will obviously does not allow the worker to buy more products thanks to the fall in prices Wages always fluctuate around the axis of the value of labour power, which is equivalent to those things strictly indispensable to its reproduction: the movement of the value of wages above or below this value evolves parallel to the fluctuations in the balance of forces between capitalists and proletarians.
From what precedes, it follows that the quantity of surplus value is a function not of the TOTAL capital employed, but only of the part devoted to the purchase of labour power, or VARIABLE CAPITAL. This is why the capitalist tends to make the MINIMUM of TOTAL CAPITAL produce the MAXIMUM of SURPLUS VALUE, but as we will see when we analyse accumulation, this tendency is countered by a law that acts in the opposite direction and leads to a fall in the rate of profit.
When we consider total capital, or the capital invested in capitalist production – let us say for one year – we must consider it, not as an expression of the concrete, material form of things, of their use value, but as representing commodities, exchange value. This being the case, the value of the annual product is made up:
of consumed constant capital, that is to say the means of production that have been worn out, and raw materials absorbed: these two elements express past labour, that has already been consumed, materialised, during previous periods of production;
of variable capital and surplus value representing new, living labour consumed during the year.
This synthetic value, as it appears in the total product, is found in the unitary product: the value of a table, for example, is the sum of the value equivalent to the wear of the machine that produced it, plus the value of the raw material, and of the labour incorporated in it. The product should not therefore be considered as expressing exclusively either constant capital, variable capital, or surplus value.
Variable capital and surplus value form the revenue that springs from the sphere of production (since we have not here considered the extra-capitalist production of the peasants or craftsmen, etc., we do not include their revenue either).
The proletariat’s revenue is the wage fund. The bourgeoisie’s revenue is the mass of surplus value, of profit (we will not analyse here the division of surplus value within the capitalist class, into industrial profit, commercial profit, banking profit and money rent). Thus determined, the revenue from the capitalist sphere fixes the limits of individual consumption for both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. However, it is important to emphasise that the capitalists’ consumption is only limited by the possibilities of the production of surplus value, whereas the workers’ consumption is strictly a function of the necessities of this same production of surplus value. Hence, there is a fundamental antagonism at the basis of the division of total revenue, which engenders all the others. To those who say that the workers need only produce in order to consume, or that since their needs are unlimited they are always below the possibilities of production, we reply with the words of Marx: “what the workers produce in fact is surplus value: as long as they produce it, they can consume, but as soon as production stops, consumption stops likewise. It is not true that they are able to consume because they produce the equivalent of their consumption”. He says, moreover: “The workers must always be over-producers (surplus value), and produce beyond their ‘needs’ in order to be able to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs”.
But for the capitalist, it is not enough to appropriate surplus value, he cannot content himself with despoiling the worker of a part of the fruits of his labour; he must be able to realise this surplus value, transform it into money by selling the product that contains it, at its value.
Sale conditions the renewal of production: it allows the capitalist to replace the elements of capital used up in the process that has just terminated; he has to replace worn out equipment, buy new raw materials, pay the workforce. But from the capitalist viewpoint, these elements are considered not in their material form as a similar quantity of use values, as the same quantity of production to be reincorporated into the productive process, but as exchange value, as capital reinvested in production at its old level (ignoring the new accumulated value) in order to maintain at least the same level of profit as previously. To begin the cycle again, in order to produce new surplus value remains the capitalist’s supreme objective.
If production cannot be entirely realised, or if it is realised below its value, then the exploitation of the worker has earned little or nothing for the capitalist, because the free labour has not been concretised in money, and then converted into new capital capable of producing surplus value. The fact that consumable products have nonetheless been produced leaves the capitalist completely indifferent, even if the working class lacks for essentials. If we envisage the possibility of a failure to sell, it is precisely because the capitalist process of production is divided into two phases: production and sale. Although these two phases form a unity, and are closely inter-dependent, they take place quite separately. Thus the capitalist, far from dominating the market, is on the contrary completely subjected to it. Not only is sale separate from production, but the subsequent purchase is separate from the sale; in other words, the vendor of a commodity is not necessarily and at the same time the buyer of another commodity. In the capitalist economy, trade in commodities does not mean their direct exchange: all commodities, before they arrive at their definitive destination, must metamorphose into money, and this transformation is the most important phase in their circulation.
The first possibility of crises therefore springs from the differentiation between on the one hand, production and sale, and on the other between sale and purchase, whence the necessity for the commodity to be metamorphosed first into money, then from money to commodity, and this on the basis of a production that starts from capital-money to end up as money-capital.
Here then, capitalism finds itself confronted with the problem of the realisation of production. What are the conditions for its solution? Firstly, in normal conditions the fraction of the product’s value that embodies constant capital can be sold within the capitalist sphere itself, through an internal exchange which conditions the renewal of production. The fraction representing variable capital is purchased by the workers, thanks to the wages paid them by the capitalist, and strictly within the limits that we have pointed out, since the price of labour power gravitates around its value: this is the only part of the total product whose realisation, and whose market, are assured by the financing of capitalism itself. There remains surplus value. We could of course envisage the possibility that the bourgeoisie devotes all of this to its personal consumption, although for this to happen the product would first have to have been exchanged for money (we dismiss the possibility that individual expenses could be paid with already hoarded money), since capitalism cannot consume its own production. But if the bourgeoisie behaved like this, if it did no more than enjoy the fruits of the surplus product that it takes from the proletariat, if it limited itself to a simple, rather than enlarged reproduction, thus guaranteeing itself a peaceful and carefree existence, then it would be no different from previous ruling classes, except in its forms of domination. The structure of slave society prevented any technical development and maintained production at a level which perfectly satisfied the slave-owner, whose needs were amply met by the slaves. Similarly, the feudal lord, in exchange for the protection he gave the serf, received from the latter the produce of his extra work and thus rid himself of the concerns of production, the market being limited to a narrow and inelastic range of exchanges.
Under the impetus of the development of a mercantile economy, capitalism’s historic task was precisely to sweep away these sordid, stagnant societies. The expropriation of the producers created the labour market and opened the valves of surplus value for a mercantile capital transformed into industrial capital. A productive fever gripped the whole social body. Spurred on by competition, capital attracted capital. The productive forces and production grew geometrically, and capitalist accumulation reached its apogee during the last third of the 19th century with the flourishing of “free trade”.
History thus demonstrates that the bourgeoisie, taken as a whole, cannot be content with consuming the whole of the surplus value. On the contrary, its eager search for profit encouraged the bourgeoisie to set aside the greater part of the surplus value and – since profit attracts profit as the magnet attracts iron – to transform it into CAPITAL. Production continued to expand, competition stimulating its movement and presupposing technical improvement.
The demands of accumulation transformed the realisation of surplus value into a stumbling block to the realisation of the total product. While the realisation of the part reserved for consumption poses no problems (at least in theory), there nonetheless remains the surplus value reserved for accumulation. This cannot be absorbed by the proletarians, since their purchasing power is limited to their own wages. Can we suppose that it could be absorbed by exchange among the capitalists and within the capitalist sphere, and that this exchange would be sufficient to extend production?
Such a solution is evidently absurd in the end, since as Marx points out: “capitalist production supposes, not the possession of more and more goods, but the appropriation of value, money, abstract wealth”. The extension of production is a function of the accumulation of this abstract wealth; the capitalist does not produce for the pleasure of producing, for the pleasure of accumulating means of production and consumption, or of “stuffing” more and more workers, but because production engenders free labour, surplus value which accumulates, and grows more the more it is transformed into capital. Marx adds: “If we say that the capitalists need only exchange and consume their commodities amongst themselves, then we forget the whole character of capitalist production, since it is also necessary to valorise capital, and not to consume it”.
We thus find ourselves at the heart of the problem which is constantly and inevitably posed to the capitalist class as a whole: that of selling outside the capitalist market, whose absorptive capacity is strictly limited by the laws of capitalism, since the surplus production represents at least the value of the surplus value which is not consumed by the bourgeoisie, but is destined to be transformed into capital. It is inescapable: commodity capital cannot become capital that produces surplus value unless it is first converted into money outside the capitalist market. “To sell a part of its commodities, capitalism needs buyers who are neither capitalists nor wage-earners, and who dispose of an autonomous purchasing power” (Rosa Luxemburg).
Before we consider where and how capital finds buyers with this “autonomous” purchasing power, we must first follow the process of accumulation.
We have already pointed out that the growth of working capital within production at the same time develops the productive forces, under the impetus of technical improvements. However, along with this positive and progressive aspect of capitalist production there emerges a regressive, antagonistic factor arising from the modification of the internal relationship of capital’s component parts.
Accumulated surplus value is divided into two unequal parts: one – the largest – must serve to extend constant capital, while the smaller part is devoted to the purchase of extra labour power; the rhythm of increase of constant capital thus accelerates to the detriment of variable capital, and the share of constant capital as a part of the whole grows: in other words, capital’s organic composition rises. The demand for extra workers certainly increases the proletariat’s absolute share of the social product, but its relative share declines, since variable capital declines relative to constant capital and total capital. However, even the absolute growth in variable capital, the wages fund, cannot continue indefinitely: at a certain moment, it reaches saturation point. In fact, the continuing rise in organic composition (in other words, of capital’s technical development) develops the power of the productive forces and of labour productivity to such a point that capital’s continued rise, far from absorbing ever more new labour power, on the contrary ends up by throwing onto the market a part of that labour power which has already been integrated into production, thus producing a “phenomenon” which is specific to decadent capitalism: permanent unemployment, the expression of a relative and constant “over-population” of the working class.
On the other hand, the full significance of the gigantic proportions reached by production lies in the fact that the mass of products or use values grows much more quickly than the corresponding mass of exchange value, than the value of constant capital consumed, of the variable capital and the surplus value; thus, for example, when a machine costing 1000 francs and able to produce 1000 units of a given product and needing two workers to operate it, is replaced by one costing 2000 francs, needing only one worker, but capable of producing three or four times more than its predecessor. It may be objected that since more products can be obtained with less labour, the worker’s wage can therefore buy more, but this forgets completely that products are first and foremost commodities, and that labour power is also a commodity: consequently, as we said at the outset, this commodity Labour Power can only be sold at its exchange value, which is equivalent to the cost of its reproduction, which in turn represents the strict minimum necessary for the worker to maintain his existence. If technical progress reduces the cost of this subsistence, then the workers’ wage will diminish correspondingly. And even if this reduction is not proportional to the fall in the cost of products, due to a balance of forces favourable to the proletariat, it must in every case fluctuate within the limits compatible with the demands of capitalist production.
The process of accumulation thus deepens a first contradiction: growth of the productive forces, decline of the labour power devoted to production, and development of a permanent relative over-population of the working class. This contradiction creates another. We have already shown what are the factors that determine the rate of surplus value. However, it is important to emphasise that for a constant rate of surplus value, the mass of surplus value, and so the mass of profit, will always be proportional to the mass of variable capital engaged in production. If variable capital decreases in relation to total capital, then the mass of profit relative to total capital also falls, and as a result, the rate of profit decreases. This fall in the rate of profit sharpens as accumulation progresses, and as constant capital increases relative to variable capital, while at the same time the mass of profit continues to rise (as a result of a rise in the rate of surplus value). It therefore does not in the least express a less intense exploitation of the workers, but means that less labour is used in relation to total capital, thus obtaining less free labour. Moreover, it accelerates the rhythm of accumulation because it harasses capitalism, biting at its heels, forcing it to extract the maximum surplus value from a given number of workers, and thus to accumulate more and more surplus value.
The law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall generates cyclical crises, and is a powerful catalyst in the decomposition of the decadent capitalist economy. Moreover, it provides us with an explanation for the export of capital, which is one of the specific traits of imperialist and monopolist capital: “the export of capital”, says Marx, “is not caused by the impossibility of employing it at home, but by the possibility of placing it abroad at a higher rate of profit”. Lenin confirms this idea (in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism), saying that “the need to export capital results from the capitalism’s excessive maturity in certain countries, where advantageous investments [our emphasis] are in short supply, agriculture being backward and the masses wretched”.
Another factor which helps to accelerate accumulation is credit, a panacea which today has acquired a magical power in the eyes of bourgeois and social-democratic economists in search of salvation and solutions: a magical word in the country of Roosevelt, a magical word for all the enthusiasts of the planned (capitalist) economy: for De Man3, for the bureaucrats of the CGT and other saviours of capitalism. Apparently, credit has the virtue of creating purchasing power.
However, once stripped of all its deceitful pseudo-scientific rags, credit can be defined very simply as follows: the putting at capital’s disposal, via its financial apparatus:
of money temporarily unused in the production process and destined for the renewal of constant capital;
of the fraction of surplus value that the bourgeoisie does not consume immediately, or that it cannot accumulate;
of the sums available to non-capitalist strata (peasants, artisans), or to privileged strata of the working class, in a word of everything that constitutes SAVINGS, and expresses a potential purchasing power.
At most, therefore, the operation of credit cannot do more than transform latent purchasing power into new purchasing power. Moreover, it is a problem that is only of interest to those who want to amuse idle onlookers. What concerns us is that savings can be mobilised for capitalisation and so increase the mass of accumulated capital. Without credit, savings would only be hoarded money, not capital. “Credit increases immeasurably the capacity for the extension of production, and is the internal motive force that constantly pushes it to go beyond the limits of the market” (R. Luxemburg).
A third accelerating factor should be pointed out. It is impossible for the bourgeoisie to adapt its own consumption to the vertiginous increase in the mass of surplus value. No matter how voracious its “stomach”, it cannot absorb the extra surplus value produced. Even if its gluttony pushed it to consume more, it could not do so, for it is subjected to the implacable law of competition: expanding production in order to reduce the cost price. Since the fraction of surplus value that is consumed is more and more reduced relative to total surplus value, the rate of accumulation increases. Whence a new cause of contraction of the capitalist market.
We will just mention here a fourth accelerating factor, which appeared in parallel with credit and banking capital, and is a product of the competitive process of selection: the centralisation of capital and means of production in gigantic enterprises which, by increasing the surplus value for accumulation “in bulk”, increase much more rapidly the mass of capital. Since these enterprises evolve organically into parasitic monopolies, they also become a virulent catalyst for disintegration in the period of imperialism.
Let us now summarise the fundamental contradictions which undermine capitalist production:
on the one hand, a production that has reached a level resulting in mass consumption; on the other, the demands of this production itself shrink the foundations of consumption within the capitalist market: relative and absolute decrease of the proletariat’s share in total product, relative restriction of the capitalists’ individual consumption;
the need to realise outside the capitalist market that fraction of the product which cannot be consumed internally, corresponding to accumulated surplus value, which increases rapidly and constantly under the pressure of various accelerating factors.
It is necessary therefore, on the one hand, to realise the product before production can begin again, and on the other to enlarge the available outlets in order to be able to realise the product.
As Marx emphasises: “Capitalist production is forced to produce on a scale which has nothing to do with present demand, but depends on a continual extension of the world market. The demand of the workers is not enough, since profit comes precisely from the fact that the workers’ demand is less than the value of their product, and profit is all the greater when their demand is relatively less. The reciprocal demand of the capitalists is not enough either”.
How then will this continuous extension of the world market happen, this constant creation and widening of extra-capitalist markets whose vital importance for capitalism was emphasised by Rosa Luxemburg? Because of its historic position in the evolution of society, capitalism, if it is to continue to survive, must pursue the struggle that it first began to create the foundations for the development of its production. In other words, if capitalism is to transform into money and accumulate the surplus value that it sweats from every pore, it must disintegrate the old economies that have survived the upheavals of history. In order to sell the products that the capitalist sphere cannot absorb, it must find purchasers, and these can only exist in a market economy. Moreover, in order to maintain the scale of its production, capitalism needs immense reserves of raw materials, which it can only appropriate in the countries where they exist on condition that it does not come up against forms of property which create a barrier to its aims, and on condition that it can dispose of the labour power necessary to exploit these coveted riches. Wherever there still survive slave-holding or feudal economies, or peasant communities where the producer is tied to his means of production and works to satisfies his own needs, capitalism therefore has to create the conditions and open the way to attain its objectives. Through violence, expropriation and taxation, and with the support of these regions’ ruling strata, capitalism first destroys the last vestiges of collective property, transforms production to satisfy the demands of production for the market, establishes new production corresponding to its own needs, amputates the peasant economy of those crafts which complemented it. It thus creates a market where the peasant is forced to sell his agricultural produce – which is all that he can still produce – in exchange for the junk churned out of the capitalist factories. In Europe, the agricultural revolution of the 15th and 16th centuries had already brought about the expropriation and expulsion of a part of the rural population, and created the market for the emerging capitalist production. Marx remarked, on this point, that only the annihilation of domestic cottage industry could give a country’s home market the extension and cohesion that the capitalist mode of production needs.
Capitalism’s insatiable appetite does not stop there. It is not enough to realise surplus value. Capitalism must now eradicate the independent producers which it has caused to emerge from the primitive societies, and which have retained their means of production. It must replace their production, and replace it with capitalist production, in order to find employment for the masses of accumulated capital which threaten to stifle it. The industrialisation of agriculture begun in the second half of the 19th century, especially in the United States, provides a striking illustration of the disintegration of the peasant economies, which has widened the divide between the capitalist farmers and agricultural proletarians.
In the exploited colonies, despite the fact that the process of capitalist industrialisation remained very limited, the expropriation and proletarianisation of the mass of the indigenous population filled the reservoirs from which capitalism draws the labour power to supply it with cheap raw materials.
As a result, realising surplus value means for capitalism the progressive and continual annexation of pre-capitalist economies, whose existence is vital to it, but which it must nonetheless annihilate if it wants to continue its reason for existence: accumulation. Whence there appears another connected and fundamental contradiction: capitalist accumulation and production develop, fed by the “human” substance of the extra-capitalist milieus, but also by gradually exhausting them. What was once an “autonomous” purchasing power able to absorb surplus value – for example, the consumption of the peasantry – becomes a specifically capitalist purchasing power (in other words one that is confined within the strict limits determined by variable capital and consumable surplus value) as soon as the peasantry divides into proletarians and capitalists. Capitalism, in a sense, saws off the branch on which it is sitting.
We could of course imagine an epoch where capitalism has extended its mode of production throughout the world, and achieved equilibrium in the productive forces along with social harmony. But it seems to us that if Marx, in his schemas of enlarged reproduction, hypothesised an entirely capitalist society where the only opposition was between capitalists and proletarians, this was precisely in order to demonstrate the absurdity of a capitalist society one day achieving an equilibrium and harmony with the needs of humanity. This would mean that the surplus value available for accumulation, thanks to the expansion of production, could be realised directly, on the one hand by the purchase of new means of production, on the other by the demand of the extra workers (and where would they be found?), and that the capitalists would have been transformed from wolves into peaceful progressives.
Had Marx been able to continue the development of his schemas, he would have ended with this opposing conclusion: that a capitalist market which can no longer be extended by the incorporation of non-capitalist milieus, an entirely capitalist production – which is impossible historically – would mean an end to the process of accumulation and the end of capitalism itself. Consequently, to present these schemas (as some “marxists” have done) as the image of a capitalist production able to continue without imbalance, without over-production, without crises, is consciously to falsify marxist theory.
However, while capital prodigiously increases production, it is unable to adapt this production harmoniously to the capacity of the markets which it has managed to annex. On the one hand, the markets do not expand continuously, while on the other the various accelerating factors we have mentioned give an impetus to accumulation, causing production to expand far more rapidly than the extension of new extra-capitalist outlets. Not only does the process of accumulation engender an enormous quantity of exchange values, but as we have said, the growing capacity of the means of production increases the mass of use values in still greater proportions. As a result, the production process is capable of satisfying mass consumption, but the sale of its products is subordinated to the constant adaptation of a capacity for absorption which only exists outside the capitalist sphere.
If this adaptation does not take place, then there is over-production of commodities, relative not to the capacity of consumption, but to the purchasing power of the internal capitalist market, and the external extra-capitalist market.
If over-production could only exist once every inhabitant of a country had satisfied their most urgent needs, then any general or even partial over-production would have been impossible throughout the past history of bourgeois society. When the market is saturated with shoes, cotton goods, wines, colonial produce etc, does this mean that a part of the nation – let us say two thirds – has more than satisfied its needs in terms of shoes, etc? Over-production is not a matter of absolute need; it only concerns itself with a need that is “solvent” (Marx).
This kind of over-production is not to be found in any previous society. In the ancient, slave-holding society, production was directed towards the satisfaction of the needs of the ruling class. The low level of the means of production required the exploitation of slaves to stifle, violently, any inclination to expand the needs of the masses. Whenever any accidental over-production did occur, then it was absorbed either by hoarding or by an expansion of luxury consumption; in other words, it was not so much over-production as over-consumption by the rich. Similarly, in the feudal regime, the low level of production was easily consumed. The greater part of the serf’s product was devoted to satisfying the needs of the feudal lord, while the serf himself did his best to avoid dying of hunger: wars and famines made sure that there was no danger of over-production.
In the capitalist regime, the productive forces overflow a foundation which has become too narrow to contain them: capitalist products are abundant, but have only repulsion for mere human need; they only “give” themselves in exchange for money, and when there is no money they prefer to pile up in factories, shops and warehouses, or even just to rot.
The only limits to capitalist production are those imposed by the possibility of valorising capital: as long as surplus value can be extracted and capitalised then production progresses. Its disproportion to the general consumptive capacity only appears when the flood of commodities comes up against the limits of the market, and blocks the channels of circulation: in other words, when the crisis breaks out.
It is obvious that the economic crisis goes beyond the definition that limits it to a break in the equilibrium between various sectors of production, as some bourgeois economists, and even some marxists, claim. Marx points out that “in periods of general over-production, over-production in certain spheres is only the result, the consequence of over-production in the main branches: there is only relative over-production there because there is over-production in other spheres”. Obviously, too flagrant a disproportion, for example between the sector producing means of production, and that producing means of consumption, may determine a partial crisis: it may even be the original cause of a general crisis. The crisis is the product of a general and relative over-production, an over-production of produce of every kind (whether means of production or consumption) relative to the demands of the market.
In short, the crisis is the expression of capitalism’s inability to draw profit from the exploitation of the worker: we have already shown that it is not enough to extort unpaid labour and to incorporate this in the product in the form of a new value, surplus value; it must also be materialised in the form of money through the sale of the total product at its value, or rather at its price of production which is made up of the cost price (the value of the committed capital, both constant and variable), and the average social profit (not the profit made by each particular production). On the other hand, the market price, although theoretically it is the monetary expression of the production price, in reality differs from it because it follows the curve established by the mercantile law of supply and demand, while nonetheless moving within the orbit of value. We should therefore emphasise that crises are characterised by abnormal fluctuations in prices, resulting in a considerable depreciation of values, which can go as far as their destruction, equivalent to a loss of capital. The crisis abruptly lays bare the fact that such masses of means of production, means of consumption, and means of labour have been produced that it has become impossible to make them function as instruments of exploitation of the workers at a certain rate of profit; when this rate falls below a level acceptable to the bourgeoisie, or even threatens to suppress profit altogether, it perturbs the process of production and can even paralyse it. Machines stop, not because they have produced more than can be consumed, but because the existing capital no longer receives the surplus value that makes it live. The crisis thus disperses the mists of capitalist production; it powerfully emphasises the fundamental opposition between use value and exchange value, between the needs of human beings and the needs of capital. For Marx, “Too many commodities have been produced for the value and the surplus value that they contain to be realised and reconverted into new capital, within the conditions of distribution and consumption given by capitalist production. There is not over-production of wealth. But periodically, too much wealth is produced in its opposing capitalist forms”.
This almost mathematical periodicity of crises is one of the specific traits of the capitalist system of production. Neither this periodicity, nor the specific nature of capitalist crises, are to be found in any previous society: crises due to an excess of wealth were unknown in the ancient, patriarchal, or feudal economies, based essentially on the satisfaction of the needs of the ruling class and dependent neither on technical progress nor on a market encouraging a broad current of exchange, since – as we have seen – over-production was impossible and economic disasters were the result either of natural causes (drought, floods, epidemics), or of social factors like wars.
Economic crises only appear at the beginning of the 19th century when capitalism, consolidated by its bitter and successful struggles against feudal society, enters its period of flourishing expansion, and begins its conquest of the world, solidly established on its industrial foundations. Henceforth, capitalist production developed unevenly. Feverish output to satisfy the growing demand of the world market was followed by a blockage of the market. The ebb in circulation profoundly shook the whole mechanism of production. Economic life thus forms a long chain, where each link constitutes a cycle divided into a succession of periods of average activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and depression. The breaking point in the cycle is the crisis, “the temporary and violent resolution of existing contradictions, a violent eruption which temporarily re-establishes the upset equilibrium” (Marx). The periods of crisis and prosperity are therefore inseparable, and each conditions the other.
Until the mid-19th century, Britain, the cradle of industrial capitalism, remained the centre of gravity of these cyclical crises. The first crisis of over-production occurred in 1825 (the previous year, the trades union movement had begun to expand on the basis of the law on coalitions that the proletariat had won from the bourgeoisie). The origins of this crisis were curious for the time: the substantial loans engaged on the London market by the young South American republics had all been spent, resulting in an abrupt contraction of these markets. The crisis particularly affected the cotton industry, leading to a loss of its monopoly and revolts by the cotton workers. The crisis was overcome by an extension of outlets, which had been essentially limited to Britain: firstly, in Britain itself capital could still find vast regions to transform and capitalise through the penetration of the British countryside, and secondly, the development of exports to India opened up the market for the cotton industry; railway construction and the development of the machine tool industry opened the market to the engineering industry, which definitively got off the ground. In 1836, the cotton industry slumped after a long depression that had followed a period of prosperity; this generalised the crisis, and the starving weavers were once again offered up as expiatory victims. The crisis came to an end in 1839 with the expansion of the railway network, but in the meantime the Chartist movement was born, expression of the British proletariat’s first political aspirations. In 1840, another depression in the British textile industry led to workers’ revolts, and was to continue until 1843. Expansion began again in 1840, leading to a period of great prosperity in 1845. A general crisis broke out in 1847, and spread to the continent. It was followed by the Parisian insurrection of 1848, and the German revolution which lasted until 1849, when the American and Australian markets opened to European and above all British industry; at the same time an enormous expansion of the railway network began on the European continent.
Already at the time, Marx in the Communist Manifesto had established the general characteristics of crises, and emphasised the antagonism between the development of the productive forces and their bourgeois appropriation. With brilliant profundity, he sketched the perspectives for capitalist production: “And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented". Beginning with the second half of the 19th century, industrial capitalism began to dominate the continent. The industrial take-off of Germany and Austria began in 1860. As a result, crises became more and more far-reaching. The 1857 crisis was brief, thanks to the expansion of capital, above all in Central Europe. The British cotton industry reached its apogee in 1860, following the saturation of the markets in India and Australia. The War of Secession between the American states deprived it of cotton, provoking its complete collapse in 1863, which in turn led to a general crisis. But British and French capital lost no time, and between 1860 and 1870 established solid positions in Egypt and China.
The period from 1850 to 1873 was extremely favourable to the development of capital. It was characterised by long phases of prosperity (about 6 years) and short depressions of about 2 years. During the period that followed, from the 1873 crisis until 1896, the process was reversed: chronic depression broken by brief ascendant phases: Germany (after the Peace of Frankfurt in 1871) and the USA had just appeared as formidable competitors to Britain and France. The prodigious rhythm of capitalist production’s development overtook the rhythm of market penetration: there were crises in 1882 and 1890. The great colonial struggles for the division of the world got under way, and under the pressure of an enormous accumulation of surplus value, capitalism launched itself into the phase of imperialism, which was to lead to general crisis and bankruptcy. In the meantime, there were the crises of 1900 (the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion), and 1907. The crisis of 1913-14 was to explode into world war.
Before analysing the general crisis of decadent imperialism, which is the object of the second part of our study, we need to examine the trajectory of each of the crises of the expansionist epoch.
The two extreme points of an economic cycle are:
the final phase of prosperity, which leads to the culminating point of accumulation, expressed in the highest organic composition of capital; the power of the productive forces reaches a point of rupture with the capacity of the market; as we have pointed out, this also means that the low rate of profit corresponding to the high organic composition clashes with the demands of the valorisation of capital;
the most profound phase of the crisis, corresponding to a complete paralysis of the accumulation of capital and immediately preceding the depression.
Between these two moments, there take place on the one hand the crisis itself, a period of upheavals and the destruction of exchange values, and on the other hand the depression, followed by a recovery and prosperity fertile in new value.
The unstable equilibrium of production, undermined by the progressive deepening of capitalist contradictions, is abruptly ruptured when the crisis breaks out, and it can only be re-established when capital-values are restored to health. This clean-out begins with a fall in the prices of finished products, while the price of raw materials continues to rise for a while. The contraction of commodity prices obviously leads to the depreciation of the capital materialised in these commodities, and the fall continues until a greater or lesser fraction of capital has been destroyed, depending on the gravity and intensity of the crisis. There are two aspects to the process of destruction: on the one hand, a loss of use values as a result of the complete or partial stopping of the productive apparatus, which leads to the deterioration of unused machinery and raw materials, and on the other a loss of exchange values, which is more important because it attacks the process of the renewal of production, which it halts and disorganises. The first shock hits constant capital; the diminution of variable capital does not follow simultaneously, since the fall in wages generally comes after the fall in prices. The contraction in values prevents their reproduction on the old scale; moreover, the paralysis of the productive forces prevents the capital that they represent from existing as such: as capital, it is dead and non-existent, even though it continues to exist in its material form. The process of accumulation of capital is also interrupted because the surplus value for accumulation has been swallowed up by the fall in prices, even though the accumulation of use values may very well continue thanks to already planned extensions to the productive apparatus.
The contraction in values brings with it the contraction in enterprises: the weakest go under, or are absorbed by the strongest, which are less vulnerable to the fall in prices. This centralisation does not take place without a struggle: as long as prosperity lasts, as long as there is loot to be shared, it is divided up between the different fractions of the capitalist class at the pro-rata of the capital committed; but as soon as the crisis hits, and losses become inevitable for the class as a whole, each individual capitalist or group of capitalists tries by every means possible to limit their own losses, or to transfer them to the next man. Class interest disintegrates under the impetus of particular, disparate interests, whereas in normal times these latter respect a certain discipline. We will see that in general crises, it is on the contrary the general class interest that predominates.
But the fall in prices, which has made it possible to liquidate old stocks of goods, comes to an end. Progressively, equilibrium is re-established. Capital values return to a lower level, organic composition also falls. At the same time, cost prices fall, essentially as a result of the massive compression of wages; surplus value – capital’s oxygen – reappears, and slowly reanimates the whole body of capitalism. The economists of the liberal school once again celebrate the merits of the system’s anti-toxins and its “spontaneous reactions”, the rate of profit rises again and becomes more “interesting”; in short, enterprises return to profitability. Accumulation is reborn, sharpening the capitalist appetite and preparing the explosion of new over-production. The mass of accumulated surplus value grows, demanding new outlets, until the moment when the market once again acts as a brake on the development of production. The crisis is ripe. The cycle begins again.
“Crises appear as a means of sharpening and unleashing anew the fires of capitalist development” (R. Luxemburg).
Mitchell (to be continued)
1 Mitchell was a member of the minority in the Belgian Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes, and by forming the Belgian Fraction in 1937 took part, with Bilan, in the foundation of the Communist Left.
2 Manifesto of the founding congress of the Communist International.
3 Member of the Belgian government of the day, who gave his name to the “De Man Plan”.
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[8] https://recollectionbooks.com
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[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1971/socialism-one-country
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[55] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/2071/crises-and-cycles-dying-capitalism
[56] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/15/decadence-capitalism
[57] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/economic-crisis
[58] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/mitchell