Introduction
In decadent capitalism the internal contradictions and conflicts of the system have only one possible outcome: war. There is no mystery about imperialist wars in our epoch. The lack of new markets to realize the surplus value incorporated in the commodities turned out in the process of production has plunged the system into a permanent crisis: a bitter struggle for the possession of raw materials, for mastery of the world market, for control of the planet's strategic military zones. The more inter-imperialist antagonisms are exacerbated by the economic crisis, the more the capitalist states are compelled to strengthen their defensive and offensive military apparatus. Towards the end of the nineteenth century capitalism definitively reached the stage of imperialism and today all states are forced, in order to defend their own interests, to put themselves under the tutelage of one or other of the two great powers: the US and Russia.
At the moment the wars are still local ones but in recent years the theatre of operations has been extended from Indochina, now a hunting-ground for Russia and China (which has become the main representative of the western bloc in Asia), to the Middle East, that permanent abscess, and now Africa, which is rent into potential or actual war zones: Zaire, Chad, Rhodesia, South Africa, Angola, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia.
The recent events in Zaire are the most striking sign of the heating-up of inter-imperialist conflicts. The direct military intervention of France and Belgium was motivated by the economic and political interests these countries still have in their former colonial empires, just as the French ‘blue caps' in Lebanon are just the old colonial army in disguise. It might seem tempting to compare Zaire with the imperialist adventures of the 1960s, like Vietnam, and conclude that today's events are less grave, less grim, less dangerous. But this would be a bad mistake.
In fact, the intervention in Zaire, like the intervention in Chad, is part of a concerted effort by all the NATO countries to counter the thrust of the Russian bloc. What's at stake is not one or two countries but the very policies of the imperialist blocs. (Having been forced to submit to the Pax Americana in the Middle East, Russian imperialism is now attempting to break the American bloc's grip on Africa.) American imperialism has replied with an important demonstration of how quickly it can act and how effectively the western bloc can collaborate in the face of such conflicts.
When the Zaire events took place, all the countries of Western Europe gave support to the intervention and Washington even lent aero planes. On 5 June, the six countries of NATO met in Brussels to study the situation in Africa and later, on 11 June, the ‘eleven' countries of the US bloc (including Iran, Saudi Arabia, the IMF, the World Bank and a commission of the EEC) studied the problem of financial aid in order to keep the Zaire economy afloat. Zaire is crippled by a foreign debt of 2.3 billion dollars and its gross national product has fallen by 5 per cent per year since 1976. Seven African countries have now participated in the force sent to defend Shaba; Morocco will be supplying the main body of troops to this unprecedented force. Even Egypt has given military support to Zaire, as it does in Chad.
The imperialist blocs reinforce themselves with each new conflict. We can now see clearly the correctness of our analysis when we wrote that:
"The war economy in the present epoch, however, is not simply established on a national scale, but also on the scale of an imperialist bloc. Incorporation into one of the two imperialist blocs -- each one dominated by a mammoth continental state capitalism: the US and Russia -- is a necessity which not even the bourgeoisies of formerly great imperialist powers like Britain, France, Germany and Japan can resist." (‘From Monetary Crisis to the War Economy', International Review, no.11, p.7)
The bourgeoisie has presented this new step towards open war as a ‘humanitarian' act to ‘save the whites', just as it launched the anti-terrorist campaigns in order to hide the strengthening of the state's repressive apparatus. Revolutionaries have a duty to take up an intransigent internationalist position against all threats of war, against all the ideological preparations for war. This is what the ICC has done in the declaration we're publishing here, denouncing both camps in the conflict, denouncing any attempt to hide the truth of these events behind the mystification of so-called ‘national liberation struggles' or by supporting the supposedly ‘progressive' Russian bloc. Against the PCI (Bordigist) which wrote "the Palestinian, Lebanese, Chadian and Saharan fighters who have taken up arms against ‘our' imperialism are the brothers of the proletarians in the metropole struggling against the common enemy: the French imperialist state" (contained in a leaflet of 21 May in France), the ICC insists that:
"You can't fight against imperialism by choosing one or other of the antagonistic powers to support. All those who use this language are acting, consciously or unconsciously, as the backers of imperialist war." (‘Against the March Towards World War: The International Struggle of the Working Class', ICC leaflet contained in this Review.)
The Palestinian, Chadian and Katanganese armies are the pawns of Russian imperialism while at the same time dependent on a part of the local bourgeoisie, just as the expeditionary corps of the western bloc (the French Legionnaires, the Moroccan and other troops) serve American imperialism while also defending the interests of a part of the local bourgeoisie. The proletariat has no fatherland, it cannot support any kind of nationalist movement, neither in the third world nor in the metropoles. The working class lives and acts in the under-developed countries; in reality it was the working class that was being massacred in the mining town of Kolwezi by the contending armies. The working class cannot make alliances with nationalist movements. Its only enemy is the capitalist system all over the world. The international situation is getting sharper but only the proletariat can bring down the forces of imperialism. In June 1978, while the French and western expeditionary forces were doing their dirty work in Zaire and Chad, 50,000 workers in the arsenals of the French state went on strike against their conditions of exploitation. This capacity to thwart the murdering hands of capital is the only possible response the working class can have, in NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Every day it is becoming clearer and clearer that the struggle against war is the struggle against capital.
The following declaration has been published in various languages in all the ICC's press. It was distributed as a leaflet during the events in France and Belgium.
ICC
Against the march towards world war - the International struggle of the working class!Zaire. They say they're intervening for ‘humanitarian reasons'. They're lying:
All wars begin with this pretext. Atrocities? They ‘forget' about them when they can't use them as an excuse anymore. What did they have to say about the massacre of 600 refugees in Angola by South Africa?
‘Knights of civilization'? These paratroopers and legionnaires? They are the most brutal and bloody of all troops. They themselves have said it openly: ‘We're here to crush the Katanganese!'
The press, television and radio protest too much. They wouldn't be making so much noise if it wasn't so hard for them to do their job of hiding the truth. The only real reason for the Kolwezi operation is the interests of imperialism. The level of noise corresponds to the high stakes involved.
The intervention in Zaire marks a new step in the escalation towards a third world war!Of course, this is nothing new. Since the end of World War II, the two imperialist blocs -- the USA and its lackeys, the USSR and its ‘brothers' -- have continuously confronted each other under the guise of ‘decolonisation', ‘the right of nations to self-determination', ‘the defense of national integrity', ‘the struggle for democracy', or the ‘struggle for socialism'. They have turned the zones of conflict into a living hell for the peoples victimized by their ‘concern'. They've done this both through massive shipments of the most murderous weaponry to the local contestants or through direct intervention themselves. The whole planet is criss-crossed by these bloody massacres: Korea, North Africa, the Middle East, Vietnam, Biafra, Bengal, Cambodia.
Today, Africa occupies a privileged position on this infernal chess-board. Each bloc is putting its pawns forward. At the moment the two camps are drawn up as follows: under the Russian colors are Angola, Mozambique, Libya, and Ethiopia. Against them stand the pawns of the USA and its British, French and Belgian yes-men: South Africa and Zaire. The more world capitalism sinks into economic crisis, the more numerous and violent these conflicts become. Rhodesia, Sahara, Ogaden, Eritrea, Chad... the list of massacres is getting longer all the time. Today we have the intervention in Zaire. Why?
1. Because it illustrates the tendency of these conflicts to move closer to a vital centre of capitalism: Europe. Zaire is an important source of raw materials and an area of major capitalist penetration for Europe.
2. Because, despite the rows between the French and Belgian capitalist accomplices, this intervention represents a response from the whole American bloc to the defiance of the Russian bloc with its control over Angola.
3. Because no such expedition in recent years has seen such wide-ranging collaboration between the Western robber states in their preparation, execution and justification for the intervention. (American planes, British materials, Belgian and French troops, blessings from the EEC and so-called ‘Communist China'.)
4. Because the ideological campaign which has supported the military offensive is also unprecedented in its scope and in the hysteria it has tried to stir up.
For all these reasons, the intervention in Zaire is a fundamental step in the escalation towards world war.
The other liars of the bourgeoisieApart from those who have openly backed this expedition, some of the most hypocritical liars in the bourgeois cam are:
Those who protest against the intervention, not on principle, but because it didn't respect the diplomatic and constitutional rules. Fundamentally, they defend the same imperialist interests as their national capital.
Those who advocate pacifism, moral pressure, international conferences, action by the United Nations, and other schemes to ‘stop wars'.
Wars don't happen because of a few war-like or evil-minded governments. They are part of capitalism's way of life, especially since the beginning of the twentieth century. Ever since World War I, this system has only been able to survive through a hellish cycle of destruction, in which each period of reconstruction after one war simply prepares the ground for an even bigger crisis than the one before. A crisis which the bourgeoisie can only ‘solve' through an even more devastating and murderous war.
Just like the 1929 crisis, today's crisis has no solution. As with the 1929 crisis, the economic crisis today can only lead capitalism into another world butchery. This is proved day after day by the deterioration of the economic situation in all countries of the world, including the so-called ‘socialist' ones.
This is proved by the constant aggravation of conflicts all over the planet.
This is proved by today's intervention in Zaire.
To advocate pacifism is to advocate passivity and submission to capital's war-machinery. It simply opens the way to war.
Those who, speaking ‘in the name of the working class', offer the workers no alternative than supporting the other imperialist bloc. You can't fight against imperialism -- which today is the way of life of every nation in the world -- by choosing one or other of the antagonistic powers to support. All those who use this language are acting, consciously or unconsciously, as the backers of imperialist war, no less than all the others.
What is the way out?There is no way out within capitalism. This system must be destroyed before it destroys humanity.
Only one force in society can do this. That force is the working class. It's already shown this in 1917 in Russia and in 1918 in Germany. It alone can jam and paralyze the machine that's dragging the world towards a new holocaust. It alone has the power to abolish exploitation, oppression, classes and nations. It alone has the power to create a new society: socialism.
In order to do this, the workers everywhere must go onto the offensive against capitalism. In the countries where the class is being directly dragooned into these massacres, it must denounce the brutal chauvinism which is being thrust upon it in the name of ‘national liberation' and other lies. The only possible response is that of the Russian workers of 1917, the German workers of 1918:
1. fraternisation with the workers in uniform of the other camp.
2. turning your guns against your own exploiters and governments.
3. turning the imperialist war into civil war.
In the countries of the Third World, where these imperialist wars are presently taking place, the proletariat has already begun to struggle on its own class terrain. There can be no way out except to carry this struggle forward.
In the centers of capitalism, particularly in France and Belgium, which are now in the front-line of the imperialist attack, it is the same. No way out for the workers except to renew the struggle against austerity and lay-offs. Why?
1. Because the intervention in Zaire and the attack on workers' living standards are part of the same offensive by capital.
2. Because, whether workers like it or not, they are already mobilized in the war effort. It's their exploitation which is paying for the growing military expenditure.
3. Because the only way of showing their internationalism, their solidarity with their class brothers directly hit by the war, is for workers in the heartlands of capital to fight against the common enemy that confronts them all. That enemy is their own national capitalist state.
4. Because, after the professional troops, it will be conscripts who will be sent to the slaughter. And the bourgeoisie won't stop there. Each step in the preparation for generalized war opens the way to the next step.
Workers of all countries, your class response can't wait. Renew the struggle begun in 1968. The struggle the bourgeoisie has temporarily managed to divert into the dead-ends of support for bourgeois democracy, ‘the left', electoralism and trade unionism.
Take up the battle cry of your class: the workers have no fatherland! Workers of the world unite!
International Communist Current
May 1978
Introduction
The unprecedented growth in unemployment over the last ten years is increasingly posing the organization of the class struggle with the problem that a considerable part of the working class is no longer to be found at the point of production. But although this deprives them of that fundamental weapon of struggle, the strike, it doesn’t mean that the unemployed have no possibility of struggling. On the contrary. While in the beginning unemployment tended to hit small and marginal enterprises, the weak sectors of the capitalist economy, it is now hitting whole sectors of the working class in the most concentrated sectors: textiles, metallurgy, shipbuilding etc. Unemployment began hitting the class in a ‘selective’ manner and this allowed the bourgeoisie to mount an attack on workers’ living standards while presenting unemployment as an individual or at most regional and sectional problem. But now, as it becomes longer and more frequent among growing numbers of workers’ families (thus cutting the living standards of many more people who depend on workers’ wages), as it makes the labor force more and more mobile, the extension of unemployment makes it possible for the working class to understand the means and goals of its struggle and to go beyond the divisions imposed by capital. In today’s period of rising class struggle, for the first time in history -- with the exception of 1848 -- we can see the perspective of a revolutionary wave coming as Marx envisaged: the proletariat’s assault on the bourgeois state is being prepared in a period of economic crisis, of a relatively slow disintegration of the capitalist system. The bourgeoisie has not mobilized and crushed the working class so that it can impose its ‘solution’ to the crisis: generalized war. One of the consequences of this situation is that the struggle against unemployment takes on a considerable importance. The struggle against this direct loss of the means of subsistence is going to be a vital factor in the preparation of the decisive confrontations that lie ahead. To some extent, the unemployed can act in these battles in an analagous manner to the soldiers in the revolutionary wave which followed the 1914 war -- helping to unify and generalize the confrontation with the capitalist state. This is why it is so vital that the working class doesn’t fall into the many traps set by the bourgeoisie to maintain the unemployed as a distinct ‘category’, separated from the class as a whole. The following text attempts to reply to those arguments which seek to deprive the working class of a part of itself, of one of its own methods of struggle.
The general and worldwide overproduction which accompanies the crises of capitalism, particularly in its decadent epoch, throws a growing part of the working class outside of the productive process. Unemployment, in moments of acute crisis such as we are now going through, is going to get bigger and bigger and become one of the central preoccupations of the working class. It is thus essential for a revolutionary organization which intends to intervene in the working class to clarify and understand the whole question of unemployment in the class struggle.
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1. The situation of unemployment is a necessary part of the condition of the working class. This is a class of ‘free’ workers, ie free from any ties to the means of production, from which they are separated and which confronts them as capital. This ‘freedom’ is in fact the worst kind of servitude, because the workers can only survive by selling their labor power. In capitalism the specific norm of the association of labor with the means of production -- wage labor -- makes labor power a simple commodity like everything else, and the only commodity which the workers have to sell. Like all commodities, the commodity labor power can only be sold when the market is big enough; and since overproduction in relation to the needs of the market is written into capitalist relations of production, the temporary or definitive non-utilization of a part of the labor force -- unemployment -- is an integral part of the condition which capital imposes on the working class. Because of the particular character of the commodity labor power -- as a creator of value -- unemployment has always been an indispensable precondition for the well-functioning of the capitalist economy, since it makes a part of the labor force available for the enlargement of production while acting as a constant pressure on wage levels. In the period of capitalist decadence unemployment in all its forms takes on a considerable weight and becomes an expression of the historical bankruptcy of capital, its inability to carry on with the development of the productive forces.
2. Since unemployment is an aspect of the working class condition, unemployed workers are as much a part of the working class as the employed workers. If a worker is unemployed, he is potentially at work, if he is working he is potentially unemployed. The definition of the working class as a producer of surplus value is not an individual question; it can only be understood as a social, collective definition. The working class is not just a sum of individuals, even though, in the beginning, capital created it as competing individuals. The proletariat expresses itself in the transcendence of the divisions and competition between individuals, forming a single collectivity with interests that are distinct from those of the rest of society. The division between unemployed workers and employed workers does not, any more than the other divisions between the various categories of workers, make them different classes. On the contrary, unemployed and employed workers have the same interests against capital. The class consciousness of the proletariat is not a sum of individual consciousnesses, and while it has its origins in the way the workers are integrated into capitalist production, it is not connected in an immediate manner to this or that worker and his presence in or absence from a place of production. Class consciousness develops in the whole class, and thus both among the unemployed and employed workers. In many cases the unemployed are the most resolute sectors of the proletariat in a frontal struggle against capital, because the situation of the unemployed concentrates in itself all the misery of the working class condition.
3. It is wrong to consider the unemployed as a distinct social category: the only fundamental divisions in society are class divisions, and these are determined by the place occupied in production. The situation of unemployment is linked to wage labor. Now, in the development of capitalist society, and in particular in its tendency towards state capitalism, capital has made more and more of the population wage earners, sometimes even to the point of paying salaries to the whole bourgeois class itself. One of the purest expressions of the decadence of capitalism is the fact that the managers of capital, the state functionaries and officers, are themselves hit by unemployment. The situation of unemployment must therefore not be peculiar to the worker, and this is why the category of the unemployed does not represent anything in itself. It encompasses workers as well as members of the bourgeoisie and intermediate strata. This is why, as well as unemployment being a factor of demoralization on the unemployed worker because of isolation, the mass of unemployed can be used by the bourgeoisie for counter-revolutionary ends in periods when the class struggle does not put forward a proletarian answer to the crisis of capital.
4. As an integral part of the working class, the unemployed workers must integrate themselves into the struggles of their class. However, the possibilities of struggle open to them are very limited. On the one hand they are extremely isolated from each other, and on the other hand they don’t have the same means of practical action as the workers in production (strikes etc). This is why unemployed workers only enter massively into struggle when the class struggle has become general. The integration of the unemployed into the struggle then becomes an important factor in the radicalization of the struggle, to the extent that, more than any other sector, the unemployed won’t have any immediate demands or reforms to win and will tend to wage their struggle against the whole society. The practical modalities of this integration into the general struggle and into the workers’ councils cannot be envisaged precisely: experience will provide an answer and it’s not the task of revolutionaries to plan forms of organization for the class. When these forms arise, revolutionaries must understand their connection to the content of the struggle, but they can’t invent them in advance.
5. The fact that greater and greater masses of workers are thrown into unemployment with no real perspective of being reintegrated into production has various contradictory effects on the evolution of the class struggle. For an initial period, it weakens the cohesion of the class, dividing it into workers inside and outside the factory. As well as using the threat of unemployment and the unemployed workers as a way of keeping wages down, thus creating an artificial hostility between employed and unemployed workers, capital uses all its forces to disperse this latter fraction of the class, to atomize them into mere individuals and drown them in a mass of ‘needy people’. In the subsequent period, given the impossibility of fully carrying out this operation and faced with the growing discontent of the unemployed workers, it becomes necessary to control them better; capital with all its party and union organs, ably assisted by the leftists, looks for means to encapsulate them, and so sets up special organs which dragoon them into a particular ‘class’ of declasses. Against this dual operation of dispersion and encapsulation, the working class can only affirm its unity, through the defense of its unitary historic and immediate interests, and through its constant, untiring effort towards self-organization.
6. The period of decadence, of the general historic crisis of the capitalist social system, has ended the possibility of a movement for the real, lasting amelioration of the workers’ condition and poses the need for the class to engage in a revolutionary struggle for its historic objectives. This has made it impossible for there to exist specific organs for the defense of the economic conditions of the workers within capitalism, like the unions used to be; today such organs can only be barriers to the class struggle, to the benefit of capitalism. This in no way means that the working class can no longer defend its immediate interests and organize itself for this struggle: it only means a radical change in the form of the struggle and of the organizations the class gives rise to: wildcat strikes, committees elected by all the workers in struggle, the general assemblies in the factories -- all prefigurations of tomorrow’s general unitary organs of the class, the workers’ councils, towards which the proletarian struggle is leading.
What is true for the whole of the class is also true for the fraction of the class which finds itself out of work, ie outside the factories. Like the class as a whole, these millions of unemployed have to struggle against the miserable conditions capital imposes on them. Just as these miserable conditions don’t simply apply to the individual unemployed workers (even if this misery is felt most directly by individuals), but are an integral part of the conditions imposed on the entire working class, so the struggle of the unemployed is an integral part of the general struggle of the class.
The struggle of the class for wages isn’t a sum of struggles by each worker against his individual exploitation, but a general struggle against capital’s exploitation of the labor power of the whole working class. The struggle of the unemployed against miserable unemployment pay or rents or social services (gas, electricity, transport etc) has the same basic nature as the struggle for wages. Although it’s true that this doesn’t immediately show itself in a clear way, it is still based on the global struggle against the extraction of immediate or past, direct or indirect, surplus value which the working class has suffered and continues to suffer.
7. It is not true that the unemployed workers can only participate in the class struggle by taking part in or supporting the workers at work (solidarity with and support for strikes). It is by directly defending themselves tooth and nail against the conditions capital imposes on them, in the place it makes them occupy, that the unemployed workers make their struggle an integral part of the general struggle of the working class against capital, and as such this struggle has to be supported by the entire class.
8. It is true that the situation of the unemployed workers outside the factories deprives them of one of the most important, classical weapons of the class struggle -- the strike -- but this does not mean that they are deprived of all means of struggle. By losing the factory, the unemployed gain the streets. Unemployed workers can and have struggled through street assemblies, demonstrations, occupations of town halls, unemployment exchanges and other public institutions. These struggles have sometimes taken on the character of riots which can be a signal for a generalized struggle. It would be a grave error to neglect such possibilities. To a certain extent, the radical struggles of the unemployed can take on the character of a social struggle more easily and rapidly than a strike of workers in a factory.
9. In order to wage the struggle imposed by their conditions, the unemployed workers, like the rest of their class, tend to regroup themselves. Because of their dispersed situation, this need to regroup is relatively more difficult for them than for workers concentrated at the workplace, the factories. But beginning from the unemployment exchanges or the neighborhood where they meet each other, they do find ways to assemble and group together. Having a lot of ‘free time’ at their disposal, chased from their homes by boredom, misery or the cold, looking for contact with others, they end up claiming and getting public locals where they can meet. There thus arise permanent meeting places where conversations, reflections and discussions are transformed into permanent meetings. This is an enormous advantage for the politicization of these important masses of workers. It is of the greatest importance to counteract the maneuvers of parties and especially of the unions, who try to infiltrate these gatherings and make them appendages of the unions. These gatherings, whatever they are called: group; committee; nucleus; etc, are not unions, if only for the reason that they are not structured on the same model -- they don’t have statutes, membership cards and dues. Even when they form committees these are not permanent and are constantly under the control of the participants who are always present, who assemble daily. In many ways, these are the equivalent of the general assemblies of struggling factory workers and, like the latter, are threatened by the maneuvers of the unions who try to control them, take them over and infiltrate them, the better to sterilize them.
10. The fact that the mode of existence of these groupings of unemployed workers is not the workplace, but where they live, their neighborhood, their commune, in no way changes their class nature, nor their social links with all other members of the class. These indestructible links are provided by the fact that these unemployed workers were at work yesterday and may return individually to work tomorrow, that there is a constant movement of workers joining the unemployed. Although unemployment is a fixed and irreversible phenomenon of the crisis, this does not apply to every unemployed worker taken individually, but to the class as a whole. These links are also provided by the common life of workers at work and unemployed workers, who may share the same incomes, be parents, friends etc. Finally, there are the links between the workers living in a neighborhood and those working in the factories in that neighborhood. The diversity of particular and circumstantial conditions within the general unitary condition of the class can give rise to momentary and diverse forms of workers’ regroupment without calling into question their class character.
11. In the unitary organs of the class, which in the revolutionary period will be the centralized workers’ councils, there can be no question of excluding millions of workers because they are out of work. In one way or another they will necessarily be present in these unitary organs as they will in its struggles. Nothing allows us, not even the experience of the past, to stipulate in advance the form this participation will take, and a priori proclaim that it will not be through local groupings of unemployed. It’s exactly the same for the unemployed workers as for the workers and employees in small enterprises who will most probably be called upon to regroup on the basis of the localities of their workplaces in order to send their delegates to the central council of the councils in a town. In any case, it would be artificial and presumptuous to arbitrarily dictate in advance the particular forms in which the workers will regroup. It’s up to revolutionaries to remain constantly attentive and vigilant so that all the formations which may appear can integrate themselves in the best way possible into the unitary organs and struggles of the class.
12. The fact that other elements coming from the petty bourgeoisie and other strata share the condition of unemployment doesn’t substantially alter the problem of unemployment and the unemployed. These elements tend to be a minority in the mass of the unemployed. In a sense, the entry of these elements or some of them into the mass of unemployed workers is a paradoxical method of their proletarianization. Where they come from sociologically and what they are about to become differs greatly. The petty bourgeois mentality which they bring with them into the mass of unemployed workers can certainly have a pernicious influence, but their influence is largely limited and minimized by more important factors like the class struggle and the balance of forces. They should not be given undue importance. After all, we find a similar problem when these elements end up among the workers at work. Everything depends on the state of the class, its consciousness and combativity, which make it able to lead and assimilate these elements. It’s the same in a war when masses of workers, instead of being unemployed, are metamorphosed into soldiers and mixed up with elements from other classes. It would be a waste of time, and impossible, to look at each one in terms of his social origins. Unemployment is and will remain fundamentally a state imposed on the working class and as such is a problem of the working class.
ICC, March 1978
International Review 14, 1978
The formidable ideological campaigns of the European bourgeoisie on the subject of terrorism (the Schleyer affair in Germany, the Moro affair in Italy), fig leaves covering a massive strengthening of the terror of the bourgeois state, have made the problem of violence, terror and terrorism a major preoccupation for revolutionaries. These questions are not new for communists: for decades they have denounced the barbaric methods used by the bourgeoisie to maintain its power in society, the savagery which even the most democratic regimes unleash at the slightest threat to the existing order. They have been able to point out that the present campaigns are not really aimed at the gnat bites of a handful of desperate elements from the decomposing petty bourgeoisie, but at the working class, whose necessarily violent revolt is the only serious threat to capitalism.
The role of revolutionaries has thus been to denounce these campaigns for what they are, as well as showing the stupid servility of the leftist groups, for example certain Trotskyists, who spend their time denouncing the Red Brigades because they condemned Moro ‘without sufficient proof’ and ‘without the agreement of the working class’. But at the same time as they denounce bourgeois terror and affirm the necessity for the working class to use violence to destroy capitalism, revolutionaries have to be particularly clear:
· about the real meaning of terrorism;
· on the form of violence the working class uses in its struggle against the bourgeoisie.
And here it must be said that, even within organizations that defend class positions, there can be a number of erroneous conceptions, which see violence, terror and terrorism as synonymous, and which consider:
· that there can be a ‘workers’ terrorism’;
· that against the white terror of the bourgeoisie, the working class has to put forward its own ‘revolutionary terror’, which is in some ways symmetrical to bourgeois terror.
The Bordigist International Communist Party (Programme Communiste) has probably made the most explicit interpretation of this kind of confusion. For example: “The Marchais and Pelikans only reject the revolutionary aspects of Stalinism — the single party, dictatorship, terror which it inherited from the proletarian revolution . ..“ (Programme Communiste, no.76, p.87)
Thus, for this organization, terror, even when it’s used by Stalinism, is essentially revolutionary, and there can be an identity between the methods of the proletarian revolution and those of the worst counter—revolution which has ever descended upon the working class.
Moreover, at the time of the Baader affair, the ICP tended to present the terrorist acts of Baader and his companions as harbingers of the future violence of the working class, despite reservations about the impasse these acts represent. Thus in Le Proletaire, no.254 we read: “It is with this spirit that we have anxiously followed the tragic epic of Andreas Baader and his comrades who have participated in this movement, the movement of the slow accumulation of the premises for the proletarian awakening”, and further on: “The proletarian struggle will know other martyrs ...”
Finally, the idea of a ‘workers’ terrorism’ appears clearly in passages such as: “In sum, to be revolutionary, it’s not enough to denounce the violence and terror of the bourgeois state — you have to call for violence and terrorism as indispensable weapons in the emancipation of the proletariat.” (Le Proletaire, no. 253)
Against confusions of this sort, the following text attempts to go beyond mere dictionary definitions and the abuses of language accidentally committed by certain revolutionaries in the past, and to establish the difference in class content between terror, terrorism and violence, above all the violence the working class will have to use to emancipate itself.
To recognise the class struggle is straight away to accept that violence is one of the inherent, fundamental aspects of the class struggle. The existence of classes means that society is torn by antagonistic interests, irreconcilable conflicts. Classes are constituted on the basis of these antagonisms. The social relations between classes are necessarily relations of opposition and antagonism, i.e. of struggle.
To claim the opposite, to claim you can overcome this state of fact by good will, by collaboration and harmony between classes, is to leave reality. It’s completely utopian.
It’s not surprising that exploiting classes should spread such illusions. They are ‘naturally’ convinced that no other society, no better society, can exist than the one they rule over. This absolute, blind conviction is dictated by their interests and privileges. Their class interests and privileges are identified with the kind of society they rule over; they have an interest in preaching to the exploited, oppressed classes that they should renounce struggle, accept the existing order, submit to ‘historical laws’ which are supposed to be immutable. Ruling classes are both objectively limited and unable to understand the dynamism of the class struggle (of oppressed classes) and subjectively interested in making the oppressed classes give up their struggle, in annihilating the will of the oppressed through all sorts of mystifications.
But ruling exploiting classes are not the only ones to have such an attitude to the struggle. Certain currents have believed that it is possible to avoid class struggle by appealing to the intelligence and understanding of men of good will, in order to create a harmonious, fraternal, egalitarian society. This was the case, for example, with the Utopians at the beginning of capitalism. Contrary to the bourgeoisie and its ideologies, the Utopians had no interest in glossing over the class struggle in order to maintain the privileges of the ruling class. If they bypassed the class struggle it was because they didn’t understand the historic reasons for the existence of classes. They thus expressed an immaturity in understanding reality, a reality which already included the class struggle, the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. While expressing the inevitable lag of consciousness behind existence, they were a product of the theoretical groping of the class, of the effort of the class to become conscious. This is why they were justly seen as the precursors of the socialist movement, a considerable step forward in the movement which was to find a scientific and historical foundation in marxism.
It’s not at all the same case for the humanist and pacifist movements which have flourished since the second half of the last century and who claim to ignore the class struggle. These bring no contribution to the emancipation of humanity. They are simply the expression of petty bourgeois strata which are historically anachronistic and impotent, and which subsist in modern society, caught between the struggle of the proletariat and bourgeoisie. Their a-classist, inter-classist anti-class struggle ideology is the lamentation of a doomed class which has no future in capitalism nor in the society which the proletariat will establish: socialism. Lamentable and ridiculous, prey to absurd illusions, they can only obstruct the progress and will of the proletariat; and for the same reason they are eminently usable, and very often used, by capitalism, which will use anything it can get hold of as a weapon of mystification.
The existence of classes, of the class struggle, necessarily implies class violence. Only snivelling wretches or rank charlatans (like Social Democrats) can reject this. In general, violence is a characteristic of life and has accompanied its whole evolution. Any action involves a certain degree of violence. Movement itself is a product of violence because it is the result of a continuous break in equilibrium, deriving from the clash of contradictory forces. It was present in the first human groupings, and it doesn’t necessarily express itself in the form of open physical violence. Violence means anything involving imposition, coercion, a balance of force, threats. Violence means resorting to physical or psychological aggression; aggression against other beings, but
it also exists when a given situation or decision is imposed by the mere fact of disposing of the means to such aggression, even if these means aren’t actually used. But while violence in one form or another existed as soon as movement or life existed, the division of society into classes made violence a principal foundation of social relations, reaching its most infernal depths with capitalism.
Any system of class exploitation bases its power on violence, an ever-growing violence which tends to become the main pillar holding up the whole social edifice. Without it society would immediately fall apart. A necessary product of the exploitation of one class by another, violence, organized, concentrated and institutionalized in its most fully worked-out form in the state, becomes dialectically a fundamental precondition for the existence of an exploitative society. Against this increasingly bloody and murderous violence of the exploiting classes, the exploited and oppressed classes can only put forward their own violence if they want to liberate themselves. To appeal to the ‘humane’ feelings of the exploiters, like religious thinkers a la Tolstoy or Gandhi, or the rabbit-skinned socialist, is to believe in miracles; it’s asking wolves to stop being wolves and change into lambs; it’s asking the capitalist class to stop being a capitalist class and transform itself into the working class.
The violence of an exploiting class is an inherent part of its nature and can only be stopped by the revolutionary violence of the oppressed classes. To understand this, foresee it, prepare for it, organize it, is not only a decisive precondition for the victory of the oppressed classes, but will also ensure this victory with the least amount of suffering. Anyone who has the least doubt or hesitation about this is not a revolutionary.
We have seen that exploitation is inconceivable without violence; that the two are organically inseparable. Although one can conceive of violence outside of exploitative relations, exploitation can only be carried on through violence. They are to each other like lungs and air - the lungs can’t function without oxygen.
Like the movement of capitalism into its imperialist phase, violence combined with exploitation takes on a particular and new quality. It’s no longer an accidental or secondary fact: its presence has become a constant at every level of social life. It impregnates all relationships, penetrates the pores of the social organism, both on the general level and the so-called personal level. Beginning from exploitation and the need to dominate the producer class, violence imposes itself on all the relationships between different classes and strata in society: between the industrialized countries; between the different factions of the ruling class; between men and women; between parents and children; between teachers and pupils; between individuals; between the governors and the governed. It becomes specialized, structured, Organized, concentrated in a distinct body; the state, with its permanent armies, its police, its laws, its functionaries and torturers; and this body tends to elevate itself above society and to dominate it.
In order to ensure the exploitation of man by man, violence becomes the most important activity of society, which devotes a bigger and bigger portion of its economic and cultural resources to it. Violence is elevated to the status of a cult, an art, a science. A science applied not only to military art, to the technique of armaments, but to every domain and on all levels, to the organization of concentration camps and the installation of gas chambers, to the art of rapid and massive extermination of entire populations, to the creation of veritable universities of psychological and scientific torture, where a plethora of qualified torturers can win diplomas and practice their skills. This is a society which not only “sweats mud and blood from every pore”, as Marx said, but can neither live nor breathe outside of an atmosphere poisoned with cadavers, death, destruction, massacres, suffering and torture. In such a society, violence has reached its apogee and changed in quality - it has become terror.
To talk about violence in general terms, without referring to concrete conditions, historic periods, and the classes who are exercising the violence, is to understand nothing of its real content, of what gives it a distinct and specific quality in exploitative societies, and why there is this fundamental modification of violence into terror, which can’t be reduced to a simple question of quantity (just as, when talking about commodities, only a quantitative difference is recognized between antiquity and capitalism and not the fundamental qualitative difference between the two modes of production).
As a society divided into antagonistic classes develops, violence in the hands of the ruling class more and more takes on a new character: terror. Terror is not an attribute of revolutionary classes at the moment they accomplish the revolution. This is a superficial, purely formal view which glorifies terror as the revolutionary action par excellence. In this way you end up with the following axiom: the stronger the terror, the deeper and more radical the revolution. But this is completely negated by history. The bourgeoisie has used and perfected terror all through its existence, not just at the moment of its revolution (c.f. 1848 and the Paris Commune), but bourgeois terror reaches its highest points precisely when capitalism has entered into decadence. Terror is not the expression of the revolutionary nature and activity of the bourgeoisie at the moment of its revolution, even if it had some spectacular expressions in the bourgeois revolution. It is much more an expression of its nature as an exploiting class which, like any other exploiting class, can only base its rule on terror. The revolutions which ensured the passage from one exploitative society to another were in no way the progenitors of terror; they simply transferred it from one exploiting class to another. It was not so much to get rid of the old ruling class that the bourgeoisie perfected and strengthened its terror, but mainly to ensure its domination over society in general and the working class in particular. Terror in the bourgeois revolution was therefore not an end but a continuity, because the new society was a continuity in societies of exploitation of man by man. Violence in bourgeois revolutions was not the end of oppression but a continuity in oppression. That is why it could only take the form of terror.
To sum up, we can define terror as violence specific to exploiting classes, which will only disappear when they do. Its specific characteristics are:
1. Being organically linked to exploitation and used to impose it.
2. Being the action of a privileged class.
3. Being the action of a minority class in society.
4. Being the action of a specialized body, tightly selected, closed in on itself, and tending to elude any control by society over it.
5. Reproducing and perfecting itself endlessly, extending to all levels, to all social relationships.
6. Having no other raison d’etre than subordinating and crushing the human community.
7. Developing feelings of hostility and violence between social groups: nationalism, chauvinism, racism and other monstrosities.
8. Developing feelings and behaviour patterns of egoism, sadistic aggressiveness, vindictiveness; the daily unending war of each against all which plunges the whole of society into a state of terror.
The petty bourgeois classes (peasants, artisans, small shopkeepers, liberal professions, intellectuals) do not constitute fundamental classes in society. They have no particular mode of production or social project to put forward. They are not historic classes in the marxist sense. They are the least homogeneous of social classes. Even though their higher echelons draw their revenue from the exploitation of others’ labour and are thus part of the privileged, they are, as a whole, subjected to the domination of the capitalist class, which imposes its laws on them and oppresses them. They have no future as classes. In their higher echelons, the maximum they can aspire to is to integrate themselves individually into the capitalist class. In their lower ranks, they are implacably doomed to lose any ‘independent’ ownership of the means of production and to be proletarianised. The immense middle-of-the-road majority are doomed to vegetate, economically and politically crushed by the domination of the capitalist class. Their political behaviour is determined by the balance of forces between the two fundamental classes in society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Their hopeless resistance to the pitiless laws of capital leads them to adopt a fatalistic, passive behaviour. Their ideology is the individualistic ‘get what you can’; collectively they indulge in all kinds of pathetic lamentations in the search for miserable consolation, in ridiculous and impotent humanist and pacifist sermons.
Materially crushed, with no future, vegetating in a completely restricted day-to-day existence, wallowing in mediocrity, they are in their despair prey to all kinds of mystifications, from the most pacifist (religious, nudist, anti—violence, anti—atomic bomb, anti—nuclear sects, hippies, ecologists) to the most bloodthirsty (Black Hundreds, pogromists, racists, Ku—Klux Klan, fascist gangs, gangsters and mercenaries of all kinds). It is mainly in the latter, the bloody ones, that they find the compensation of an illusory dignity. It is the heroism of the coward, the courage of the clown, the glory of sordid mediocrity. After reducing them to a most miserable condition, capitalism finds in these strata an inexhaustible source of recruitment for the heroes of its terror.
Although during the course of history there have been explosions of violence and anger from these classes, these explosions remain sporadic and never go beyond jacqueries and revolts, because they don’t have any perspective except to be crushed. In capitalism these classes completely lose their independence and serve only as cannon—fodder in the confrontations between factions of the ruling class, both inside and outside national frontiers. In moments of revolutionary crises and in certain favourable circumstances, the profound discontent of a part of these classes can serve as a force supporting the struggle of the proletariat.
The inevitable process of pauperization and proletarianisation of the lower strata of these classes is an extremely difficult and painful road to follow and gives rise to a particularly exacerbated current of revolt. The combativity of these elements, especially those coming from the artisans and declassed intellectuals is based more on their desperate conditions of life than on the proletarian class struggle, which they find difficulty in joining. What basically characterizes the members of these strata is their individualism, impatience, scepticism and demoralization. Their actions are more aimed at spectacular suicide than at any particular goal. Having lost their past position in society, having no future, they live in a present of misery and exasperated revolt against this misery; in an immediacy which is felt as an immediacy. Even if through contact with the working class and its historical future they can get inspired by its ideas in a distorted way, this rarely goes beyond the level of fantasy and dreams. Their real view of reality is a purely contingent one.
The political expressions of this current take on extremely varied forms, from individual action to different kinds of sects; closed conspiratorial groups plotting coups d’etat, ‘exemplary actions’ and terrorism.
What constitutes the unity in all this diversity is their lack of awareness of the objective, historical determinism behind the movement of the class struggle and of the historic subject of modern society, the only force capable of social transformations the proletariat.
The persistence of the expressions of this current is due to the permanent process of proletarianisation which takes place throughout the history of capitalism. Their variety and diversity is the product of local and contingent situations. This social phenomenon has always accompanied the historical formation of the proletariat and is mixed to a varying degree with the movement of the proletariat, into which this social current imports ideas and behaviour alien to the class. This is particularly true in the case of terrorism.
We must insist on this essential point and leave no room for ambiguity. It is true that at the dawn of the formation of the class, the proletariat’s tendency to organise itself had not yet discovered its most appropriate forms, and the class made use of a conspiratorial form of organisation - the secret societies which were a heritage of the bourgeois revolution. But this doesn’t change the class nature of these forms of organisation and their inadequacy for the new content - the class struggle of the proletariat. Very quickly the proletariat was led to break from these forms of organisation and methods of action, and to definitively reject them.
Just as the process of theoretical elaboration inevitably went through a utopian phase, so the formation of political organisations of the class had to go through the phase of conspiratorial sects. But we must not make a virtue out of necessity here and confuse the different phases of the movement. We have to know how to distinguish the different phases of the movement and the forms they give to rise to.
Just as utopian socialism at a given moment in the movement of the class was transformed from being a great, positive contribution into an obstacle getting in the way of the further development of the movement, so conspiratorial sects also became a negative sign, sterilising the progress of the movement.
The current which represented strata on the painful road to proletarianisation could no longer make the slightest contribution to an already developed class movement. Not only did this current advocate the sect form of organisation and conspiratorial methods, thus falling further and further behind the real movement, like a woman at the menopause; they were led to push these ideas and methods to an extreme - a caricatured level - the end point of which was the advocacy of terrorism.
Terrorism is not simply the action of terror. To say that is to leave the discussion at a purely terminological level. What we want to show is the social meaning and differences underlying these terms. Terror is a system of domination, structured, permanent, emanating from exploiting classes. Terrorism on the other hand is a reaction of oppressed classes who have no future, against the terror of the ruling class. They are momentary reactions, without continuity, acts of vengeance with no tomorrow.
We find a moving description of this kind of movement in Panait Istrati and his Haidoucs in the historical context of Rumania at the end of the last century. We find it in the terrorism of the Narodniks and, though it appears in a different way, with the anarchists and the Bonnot gang. They still have the same basic nature - the revenge of the impotent. They never announce anything new, but are the desperate expression of an end - their own end.
Terrorism, the impotent reaction of the impotent, can never overcome the terror of the ruling class. It is a gnat biting the elephant. On the other hand, terrorism has often been exploited by the state to justify and strengthen its own terror.
We must absolutely denounce the myth that terrorism serves, or could serve, as a detonator of the proletarian struggle. It would be rather peculiar to find that a class with a historic future needs to look to a class without a historic future to detonate its struggle.
It is absolutely absurd to claim that the terrorism of the most radicalised strata of the petty bourgeoisie has the merit of destroying the democratic mystification in the working class. That it can destroy the mystification of bourgeois legality. That it can teach the working class about the inevitability of violence. The proletariat has no lesson to draw from radical terrorism except to distance itself from it and reject it, since the violence contained in terrorism is fundamentally situated on a bourgeois terrain. An understanding that violence is necessary and indispensable will be drawn by the proletariat from its own existence; its own struggle; its own experience; its own confrontations with the ruling class. This is class violence, which is different in nature and content, in form and method, from the terrorism of the petty bourgeoisie and the terror of the ruling class.
It is quite certain that, in general, the working class will have an attitude of solidarity and sympathy - not towards terrorism which it condemns as an ideology, a method, and a mode of organisation - but towards the elements who are drawn into terrorism. This is so for obvious reasons:
1. because elements drawn into terrorism are in revolt against the existing order of terror that the proletariat aims to destroy from top to bottom.
2. because, like the working class, elements drawn into terrorism are victims of the cruel exploitation and oppression of the capitalist class and its state, the mortal enemy of the proletariat. The only way the proletariat can show its solidarity with these victims is by trying to save them from the executioners of the state terror, and by attempting to draw them away from the deadly impasse of terrorism.
We do not have to emphasise here the necessity for violence in the class struggle of the proletariat. This would be kicking open doors because, ever since the Equals of Babeuf, this has been demonstrated in theory and in practise. It is also a waste of time repeating, as though it were a new discovery, that all classes have to use violence, including the proletariat. By limiting yourself to these truisms - almost banalities - you end up with the empty equation: “Violence equals violence”. You establish a simplistic and absurd identification between the violence of capital and the violence of the proletariat, and gloss over the essential difference: that one is oppressive and the other libratory.
To go on repeating the tautology that “violence equals violence”; to go on demonstrating that all classes use violence; to go on showing that this violence is essentially the same, is as intelligent as seeing an identity between the act of a surgeon performing a caesarean section to bring new life into the world and the act of a murderer killing his victim by plunging a knife into his stomach, simply because both use similar instruments – knives - on the same object - the stomach - and because both use an apparently similar technique in opening up the stomach.
The most important thing is not to go on shouting, “Violence, violence”, but to underline the differences. To show as clearly as possible why and how the violence of the proletariat is different from the terror and terrorism of other classes.
We are not establishing a distinction between terror and class violence for terminological reasons, or out of a sense of revulsion for the word ‘terror’, or because of squeamishness. We do so in order to draw out more clearly the differences in class nature, form and content which lie behind these words. Vocabulary always lags behind fact and a lack of distinction in words is often the sign of an insufficiently elaborated thought which can lead to further ambiguities. For example, there is the word ‘social democrat’ which in no way corresponded to the revolutionary essence - the communist goals - of the political organisation of the proletariat. It is the same thing with the word ‘terror’. You sometimes find it in socialist literature, even in the classics, tacked on to the words ‘revolutionary’ and ‘proletariat’. We must guard against the abuses that can be committed by literal citations of phrases without putting them in their context or without looking at the circumstances in which they were written and against whom they were written. This can end up distorting the real ideas of their authors. It has to be stressed that in most cases these authors, while using the word terror, took great precautions to establish the basic difference between that of the proletariat and that of the bourgeoisie, between the Paris Commune and Versailles, between revolution and counter-revolution in the Civil War in Russia. If we think it is time to distinguish these two terms it is in order to get rid of the ambiguities involved in identifying them - an ambiguity which sees only a difference in quantity and intensity, not a class difference. And if it was strictly a question of a change in quantity, for marxists who use a dialectical method, this still leads to a change in quality.
In repudiating terror in favour of the class violence of the proletariat we aim not only to express our class hostility to the real content of exploitation and oppression which lies in terror, but also to get rid of casuistic and hypocritical niceties about how ‘the end justifies the means’.
Those unconditional apologists of terror, those Calvinists of the revolution - the Bordigists, have disdain for the question of forms of organisation, of means. For them only the ‘goal’ exists and all forms and means can be used indifferently to attain this goal. “The revolution is a question of content, not of forms of organisation”, they repeat endlessly. Except, of course, for terror. Here they are quite categorical: “No revolution without terror. You’re not a revolutionary if you won’t kill children.” Here terror, considered as a means, becomes an absolute precondition, a categorical imperative of the revolution and its content. Why this exception? We could also ask other questions from the other way round. If questions of means and forms of organisation are of no importance to the proletarian revolution, why shouldn’t the revolution be carried out through the monarchical or parliamentary form?
The truth is that to try to separate form and content, means and ends, is absurd. In reality, form and content are intrinsically connected. An end cannot be achieved by any means. It requires specific means. A given means is only applicable to a given end. Any other approach leads to sophistic speculations.
When we reject terror as a mode of existence of the violence of the proletariat, it is not for some moral reason, but because terror, as a content and method, is by nature opposed to the aims of the proletariat. Can the Calvinists of the revolution really believe, can they really convince us, that the proletariat can make use of concentration camps, the systematic extermination of whole populations, the installation of a huge network of gas chambers, even more scientifically perfect than those of Hitler? Is genocide part of the ‘Programme’ of the ‘Calvinist Road to Socialism’?
We have only to recall the points we made about the main characteristics of the content and methods of terror to see at one glance the enormous gulf between terror and the proletariat:
1. “Being organically linked to exploitation and used to impose it”. The proletariat is an exploited class and struggles for the elimination of exploitation of man by man.
2. “Being the action of a privileged class”. The proletariat has no privileges and fights for the abolition of all privileges.
3. “Being the action of a minority class in society”. The proletariat represents the immense majority of society. Some may see this as an expression of our ‘incorrigible penchant for the democratic principle’, the principle of majority and minority, but it is they who are obsessed by this problem - and what is more, for them minority acts held in horror by the majority are the criterion for revolutionary truth. Socialism cannot be realised if it is not based on historical possibility and does not correspond to the fundamental interests and will of the immense majority of society. This is one of the key arguments of Lenin in State and Revolution, and also of Marx when he said that the proletariat cannot emancipate itself without emancipating the whole of humanity.
4. “Being the action of a specialized body”. The proletariat has inscribed on its banner the destruction of the permanent army and the police, and the general arming of the people; above all of the proletariat. “...tending to elude any control by society over it”. As an objective, the proletariat rejects all specialization, and because it is impossible to realise this immediately the class will insist that specialists are under the complete control of society.
5. “Reproducing and perfecting itself endlessly...”. The proletariat aims to put a stop to all this and begins to do so as soon as it takes power.
6. “Having no other raison d’etre than subordinating and crushing the human community”. The aim of the proletariat is diametrically opposed to this. Its raison d’etre is the liberation of human society.
7. “Developing feelings of hostility and violence between social groups; nationalism, chauvinism, racism, and other monstrosities”. The proletariat will suppress all these historical anachronisms which have become monstrosities and barriers to the harmonious unification of humanity.
8. “Developing feelings and behaviour patterns of egoism, sadistic aggressiveness, vindictiveness; the daily unending war of each against all...”. The proletariat will develop quite new feelings - of solidarity, collective life, fraternity, ‘all for one and one for all’, the free association of producers, socialised production and consumption. And while terror “...plunges the whole of society into a state of terror”, the proletariat will call upon the initiative and creativity of everyone, so that in a general state of enthusiasm they can take their life in their own hands.
The class violence of the proletariat cannot be terror because its raison d’etre is to do away with terror. To consider them the same is to play with words. The hand of a murderer drawing his knife isn’t the same thing as someone who stops the murder being committed. The proletariat cannot resort to the organisation of pogroms, lynchings, schools of torture, Moscow Trials, as methods for realising socialism. It leaves these methods to capitalism, because they are part of capitalism, they are suitable to its ends and they have the generic name of TERROR.
Neither terrorism before the revolution nor terror after the revolution can be weapons of the proletariat in its struggle for the emancipation of humanity.
M.C.
Unlike the Trotskyists who drape a golden chasuble over the naked body of the capitalist economy in the East, militants of the communist left like Mattick or the GLAT1 recognize the reactionary character of state capitalism. They don’t give it a ‘progressive’ label by invoking the theory of the ‘third system’, like Socialisme ou Barbarie and its present-day offshoots in Solidarity. For example, we fully endorse the article which appeared in Lutte de Classe, January 1977, when it affirms clearly that “the contradictions which hurl capitalism into crisis are not the privilege of either the advanced or the underdeveloped countries of this planet. They are inherent in state capitalism, as the example of the USSR shows ...”. This position is certainly clearer than the gratuitous assertion -- completely in contradiction with the reality of Russian state capitalism -- made by Paul Mattick when he claims that “state capitalism is not ‘regulated’ by competition and crises”. By failing to see the destructive role of competition and crises in capitalism in general, and especially by denying their effects in the East, Mattick can only end up by rejecting the objective possibility of a proletarian revolution. This is why, at a time when the bourgeoisie all over the world is taking more and more state capitalist measures, nationalizing key sectors of the economy, it is important to define the nature of state capitalism, in order to show that it is merely a palliative and not a ‘solution’ to the general crisis of capitalism.
1. What is state capitalism?The fact that state capitalism has most often been associated with Russia and its bloc, or with China, has given rise to the idea that the more or less complete takeover of the economy by the state is a peculiarity of these countries. The apparent absence over a long period of the classical manifestations of the crisis -- unemployment, overproduction, brutal falls in production -- seemed to confirm this false idea of a ‘world on its own’.
In fact, far from being a historical enigma, this phenomenon is part of the ‘natural’ evolution of capitalism2; ‘natural’ in the sense that this mode of production has been obliged to dominate all social relations in an increasingly violent and totalitarian way. In the nineteenth century certain capitalist nations which, for historical and geographical reasons, had been accumulating capital over a long period, were able to follow the ‘natural’ laws of the capitalist economy. But towards the end of the century, the growing number of capitalist nations meant that the state had to interfere more and more with these ‘natural’ laws. When Engels wrote Anti-Duhring he was already aware that liberalism and the struggle against the Moloch-state so dear to the liberal theoreticians of the nineteenth century had had their day:
“The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers -- proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head.”
This analysis of Engels, which the Trotskyists are so careful to ‘ignore’, is a posthumous blow against their theory of the ‘workers’ state’. It is an unequivocal condemnation of all their ‘transitional programs’ and plans for the nationalization of private capital. The state is the machine of exploitation par excellence: when our latter-day Duhrings, the leftists, try to outbid the traditional left in their calls for nationalizations, they are simply calling for the strengthening of this capitalist machine.
The Bordigists unconsciously participate in this when they see the states engendered by national liberation struggles as ‘progressive’ factors, products of the bourgeois revolution. They don’t understand that the bourgeois states which came out of the bourgeois revolutions of the past only represented historical progress to the extent that they allowed for the free development of the productive forces, that they stood aside and enabled new historical forces to grow. But the increasing hypertrophy of the capitalist state from the end of last century on, far from expressing a new qualitative expansion of the productive forces, reflected the growing compression of the productive forces within the framework of the nation state. Two world wars have proved that the swelling of the state is directly proportional to the destruction of the accumulated productive forces. The fact that these new ‘liberated’ states have to take over the whole of social life is proof of the weakness of the economies in these areas; and this is why these states have to subject their proletariats to the most ferocious exploitation and repression.
a. Weakness of Russian state capitalismIt would be quite wrong to limit the phenomenon of state capitalism to the so-called ‘socialist’ states. From Internationalisme3 to the ICC, revolutionaries have pointed out that we are dealing with a general phenomenon all over the world -- a tendency -- but one which can never be fully realized because of the impossibility of absorbing all the remaining non-capitalist sectors. This is why it’s wrong to talk about a fully-formed or economically ‘pure’ state capitalism in the East, which is burdened with a feebly centralized artisanal and agricultural sector (kolkhozes, small plots of land, etc), or to say that the West has a system of ‘private capitalism’ because of the relative weakness of the state sector. The tendency towards state capitalism is not a question of percentages, as though a country becomes ‘state capitalist’ when it goes beyond a fateful 50 per cent mark of state control. When Mattick, in Marx and Keynes, defines the American economy as a ‘mixed economy’ diametrically opposed to the ‘system’ of Russian state capitalism, he loses sight of the existence of this general tendency.
Mattick and others are taken in by appearances and define capitalism in terms of two antagonistic forces (‘private’ and ‘state’ capitalism) because they only see the juridical forms which capital takes on. State capitalism is fundamentally the result of the growing fusion between capital and the state. This fusion is not the same as the juridical form it takes on and which is often the mystified form of its real content. It is the degree of concentration and centralization of capital at the level of the state which determines the reality of this fusion. The classical capitalism of the nineteenth century tended to become more and more concentrated internationally, beyond its original frontiers. But while capitalism is a world system it can only develop in the framework of competition between nation states. Thus, when imperialism began to develop at the end of the nineteenth century, the tendency towards international concentration was blocked: the concentration and centralization of capital gravitated more and more around the nation state, the only force capable of defending capital in an economic war of one against the rest. The tendency towards state capitalism expressed itself most clearly in World War I, among all the belligerents, weak and small. Although still relatively weak up until the crisis of 1929, the tendency was particularly striking in the great imperialist states, where capital had already reached a high level of concentration and centralization, for example, the US and Germany during World War I -- the Germany which Lenin saw as a model of state capitalism for Russia. The ability of US capital to transform its whole productive apparatus into a war economy during World War II shows that the strength of state capitalism is itself determined by the strength of the economy which underlies it.
This does not mean that state capitalism is a higher form of capitalism, “a rationalization of the process of production” (Bukharin, Economics of the Transition Period). The permanent crisis since 1914 has shown that you can’t ‘rationalize’ a system whose survival through the cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction shows that it has become totally irrational. The ‘rationalization’ of capitalism is a contradiction in terms. Similarly the planning of the economy under state capitalism can only be the planning of the anarchy which has characterized capitalism from the beginning.
The very strength of American state capitalism resides in its capacity to push the crisis out onto the world market through its state organs (the International Monetary Fund, International Bank of Reconstruction and Development etc).
What about Russian state capitalism? How does it differ from American state capitalism? As we have seen the existence of private capitalism is not in contradiction with the existence of state capital, and vice versa. Only the Stalinists and Trotskyists could see the American state as a ‘prisoner of the monopolies’, weakened by their occult powers. These apologists for the dictatorship of the Russian state obviously cannot understand that the political strength of a state is all the greater when it is based on a powerful economic substructure. As has been shown by Marxists in the past, beginning with Engels, the development of joint stock companies, then cartels and trusts, do not lead to the weakening of the state; on the contrary it ends up with a state monopoly excluding all the others and directly subordinating them to its control.
While this process took place in a largely gradual manner with the great capitalist powers (Germany, USA, Japan), it was different in Russia and the Eastern countries. Here the process was realized through the violent dispossession of most of the private owners, the state becoming the exclusive owner of the means of production. The state had to intervene despotically in the economy in order to make up for the congenital weakness of a bourgeoisie incapable of carrying through the concentration and centralization of capital. Thus the state swelled to huge proportions on a weak economic foundation, absorbing civil society without really dominating it.
Although in some ways state capitalism has reached its most complete form in Russia, with this total absorption of civil society, this fusion of economics and politics, it has only been achieved at the price of a growing anarchy in the relations of production, which are only formally dominated by the state. The gigantic waste involved in an anarchic system of planning, which is incapable of really centralizing and concentrating the capital accumulated, shows that this fusion between capital and the state has been realized more at the legal level than in reality.
2. The myth of ‘scientific’ planningThe Eastern countries are an illustration of the growing irrationality of the capitalist system as a whole. Since the 1930s, the bourgeoisie has believed that it would be possible to develop production and consumption in a regular and harmonious manner by ‘deciding’ production quotas in advance. Precise statistical methods and specialized planning bureaux would make it possible to foresee the future and thus avoid sudden catastrophes like 1929. All the capitalist schemes from the De Man Plan to the Stalinist Plans nourished this illusion. The war was to destroy this illusion; after 1938 all the capitalist countries from the USA to the USSR which had adopted these planning methods fell back into the crisis.
The post-war period gave new life to this dream of discovering the Anti-Crisis Philosopher’s Stone, in the form of ‘econometric’ theories in the West and ‘scientific calculation’ in the East; but this was because the expansion of reconstructed markets was effectively ‘planning’ the economy. Today once again it is the crisis which is planning the economy. We saw this in the previous article when we showed that the continuing fall in production indices reflects the growing contradictions of accumulation. The fall in the rate of growth to the 4 per cent envisaged in the annual Plans of the COMECON countries up to 1980 shows that such Plans are merely passive reflections of the real situation. The Russian planners can’t be conscious agents of production; they don’t determine production, they simply put forward indices decided upon by tendencies outside their control.
What is this ‘planning’ if it doesn’t have any real basis? The title of a pamphlet published by the Novosti press agency, Major Options for the National Economy of the USSR for 1976-80 gives us an answer. Planning under state capitalism doesn’t mean attaining definite objectives, but putting forward options: This means that the planning is aimed not at achieving a splendid mathematical growth but at regulating the existing proportions between the producer goods sector and the consumer goods sector; this has to take into account a. the class struggle, which makes it difficult to cut consumer goods production too brutally; b. the need to constantly reinforce the armaments sector and thus Department I. What state capitalism can’t achieve through expansion it tries to provide through fluctuations in the proportions between the two sectors, through giving priority as to how much capital should be invested in this or that sector, this or that branch of industry.
This in no way means that capitalist anarchy has been suppressed in these ‘priority’ sectors. On the contrary, the realization of the Plan’s objectives in a given branch is done at the expense of a permanent wastage of raw materials. The commodities produced at a very low value are sometimes so poor in quality that they are unusable: “In other countries (than the USSR) production is usually extended over the whole month, but here it can only begin on the fifteenth or twentieth day of the month, when all the material has arrived. The factories then have to meet 80 per cent of the demands of the Plan (the quotas) during the last ten or fifteen days. In such conditions, no one worries about quality. Only quantity counts.”
From the standpoint of capitalist laws, the Russian economy is a perfect example of irrationality in the division of labor, productivity and profitability. This situation is reflected in the ritualistic declarations of the leaders of Russian capital:
“In the existing enterprises production must be increased, without augmenting the workforce and even by reducing it. But it is no less important to improve the organization of labor, to eliminate time-wasting and raise the level of discipline in production.” (Kosygin, at the Twenty-Fifth Congress of the CPSU)
It takes someone like Ernest Mandel to see some sort of ‘rationality’ in the permanent anarchy of the Eastern European economies. According to him, in contrast to western planning, “Soviet planning is real planning” (Marxist Economic Theory). For the Trotskyists any lie is permissible in the defense of the ‘socialist’ character of the ‘workers’ states’.
3. Weakness of the state capitalist economy in the EastIn Eastern Europe, and even more in Russia, the only sector of the economy which has any real vitality is the armaments industry. “It is easier to produce an atomic bomb or isotopes than transistors or biochemical medicines” as a Russian physicist has said (quoted in The Russians by Hedrick Smith). It is the only sector where production is really controlled. It has better materials, higher productivity and higher wages to stimulate the effort to achieve higher quality. It is the only sector where the concentration and centralization of capital by the state is a reality, because this is a vital question for the very existence of the Russian imperialist bloc4.
This strength of the Russian war economy, which proved itself in World War II against German capital, is not a reflection of the strength of the economy as a whole; it is inversely proportional to it.
But for the Russian war economy to be really effective and capable of confronting the US war economy, it’s not enough for armaments production in the Russian bloc to equal that of the other bloc. The fact that the Russian armaments sector represents 20 per cent (officially) of the GNP of the USSR, as against 10 per cent in the USA, clearly shows the weakness of the Soviet economy.
Despite a commonly held conception that was particularly in vogue at the time of the ‘Liberman reforms’, state capitalism does not suffer from a hyper-centralization and hyper-concentration of the units of production. Exactly the opposite is the case. The growing hypertrophy of planning bureaux in the COMECON countries is precisely the result of the weakness of the economic substructure; it does not signify a movement towards a greater centralization of capital, since this is fundamentally “the concentration of already-formed capitals, the transcendence of their individual autonomy, the expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, the transformation of many small capitals into a few capitals which are already existing and functioning” (Marx, Capital, Volume I). The Russian statistics show that state capitalism often exists on the purely theoretical level (and this also applies to the other countries of the bloc, except East Germany which inherited the high level of concentration of the pre-war German economy): on 1 January 1974, Russian industry included 48,578 state-owned autonomous enterprises, each one functioning as a centre of accumulation, with its own accounting system and financial autonomy. The part played by large-scale enterprises remains small except for pilot projects in petrochemicals and electro-metallurgy (Elektro-sila in Moscow has 20,000 workers). In 1973, 31% of industrial production was carried out by 1.4% of the enterprises (660); to obtain the same percentage in the USA, only fifty enterprises are needed (Fortune, May 1974). Despite the setting up of the famous ‘industrial unions’ which regroup small enterprises in larger units, in a given branch of industry in 1974-5 fifty American enterprises could, according to Fortune, produce as much as 5000 Russian enterprises!
But more important than the level of technical concentration, which is a product of, rather than a condition for, enlarged accumulation, is the fact that the state capitalist countries of the Eastern bloc suffer from a purely formal domination over labor. Apart from in the pilot projects, what we see is the extensive utilization of labor power based on the size of the workforce used (or rather, wasted in the general anarchy) rather than an intensive development of the productivity of labor, which has been the basis of modern capitalism since the end of the last century. While the exploitation of the proletariat is just as ferocious in the East as it is in the West, it doesn’t take the same form. What capitalist exploitation gains in the USSR and COMECON by the lengthening of the working day (up to ten to twelve hours), by the quantitative mobilization of the workforce, it loses in intensity, and thus, from the capitalist point of view, in efficiency5. Last century it was the orientation of capital towards the relative extraction of surplus value which allowed capitalism to achieve a more and more totalitarian domination over living labor. The dictatorship of capital over labor, which is achieved at the political level in Russia through the terrorist violence of the state, is only formally achieved at the economic level. This is why the Russian capitalists are forever warning against the perils of lax attitudes at work. As Marx said last century, “while the production of absolute surplus value corresponds to the formal domination of labor by capital, the production of relative surplus value corresponds to the real domination of capital” (Marx, Capital).
Reflecting the general crisis of capitalism since 1914, Russian state capitalism has to confront the open crisis in a weak, anachronistic condition, which accentuates the economic gap between the two competing blocs. Thus in 1973 output per inhabitant in the USSR was almost that of an underdeveloped country -- Russia was 25th in the world ranks in this field: Russia only participates in 4 per cent of international trade, about the same as Holland. Although its position on the world market is a question of life or death for each national capital in the face of the crisis, for the last twenty years COMECON has only participated in 10 per cent of world trade, less than West Germany. If we also note that the agricultural sector still mobilizes between 25 and 40 per cent of the active population in the COMECON countries, we can have some idea of just how bankrupt state capitalism is in the East. The general bankruptcy of capitalism today is also and above all the bankruptcy of state capitalism, which is a hopeless response to the general decadence of the system, and which takes the irrationality of capital as the very basis of its existence.
4. The end of illusions
a. The mercantile illusion
At the end of the 1960s, the Russian bloc tried to ‘resolve’ its crisis by modernizing its productive apparatus and thus increasing its exports on the world market, given the limitations of the COMECON market. The Liberman reforms did not stop the continual fall in the rate of profit in the enterprises; this went from “a monetary accumulation of 45.1% in 1960 to 31.7% in 1973”, the fall in the rate of profit haling recovered somewhat in 1971 (V. Vassilev, Rationality of the Soviet Economic System).
At the price of a considerable indebtedness, the countries of COMECON tried to import technology and invited the industrialized countries to install ultra-modern factories. The Eastern countries had the illusion that if you modernized your capital you could transform this ‘thrust to the East’ by western capital into a ‘thrust to the West’ by the commodities of COMECON. Since 1975 the capitalist world has had to abandon this idea: not only has the West reduced its capital exports to the East for economic and strategic reasons (the growing insolvency of COMECON, resumption of the cold war); the East has also had to resign itself to a diminution of its exports to western markets. Despite resorting to the palliative of dumping, the contraction of international trade is an irreversible phenomenon which can’t be overcome by importing technology. Even the countries whose exports are orientated towards the West have had to modify their export policies and reorientate their trade towards the East.
Contrary to what the GLAT say (Lutte de Classe, February 1977) the present crisis does express itself in the East as the product of the saturation of markets, even if the effects of this are concretized in the tendential fall in the rate of profit. One must deny reality to say that “the USSR is the experimental proof of the absurdity (!) of all theories which seek the origins of the crisis of capitalism in the insufficiency of demand or any other form (?) of lack of outlets”. State capitalism in the Russian bloc is not in crisis because it isn’t producing enough accumulated capital: state capitalism is a gigantic accumulation of constant and variable capital devalorized not only by the endemic anarchy of production but by the weakness of the markets through which it could be realized. Like the GLAT, state capitalism had the illusion that it was stagnating because it wasn’t producing enough capital6. But the underproduction of capital, ie of commodities, is, on a global scale, simply the corollary to overproduction. Underproduction in a given national capital is the result of the tendency towards overproduction of the more developed capitals in the face of the contraction of the market. Polish capital, for example, produces too many ships in relation to the world market’s capacity to absorb them; it thus finds itself obliged to underproduce vis-a-vis its own productive capacities. This is the whole point of planning in the countries of the East: capital attempts to avoid the brutal collapse threatened by the contraction of the world market by adapting its productive apparatus to the rhythm of this collapse. Only socialism will be able to put an end to this infernal dialectic of over-and-underproduction, since it is the unlimited growth of the needs of humanity and thus of the production of use values aimed at meeting these needs. Only socialism will end the mercantile illusion which is plunging humanity into barbarism.
b. The reinforcement of the Russian bloc
While the brutal aggravation of the crisis has accelerated the tendency towards autarky in the COMECON countries, it has also led to an increase in trade inside COMECON. What the COMECON planners refer to politely as the ‘international socialist division of labor’ and the ‘development of specialization’ is in reality the economic, political and strategic reinforcement of the domination of Russian capital. In order to develop and strengthen its war economy against the US bloc, Russia has adopted symmetrical measures:
“In July 1975, in Bucharest, the COMECON countries decided (sic) that nine billion roubles would be jointly spent between 1976 and 1980 in order to help realize Soviet resources in raw materials.” (L’Integration Economique a 1’Est’, Notes et Etudes Documentaires, 8 March 1976)
To give an idea of how Russia is exploiting its ‘fraternal countries’, such a measure would mean that Czechoslovakia would have to devote at least 4 per cent of its overall investments to it. These measures, ratified by the different CPs, as at the Ninth Congress of the East German Party, show clearly that Russia is going to impose rationing on its satellites. Although COMECON countries like Poland and Hungary managed to diversify their production and trade in the 1960s, they now find themselves more and more obliged to accept the stranglehold of Russian capital on all branches of their industry (multinational chemicals in Poland, etc); thanks to its monopoly of raw materials, Russia has a great potential for blackmail. For such purposes Russia has its own IMF, the International Investment Bank7 which, through the medium of the transferable rouble, allows it to be the real paymaster; while at the same time the increasing price of Russian energy, though less expensive than in the West, has considerably augmented the satellites’ debts to the USSR.
So, what Russian state capitalism has been unable to achieve through detente with the West and the modernization of its productive apparatus, it is now trying to achieve by force, by pushing the weight of the crisis onto its allies. Not only are the Dubcek economic policies of ‘facing both ways’ definitely out, with the return to the fold of those unruly children, Poland and Hungary; also finished is the whole illusion of detente and ‘peaceful coexistence’ between the blocs, as theorized some time ago by Kruschchev.
c. The end of ‘Goulash Socialism’ illusionThe resurgence of the class struggle in the 1970s in Poland, the fear that the workers’ insurrection in the Baltic would contaminate the other COMECON countries, pushed the bourgeoisie of these countries to augment the consumer goods sector, albeit at the price of plunging the economy into debt by importing the necessary goods or blocking prices of basic consumer products. The bourgeoisie in all these countries tried to convince the workers that the scarcity of the 1950s was now just a memory and that the alliance between imported coca-cola (canned in Russia) and the local goulash would lead to a real rise in living standards.
The crisis, the strengthening of the Russian bloc by pushing the crisis onto all the COMECON countries, the growing importance given to investments in heavy industry, have modified this situation. Despite the bourgeoisie’s justifiable fear of fresh workers’ riots, all the Plans up until 1980 envisage a clear reduction in real wages:
PERCENTAGE ANNUAL GROWTH OF WAGES |
||||
|
Poland |
Hungary |
East Germany |
Czechoslovakia |
71-75 |
7.2 |
3.4 |
3.7 |
3.4 |
76-80 |
3-3.4 |
2.7-3 |
? |
2.5-2.8 |
SOURCE: ‘L’ Europe de L’Est en 1976’, Notes et Etudes Documentaires, 9 Septemb |
We know that after the riots at Radom and Ursus, Poland had to revise its policy of attacking the living standards of the workers, cancelling the rises in food prices Nevertheless the last two years have seen capital continuing to attack the class through repeated price rises. The weight of these sacrifices is going to get heavier and heavier, particularly in the ‘People’s Democracies’, to which Russia has begun to export the effects of the crisis. This doesn’t mean that Russia will give up directly attacking ‘its’ working class. On the contrary: the prodigious development of military expenditure in Russia in order to cope with the strategic advance of the US bloc; the emergence of an aggressive global policy in the Middle East and Africa in particular; the necessity to pay a high price to keep its more distant allies in its own camp (Cuba, Vietnam) -- all of this is weighing more and more heavily not simply on the economies of the bloc but on the shoulders of all the workers of COMECON. The theory of a ‘labour aristocracy’ in the big imperialist countries, bought off by their own bourgeoisie, is as far as the Russian proletariat is concerned a sinister joke which only Third Worldist fanatics and avid defenders of ‘small nations’ could take seriously.
d. The explosive contradictions of the Russian blocThe proletariat of the Eastern countries is perhaps even less willing than any other section of the class to be mobilized for imperialist war, to be sacrificed on the altar of ‘socialism’. It is a proletariat which has experienced the ferocious reactions of a bourgeoisie which has shown itself to be quite pitiless in the defense of its system (Hungary 1956, Poland 1970); while today, capital’s attacks on its living standards are pushing it below the minimum guaranteed wage which state capitalism has maintained up till now. Even if state capitalism is now trying to build up food stocks by investing massively in agriculture, these are not to be understood as preventative measures against famine but as the establishment of reserve stocks to nourish the armies which one day will be thrown into an imperialist war.
At the same time, in order to face up to the US bloc on the world market, the Russian bloc must increase its productive capacities, which means increasing the rate of exploitation of the workers. In 1976 however “there was a slowing down of the rate of growth in productivity, imports and investments” (NED, 9 Sept 1977). This means that capital in the COMECON countries is unable to modernize its productive apparatus. The period of importing western technology is over. In order to make its existing capital more profitable -- particularly because of the weakness of its fixed capital -- it must not only reduce the real wages of the workers, but also reduce the number of workers, which means opening the door to unemployment. This is at least a temptation for capitalism in the eastern countries; but giving in to this temptation also means risking further class upsurges, upsetting the fragile stability which these countries have maintained since the war through policies of full employment.
The combativity of the proletariat in these countries remains intact. The class movements which have appeared in Eastern Europe, albeit in a dispersed fashion, from Radom to Karl-Marx-Stadt and the Romanian coal basin show up the fragility of the ideological preparations for imperialist war in the Russian bloc. Carter’s campaign for ‘human rights’ is much more pernicious and effective than the idea of the ‘socialist fatherland’.
Finally, the strengthening of Russia’s economic grip on the COMECON countries has only formally strengthened the cohesion of COMECON. The dues Russian imperialism demands of its allies are too heavy to pay, the economic and political advantages of being in the bloc are too few compared to the benefits offered by the US bloc. The stability and solidity of the bloc are far from guaranteed. As can be seen by the echo Carter’s campaign has had in the ‘People’s Democracies’ (Charter ‘77, internal oppositions in East Germany and the Party itself, ‘democratic’ opposition in Poland), the strengthening of the bloc has been accompanied by the accentuation of centrifugal tendencies which can weaken the cohesion of the bloc.
As the contradictions of the Russian bloc accumulate, it is up to revolutionaries to evaluate the balance of forces between the classes, ie the objective conditions for the outbreak of the world revolution in Eastern Europe.
5. Political crisis and class struggleThe development of state capitalism in Eastern Europe has simplified the political framework within which the life of capital takes place. The victory of the USSR in this part of Europe has led to profound political changes: the establishment of the one-party system, the elimination of the pro-American social democratic peasant and liberal parties. Although officially other parties continue to exist alongside the state party, such as the Polish peasant party or the christian-democratic and liberal-democratic parties in East Germany, they are simply appendages to the party-state. Their anachronistic existence is the reflection not of a western-type pluralism, but of the subsistence of a large peasant or religious sector, which is important without constituting a force for opposition. The same phenomenon exists in the USSR where the Russian Stalinist party co-exists with other ‘Communist’ or ‘national’ parties who are supposed to represent not particular social groups but ‘nationalities’ (Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians etc).
Despite these particularities, the violent establishment of state capitalism in these countries has led to the one party system. What could not be truly realized on the economic level -- the fusion of capital with the state -- has taken place on the political level. The existence of such parties is the purest expression of the decadence of the democratic form of the bourgeois dictatorship. Last century the subsistence of classes left over from older modes of production (nobility, peasantry) obliged the bourgeoisie to coexist with and accommodate itself to these archaic forces within the state. The bourgeoisie’s growing domination over the state finally eliminated such forces. In the period of capital’s decline, the instability of the system’s economic base has compelled the bourgeoisie to do away with the ‘liberties’ which mask its class dictatorship; in this epoch the bourgeoisie has tended to fuse completely with the state, the last bastion of its power. This tendency towards the disappearance of the formal content of democracy has gone furthest where the capitalist class is weakest, where its economic base is most feeble: in the third world and Eastern Europe. The strengthening of state totalitarianism in the West shows that this tendency is not only universal but irreversible. Only the relative strength of capital in the more developed countries has allowed it to tolerate the existence of parties representing the backward strata of capital. Democracy has ceased to be a functional mechanism for capital; its only role is one of mystification (democratic ‘freedoms’, ‘free’ elections, etc). The weakness of capitalism in the East, the weakness of a bourgeois class which is constituted in the state in an inorganic manner, deprives it of the luxury of the democratic opium for calming the suffering of a poverty-stricken working class. The capitalist class has to fuse directly into the state with the police and army, via the single party which functions as the general staff of capital.
It would be a major error to believe that the concentration of the capitalist class into one unit, its total fusion with the state, have eliminated the internal contradictions of the bourgeois class and done away with political crises within its ranks. The bloody purges inside the ruling Stalinist parties over the last forty years show that state capitalism does not bring with it a consolidation of the ruling class. Purges, coups d’Etat, settlings of accounts remain the back-cloth to the political life of the bourgeoisie. But the divergent interests within the ruling class are no longer expressed through a multiplicity of parties; they appear within the single party itself, and this has the effect of increasing the instability and fragility of the state. Hungary 1956 was the most striking example of this -- the party was split in two between the Rakosi faction and the Nagy faction. State capitalism, a response to the permanent economic crisis of the system, also involves a permanent political crisis of the bourgeoisie, which is imprisoned within the totalitarian state and often finds itself strangled by the very single party system which it set up to preserve its rule.
The open crisis of capitalism today has simply made this reality stand out more starkly: thus we have seen the elimination of Kruschchev, the Prague spring, the replacement of Gomulka by Gierek. The political crisis is tending more and more to come out into broad daylight; it is moving away from shady duels between rival cliques and is now manifesting itself openly in public. This simply reflects the growing accumulation of contradictions within each national capital in the bloc. The austerity imposed by Russian capital not only threatens social cohesion in the ‘People’s Democracies’: it is far too heavy a burden for the congenitally feeble bourgeoisies of these countries. But, unable to find the outlets they need in the West, they have no option except to return to the fold of COMECON.
Over the last few years, especially since Carter’s campaign about the ‘rights of man’ and after the hopes raised in certain intellectual circles by the Helsinki agreements, we have seen in the USSR, Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia the appearance of opposition groups, both inside and outside the ruling parties, calling for ‘democratic freedoms’ and political pluralism. In the USSR this opposition is limited essentially to intellectual circles which call for greater freedom of thought in their work, and to the nationalist opposition against ‘Great Russia’ in the non-Russian republics. In the ‘People’s Democracies’ these two forms tend to be combined: intellectuals calling for ‘freedom’ are more or less openly supported by factions of the bourgeoisie hoping to distance themselves economically and politically from the ruinous ‘friendship’ of the Russian bear.
In a country like Poland the resurgence of class struggle, the impossibility of crushing the fierce resistance of the Polish proletariat through the totalitarian power of the state, has given rise to an army of opposition groups or circles which claim to ‘defend the workers’, like Kuron’s Workers’ Defense Committee. These are the elements who bring tears of joy to the eyes of the Trotskyists and other advocates of the ‘re-establishment of workers’ democracy’. These good pilgrims of ‘democratic freedom’ even go so far as to talk about “the extraordinarily subversive character of the call for democratic freedoms in Eastern Europe” (Stalinisme et Libertes en Europe de 1’Est, Cahier Rouge, no. 2, Serie Pays de 1’Est) . Subversive? Let’s hear from one of the representatives of this ‘democratic’ current, Lipinski:
“A political system that lacks any mechanism for continuous adaptation, a rigid system that destroys criticism, which does not respect the fundamental freedom to criticize, such a system is not effective.” (Interview with Nouvel Observateur, 15 May 1976)
Maintaining the cohesion, the ‘effectiveness’ of the capitalist system -- this is the ‘subversive’ program the Trotskyists have once again discovered in a bourgeois current.
It is difficult to know what echo such groups have among the workers: although they have none at all in the USSR where the activity of the intelligentsia only meets with distrust, in Poland they seem to have had a greater impact on the workers’ milieu8. However, such attempts to set up an opposition do not mean that ‘democratic’ regimes are on the agenda in Eastern Europe. The crisis of capitalism can only accentuate the totalitarian character of the state; strengthen its stranglehold on the whole of society. Capital’s tightening grip on the social organism can only be relaxed momentarily when social conflict breaks out: such a relaxation can only be temporary and is in fact a preparation for further repressive measures to break the resistance of the proletariat. The ‘democratic’ opposition in Poland is simply the corollary, the complement, to the reinforcement of the dictatorship of the capitalist state concentrated in the single party. Adam Michnik, a representative of the Workers’ Defense Committee, cynically expressed this a short time ago: “To postulate a revolutionary overthrow of the dictatorship of the party, to organize actions with this aim, would be both unrealistic and dangerous” (Esprit, January 1977). The growing domination of its allies by the USSR leaves this opposition with no choice but to be the loyal opposition within state capitalism, to tacitly or resignedly accept the reality of the Russian bloc.
Outside of its function of locally diverting the discontent of the workers into campaigns and signatures against repression, the ‘democratic opposition’ has little chance of gaining an echo if it threatens the domination of Russian imperialism and proposes a break with the bloc (Charter ‘77 in Czechoslovakia). In no way can these groups be transformed into real opposition parties. All they can do is co-exist alongside the ruling party for as long as the national capital and the USSR see fit to allow them. This is the policy which Polish capital followed in 1956: once the discontent of the workers was exhausted and the regime was stabilized, the opposition groups that had arisen disappeared with or without open repression.
*************
East or West, the proletariat has no ‘freedoms’ to defend or any ‘friends’ to count on. The only freedom the proletariat demands is the freedom to destroy this rotten system. Arms in hand, the proletariat will seize hold of the freedom to organize itself and struggle for the destruction of capital; it will take the liberty of denying the freedom of the bourgeoisie to exploit it. This basic Marxist truth, which Lenin defended incessantly against all the ‘democrats’ and ‘friends’ of the proletariat, applies more than ever to Eastern Europe.
From the insurrection in Saxony and Berlin in 1953 to the explosion in Hungary 1956 and the struggles in the shipyards of the Baltic in 1971, the proletariat of Eastern Europe has shown that it is not separate from the world proletariat, but one of its detachments. Through its combativity and heroism it has shown that the possibility of a proletarian revolution in Eastern Europe is not a utopia dreamed up by a few ‘archeo-marxists’.
Certainly the proletariat of Eastern Europe has to overcome many obstacles before rediscovering the path that led to October 1917:
-- the ruthless, totalitarian hold of the state, which atomizes the class more than anywhere else;
-- the crushing of the Russian proletariat, which destroyed all organizational continuity with the revolutionary wave of the 1920s;
-- the difficulty for the class to draw the lessons from its struggles once they have subsided, owing to the absence of revolutionary political organizations.
The upsurges of the class in Eastern Europe show that it is easier for the proletariat to express its combativity and extend its struggle in these countries than in Russia, where the struggle is much weaker and dispersed both in time and space, taking the form of totally isolated local explosions. Because state capitalism in these countries is the expression of the weakness of capital, they will more and more become weak links of world capital in the face of the proletariat.
However, the central role of the West European proletariat in the international class struggle, its concentration, the emergence since 1968 of revolutionary political organizations, secreted by the class in order to draw the lessons of its struggles, its more developed historical class consciousness -- all these factors will make the West European proletariat a decisive catalyst for the workers of Eastern Europe, enabling the combativity which has been accumulating since 1971 to be transformed into a conscious revolutionary energy which can bring down the iron dictatorship of capital on a world scale.
Ch.
1 GLAT – Groupe de Liaison pour l’Action des Travailleurs. Write to Renee Togny, BP 62009, 75421, Paris, Cedex 09, France.
2 It goes without saying that no evolution of a historical phenomenon is predetermined, because men make their own history. It is the survival of capitalism after the 1917-21 revolutionary wave which has allowed this phenomenon to develop.
3 Organ of the Gauche Communiste de France. See Revolution Internationale, Bulletin d’Etudes et de Discussion, no. 8
4 This is so much the case, that in the factories working for the civil sector, certain assembly lines do work for the army with first-class materials which are rigorously tested from their arrival at the factory to their transformation into military equipment. For example, in contrast to the proverbial mediocrity of automobiles sold on the civil market, the vehicles reserved for army and party personnel have a special robustness (mentioned in Smith, The Russians).
5 The dominant form of wage labor in Russia is piece work (two-thirds of the workforce). This form so widespread in the early days of industrial capitalism, is typical in a weak capital and reflects a low productivity of labor.
6 See for example, the complex of truck factories in Kama, a gigantic accumulation of capital imported from the west, and a gigantic fiasco. After several years of work (roads, buildings etc), by 1975 around 100,000 of the trucks planned had not been produced.
7 This can be no help to the most debt-ridden countries, Poland, Hungary. This is so much the case that these two plus Czechoslovakia have recently officially made it known that they would like to receive loans from the IMF. Since the IMF is an organ of US capital, it goes without saying that this could only happen if these countries joined the other bloc. The strengthening of Russia’s hold over its satellites shows that such a project is completely illusory.
8 Thousands of Polish workers signed the Workers’ Defense Committee petition.
Introduction
The following unsigned leaflet was recently sent to the ICC by an unknown source in India. We are reprinting it because it relates to an important and tragic episode of the class struggle in India. This event has lessons for the whole international proletariat. The massacre of the workers at the Swadeshi textile mill in Kanpur will remain for many years a brutal testimony of capitalist barbarism, and it will remind all workers of the only brutal answer capitalism can offer to humanity in this epoch.
The massacre at Kanpur is only one of a number of acts of brutal repression by the ‘democratic’ Desai regime. In recent months, demonstrating workers, students, and peasants have been cut down by the police in many parts of India: in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil, Bihar, and Punjab, etc.
The Kanpur massacre also is similar to the mass killings of nearly 200 workers, their wives and children in the ‘Aztra’ sugar mill in Ecuador last October. Just like in Kanpur, the army there if not the police, dished out the only consistent policy of capital today when confronted with militant workers: cynical and bloody repression. Recent events in Peru, Nicaragua, etc confirm this trend which inevitably accompanies the proletarian resurgence in the Third World. In India the re-emergence of the working class was announced by the huge railway strike of 1974 which the Gandhi regime could only crush with the most extensive repression (25,000 workers were thrown in jail) and with the most heinous connivance of the unions and government. The Janata regime was brought in in 1976 to replace the ‘dictatorship’ of Gandhi and bring the workers under control with the promise of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’; but almost as soon as it came to power the Desai government was met with a massive wave of wildcats in the textile industry, and the ferment in the class has not stopped since then: dockers in Bombay, Kajhara miners, government employees and many others have fought bitter strikes, often outside of union control, and frequently dealt with in the same bloody way as the Kanpur strike described in this leaflet. The Indian workers have paid many lives for the privilege of learning what lies behind the facade of Janata democracy: the terror of the bourgeois state.
But the leaflet contains certain weaknesses, inevitable in a recently awakened international proletarian movement. These are reflected in the statements the leaflet makes criticizing the ‘revolutionary’ leaders of the working class movement for their respect of legalism and supposed class collaboration with the Janata regime. Similarly, it fails to recognize that the divisive role of the unions is the result of the unions being organs of state repression within the working class. The so-called ‘working class’ Communist Party (M) and the other assorted leftist organizations are capitalist parties which fully support the needs of state capitalism and economic austerity. They are not ‘betraying’ anybody nor do they ‘collaborate’ with capitalism. They are part and parcel of the political apparatus of capitalism, just like the unions. If they speak a ‘working class’ language, they do so to better mystify the workers. But in real life they contribute to the physical repression of the proletariat by duping it, dividing and isolating it, all in the name of the ‘national interest’. The leaflet’s strength assuredly rests somewhere else. In its unconditional and poignant defense of the murdered workers, and its elemental appeal to the internationalism of the working class: Workers of the World Unite. It is for this that this leaflet brings with it a breath of fresh air from the Indian sub-continent. And it will serve as an inspiration for revolutionaries and their class everywhere.
At a time when the world is more than ever being ravaged by inter-imperialist bloodbaths dressed up as ‘national liberation wars’; when revolutionaries in the advanced capitalisms are being told that they must support these national wars because the working class ‘doesn’t exist’ in the third world, because such wars can pave the way to a ‘progressive capitalist development’; this leaflet tells us very clearly that there is a working class in the Third World, that it is already fighting its own autonomous struggle, and that in that struggle it confronts the same enemies as the workers of the metropoles: democracy, the left parties, the unions, and above all, the nation state, whose historical bankruptcy in all parts of the world is starkly underlined by its recourse to terror and massacre against the proletariat.
Janata ‘democracy’ and the working classDecember 6, 1977: 1:50 p.m.:
About 1,000 workers of the Swadeshi Cotton Mills, Kanpur, gherao (surround) two officers to demand payment of wages held up for 51 days.
3:30 p.m.:
Large contingents of armed police and the Provisional Armed Constabulary (PAC) surround the mill from all sides.
3:50 p.m.:
Police open fire without any warning.
5:30 p.m.:
Over 150 workers are dead, hundreds injured, 237 arrested.
December 6, 1977 will go down in the workers’ history as black tuesday, the day on which capital launched an armed and open war on the working class, the day of cold-blooded butchery, the day of a workers’ Jalianwala Bagh.
The scene of the blood-bath will be remembered: Swadeshi Mills, one of India’s largest textile mills, whose 8,000 workers are having to pay for a crisis they did not create by being forced to forego payment of their wages.
At least the number, if not the names, of the workers who were killed by police bullets will be remembered. And the murderers’ names will be remembered too, above all those of the Janata leaders and Ministers who sanctioned and justified the firing.
None of this will be forgotten because December 6 was the day of the most barbaric and cold-blooded butchery of Indian workers since Independence. The exact numbers of workers shot dead will probably never be known since the dead bodies flung into the Ganges and the Batwa rivers will never be traced or identified, nor those reduced to ashes in the boilers of the mill. The total it appears could easily be as high as 200. While officialdom blacked out the news completely, the ‘free’ press has remained silent.
What exactly happened at Swadeshi?We give below the police version and the facts reported by hundreds of workers, eyewitnesses and a few independent journalists.
Police claim: The firing was resorted to because the violent workers were killing the two gheraod officials -- production manager Sharma and chief accountant Iyenger; and they viciously attacked the police when they tried to intervene. Superintendent of Police, Rai is supposed to have been knocked unconscious.
The facts: The officers were gheraod in the compound of the mill, near a fountain, whereas their dead bodies were found in a small room upstairs. The three to four persons who were seen dragging the two officers upstairs had never before been seen in the mill premises. A newspaper of Kanpur has reported that Sharma was heard shouting to the police to stop firing and that the officers were alive after the firing had started. A weekly claimed that the officers were killed by the police afterwards to find a good reason for their own orgy of murder. The CID has so far failed to furnish any proof of the involvement of any worker in the killing of the officers. It is also believed that the two officers knew too much about the black deeds of the management which had hired some agents (the three to four persons referred to above) to do away with them.
According to the report of a number of newspapers, the Superintendent of Police Rai was not seriously injured. Sarin, the security officer of the mill, has stated to a magazine, that Rai “walked out of the mill on his own and was not carried”.
Police claim: The firing lasted “at the most five or ten minutes”. Only twelve workers were killed and some twenty-odd injured.
The facts: The firing started at 3:50 p.m. and ended around 5:30 p.m. At least 150 workers were killed and well over a hundred injured. Owners of shops bang opposite the mill gates testify to the police firing full blast till close to 5:30 p.m.
Workers who survived claim they were forced to load the dead bodies of their fellow workers on the trucks. They say they loaded “scores of bodies”.
(Five weeks after December 6, the authorities finally started making the due payments to the workers. 238 workers never came forward to collect their wages. Where are the 226 workers gone, allowing for the official admission of 12 deaths?)
The police fired inside the mills and also outside, indiscriminately and in all directions. An eight year-old boy named Pappu and a twelve year-old boy were shot. They were both standing in their bustee, a good 100 yards away from the mill gate. Signboards of shops and houses were punctured by bullet marks. A one kilometer stretch of road was completely blocked by the police for three days to wipe off all traces of their savagery. However, the shutters of Arvind Cloth Stores still carried bullet marks. A correspondent of Aaj, a daily of Kanpur, was beaten up and his camera snatched while he was trying to take photographs outside the mill on the evening of December 6.
All evidence forces us to the conclusion that the police claims are false and baseless and that the firing was not provoked by “workers’ violence”. The firing was also “illegal”, according to India Today, a prestigious magazine, not known to have left-wing sympathies. The police did not even go through the necessary steps of lathi-charge, tear-gassing, rubber bullets Sbefore opening fire. Where is the place for procedural niceties in the handbook of barbarism?
Why this cold-bloodied butchery of Swadeshi workers?The backdrop to the massacre is the present crisis of the textile industry in India in general, the particular ‘resolutions’ to this sought by the Jaipuria management of Swadeshi with the sympathy and support of both the Congress and the Janata regimes, the experience of the Kanpur workers (Kanpur is not unique in this respect) with their trade unions and the recent history of the workers’ growing militancy and attempts at self-organisation. The period of the Emergency was, of course, a general license to the capitalists to ‘discipline’ labor and to step up the rate of exploitation of workers. Jaipuria took a further step and, since August 1975, kept wages of workers pending for 45 to 60 days. While the wages of workers in this way became an additional amount of interest free capital for him, to the tune of Rs.500,000-600,000, workers were forced to live on borrowed money, with interest rates going up to 120% per annum in many cases.
Since September 1975, workers have had to gherao management no fewer than six times, simply to ensure payments of wages, long after they had been due. It may be mentioned in passing that in none of these cases was there any case of workers attempting murder of any official. In the course of these tortuous battles for mere survival, the workers came to lose faith in the conciliation machineries of the state on the one hand, and those trade unions of ‘theirs’ who proved incapable of breaking out of the bounds of ‘bourgeois legality’ to carry the movement forward.
The most important of these gheraos was that of October 26, 1977 of the mill secretary, Agarwal. The gherao lasted 53 hours, and was only lifted when the workers’ demand was conceded. While ostensibly a struggle for overdue wages, the real significance of the gherao lies in the exemplary class-unity of the workers and their militant combativity. On the day of the gherao, workers armed themselves with stones, brickbats, iron-rods and above all, chlorine gas cylinders. The mill was surrounded from all sides by the workers making it impossible for the armed police to carry on their job as usual, to break the gherao. The workers threatened to explode the gas cylinders if the police made any attempt to break up the gherao. For 53 long hours, the armed might of the state stood still, helpless, humiliated and paralyzed.
The response of the trade unions (most of the national unions of India have their units in Swadeshi) to this degree of class preparedness was to tell the workers to ‘call off the gherao’ warning them ‘not to provoke the state too much’. Workers of Swadeshi had had more than their share of the pathetic politics of negotiations, arbitrations, compromise, resolutions and delegations. On this occasion, they beat up the trade union leaders and chased them away. It is noteworthy that, alongside the gherao, the workers took charge of production in their own hands, and the organization of food supplies etc to the workers involved in the gherao.
This victory of the Swadeshi workers in October created history in Kanpur. In one single swoop of militant activity, workers had simultaneously challenged the capitalists, the state and their ‘own’ institutions of the past, now hopelessly enmeshed within the grooves of “responsible” unionism and “bourgeois legality”.
It is this demonstration of their capacity for self-organization and militant combativity, that the real roots of the December 6 massacre lie. The working class challenge had put the wheels of the state’s repressive apparatus in motion. Just a few days after October 26, the Home Secretary and the DIG (the police of UP) in an interview on Lucknow television, had warned that the government is prepared to take ‘definite steps’ to prevent the recurrence of the Swadeshi incident at ‘any cost’. On November 29, hired goons attempted to convert a minor quarrel between two workers into a communal riot to break the unity of the workers. The opportunity for ‘definite steps’ did present itself finally, to take ‘definite steps’ at a ‘counter-demonstration’ staged against the example of October. It is even held in certain sections that though a real anger of workers prompted the workers into the gherao of December 6, the gherao could well have been stage-managed to deal with the workers when they were totally unprepared. Because of a power breakdown in Kanpur, only 1,000 workers were in the mill that afternoon as against a workforce of 8,000.
(Since the massacre of December 6, the factory has been under an illegal lockout which continues till today...March 3rd. Even the ‘Socialist minister’, George Farnandes, is reported to have said that it would take at least one to two more months to start the mill again. After 15 January, wage dispersals were begun in the presence of hundreds of policemen armed with sub-machine guns inside the factory and the main road outside. Wages paid some ninety days after they were due have disappeared in the squaring of past loans. The situation of workers and their families is extremely precarious. As reported above, 238 workers never ‘reported’ to collect their wages for obvious reasons. A one-man commission set up by the government to enquire into the firing has come to the conclusion that the firing was totally justified. If anything, it is a bit critical of the Dy. Magistrate for not having ordered the firing a bit earlier. At the same time, a Citizen’s Rights Committee in Delhi has come out with its challenging once again, all the contentions of the officialdom. The Chief Minister of UP has continued to flatly refuse even the holding of a judicial enquiry.)
Janata ‘democracy’ and the working classUndoubtedly, the butchery of the Swadeshi workers has no parallels in the history of the Indian working class movement. But this naked repression cannot be seen as an exceptional case unique to Swadeshi. Nor is it simply an act of a trigger happy District Magistrate. It is only the most naked demonstration of the increasingly repressive attitude of the Janata regime to the working class movement. Ever since it got itself installed in power, it (Janata) has explicitly stated that gheraos will not be tolerated, agreements arrived at through gheraos will not be honored, definite steps will be taken to prevent the occurrence of gheraos, etc. Not only that, in the last eleven months, at the instigation of the Janata regime, police have opened fire even on ordinary strikes that were ‘lawful’ even in the eyes of ‘bourgeois law’. Dilli-Rajhara mines (M.P), IISCO and Bokaro (Bihar), Sahibabad and Lucknow (U.P.), Muland (Maharashtra) are some examples of this. Scores of workers have lost their lives and hundreds have been badly injured. In the villages, where agricultural labor is much less organized, the repressive machinery has been even more ruthless. According to official admission, in Bihar state alone, police have opened fire on agricultural workers eight times in which eleven people have lost their lives. Armed to their teeth, the landed interests in the countryside have declared an open war on the wage-earners.
It is a further demonstration of the ‘democratic character’ of the Janata regime that the repression is at its maximum precisely in these states where the Janata regime holds power. A ‘mini-MISA’(?) was introduced in M.P. to crush the impending struggle of the power supply workers. In the strike of 80,000 secondary school teachers of U.P., 23,000 have been imprisoned while some 5,000 have lost their jobs? A legislation to suppress the working class movement, ‘disguised’ as a law to deal with criminals is on the point of being passed in Bihar.
Riding the wave of mass discontent against the regime of the ‘garibi hatao’ (remove poverty) party, the Janata catapulted itself into power, posing as the ‘party of democracy’. It was necessary to give some meaning to its slogans. It restored the formal right to strike, scrapped the Compulsory Deposit Scheme and restored the 8-1/3% minimum bonus for one year. The Janata regime could afford to be ‘sympathetic’ to the working class movement so long as it could believe that the workers’ struggle is merely for ‘democracy’ and a ‘free’ atmosphere for its exploitation; that it is struggling merely to re-establish those terms of its wage slavery that obtained prior to the proclamation of the Emergency. It is becoming increasingly clear today that the struggle of workers is not for this or that condition of its wage-slavery, but the very uprooting of the system based on wage-slavery. The revolutionary struggle of the working class is not simply for capitalist democracy, but an end to capitalism and with it capitalist democracy based on exploitation.
The rhythm, with which the class character of the working class movement and its revolutionary aim becomes explicit, is the rhythm with which the ‘democratic character’ of the Janata regime stands exposed, its class character becomes clear too. However opposed the Janata regime may have been to the Congress, in its slogans of democracy, in the recent strike of the Maharastra State government employees, the Janata Prime Minister and the Congress Chief Minister confronted the struggle from a united platform. While the Maharashtra unit of the Janata, with its eyes fixed on the coming elections, supported the strike, its President was openly demanding that workers getting ‘fair’ wages should be prohibited from going on strike. Whatever wage can be ‘fair’ for the slavery under capital?
Today the language and the politics of the Janata regime are changing very rapidly. Today there is talk of banning strikes, maintaining provisions of the Preventive Detention Act, cutting of wages, etc.
For the ‘champions of democracy’, the constitution, the legislature and the industrial courts are the ultimate judges of the ‘legitimacy’ of the demands and the forms of struggle of the workers. For the working class every form of struggle is ‘legitimate’, including and in particular that which stands to put an end to the very ‘legitimacy’ of bourgeois society. It is equally clear to the working class that when it suits its interests, it takes little effort for the champions of capital to throw aside the veil of legality and democracy. How much does it take for the defenders of capital to reframe laws in the ‘parliament of the people’, after all? The imposition of the Emergency, the argument of retention of Preventive Detention by the present Home Minister, the massacre of the Kanpur workers, the introduction of the ‘mini-MISA’ in M.P., are just a few of the recent examples.
The ‘socialist left’ of the Janata PartyIt is worth asking why the ‘left’ within the Janata is silent in the fashion of the deaf monkeys of Gandhi, on this ruthless killing of the Swadeshi workers. The repression of the working class and agricultural laborers is increasing continuously and these Gandhian-socialists choose to remain silent? It is becoming clear that the Janata-left is today forced to play the same role vis-a-vis the working class movement that in the past the ‘progressive’ and the ‘socialist’ sections of the Congress did...churning out ‘left’ schemes for the exploitation of labor, while the ‘right’ continues its operations.
The ‘communist’ left and the working classMatters don’t end there only. Some questions need to be addressed to the established ‘Communist’ parties as well. Intervening in the debate in Parliament on the Swadeshi incident, Jyotirmoy Besu, of the C.P.M. claimed that the Swadeshi incident was the result of a deep-seated conspiracy on the part of agent provocateurs of a certain political party to defame the Home Minister and to defeat the Chief Minister of U.P. in the coming elections (Times of India, December 8, 1977). According to a worker of Swadeshi, a C.P.I. leader, Harbans Singh, in a public speech in Kanpur called the Swadeshi workers ungrateful. (In obvious reference to the October gherao and beating up of trade union leaders by workers.)
Of course, the bourgeoisie always understands the militancy of the working class as the result of a conspiracy of some ‘anti-social’ elements. Has the ‘revolutionary’ leader of the working class movement arrived at the same standpoint? If the demands of its class situation and experience in the context of the national and international crisis of capital, require that the working class movement break from the bounds of ‘legal’ forms of struggle to shift the struggle on to its own class terrain, and the leadership remain entrapped in the politics of the past, what do they expect from the workers? Naturally, initiatives by the class towards its class unity must appear to the erstwhile leaders as ‘disloyalty’.
Admittedly, the papers of these parties have denounced the killings in Swadeshi. The question is what is denunciation and resolutions going to amount to? Is it not clear that, if this ruthless treatment by the state of a section of the class goes unchallenged by the Kanpur workers and the Indian working class movement, it can only end in shifting the balance of class forces decisively in favor of capital and its representatives? How much more time is required for the realization to come that any illusion by the working class in any representative of capital, can only have the most disastrous consequences for the working class movement? To what end, and for how long, this alliance with this or that section of the bourgeoisie?
There is only one way out for the working class today. Against its division within dozens of unions, the establishment of its class unity and on the basis of this class unity, a militant challenge to the Congress, the Janata regime, and every other representative of the bourgeoisie. It is also becoming clearer in the last few months that if only discreetly and sporadically, sections are emerging within the class who are alive to the historic task facing their movement. The struggle of the Swadeshi workers of Kanpur was not the result of a “deep conspiracy” but an initial moment in its historic preparation for a revolutionary challenge to the entire bourgeois order. In this respect it is integrally a part of the new phase of the international movement of the working class. In this coming period, only those can play a revolutionary role who can grasp the inner dynamics and the revolutionary content of the class’ aspirations.
Workers of the world unite!
May 1968 -- first sign of the crisis and of the reawakening of the proletariat;
May 1978 -- deepening of the crisis and the rise of the class struggle.
This succinct formula, which summarizes the whole evolution of the last ten years, allows us both to affirm our own position and refute all the interpretations and scribblings of the left and leftists about the real meaning of May 1968. Because May 1968, far from being an accident of history, a gratuitous revolt, was in fact one of the first reactions of the working class to the reappearance of the crisis of capitalism.
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I. The events of May 1968Ten years ago, on 3 May, a meeting which drew a few hundred students took place in the inner courtyard of the Sorbonne in Paris. This meeting had been organized by the UNEF (student union) and the March 22 Movement formed at Nantes University a few weeks before. There was nothing very exciting in the theoretical speeches of the leftist ‘leaders’, but there was a persistent rumor: “Occident is going to attack us”. An extreme right wing movement thus gave the police an excuse to officially ‘intervene’ between the demonstrators. It was an attempt to put an end to the student agitation, which had been building up for several weeks at Nanterre. The students had a number of reasons for being fed up: among other things they were protesting against the university hierarchy and calling for greater individual and sexual freedom in the internal life of the university.
And then the ‘unthinkable’ happened: the agitation continued in the Latin Quarter for several days. Every evening it mounted a bit higher. Each meeting, each demonstration attracted more people than the previous one: ten thousand, thirty thousand, fifty thousand. The confrontations with the forces of order grew more and more violent. Young workers joined the battles in the streets, and despite the openly declared hostility of the PCF which heaped abuse upon the ‘enrages’ and the ‘German anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit’, the CGT -- in order to avoid being completely by-passed -- was obliged to ‘recognize’ the spontaneous general strike. Ten million strikers shook the torpor of the Fifth Republic and signaled the reawakening of the proletariat in a most remarkable way.
The strike unleashed on 14 May at Sud Aviation extended itself spontaneously and, right from the beginning, took on a radical character in comparison to the kinds of actions which had been imposed by the unions until then. The strike was near general in the key metal-working and transport sectors. The unions were left behind by a movement which by-passed their traditional policies and which straight away took on an unlimited and often rather imprecise character, as Informations Correspondance Ouvrieres (ICO) pointed out:
“At the base there were in fact no precise demands. Obviously everyone was for higher wages and a shorter working week. But the strikers, or at least a majority of them, were aware that these gains would be rather precarious: the best proof of this is that they never resolved on any joint action. The real motive for the strike was clearly summed up on the boards stuck to the gates of the small factories in the Parisian suburbs: “We’ve had enough!”. (‘The Generalized Strike in France: May/June 1968’, ICO, no.72, July 1968)
In the confrontations which took place, an important role was played by the unemployed, the ones the bourgeoisie called ‘declasses’. But these ‘declasses’, these waifs and strays, were in fact pure proletarians. The workers and unemployed who have already worked are not the only proletarians -- those who have been unable to get any work at all are also proletarian. They are products of the epoch of the decadence of capitalism, of overproduction and the over-productivity of men and machines. Massive youth unemployment is a symptom of the historical limits of capitalism, which is incapable of integrating the new generation into the process of production.
But the unions wasted no time in regaining control of this movement, which had erupted outside the unions, and to some extent against them, because it broke with the usual methods of struggle advocated by the unions. On Friday, 17 May the CGT distributed a leaflet which stated very clearly the limits it intended to put on its actions: on the one hand, traditional demands linked to a Matignon-type agreement and guaranteeing the existence of union sections in the enterprises; on the other hand, a change of government, ie elections. Although they had shown distrust of the unions before the strike, had started it over the head of the unions, and extended it on their own initiative, the workers nevertheless acted throughout the strike as though they found it quite normal that the union should be given the job of bringing it to its conclusion.
But despite its limits, the general strike gave an immense impetus to the worldwide revival of the class struggle. After an uninterrupted series of defeats following the crushing of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave, the convulsions of May-June 1968 were a decisive turning point, not only in France, but in Europe and the whole world. The strike not only shook the ruling establishment but also its most effective bastion, the one that is most difficult to throw down: the left and the unions.
II. A crisis of youth?Once the initial surprise and panic had died down, the bourgeoisie rushed to find an explanation for these disturbing events. It is hardly surprising that the left should use the phenomenon of the student agitation in order to exorcise the real specter looming up in front of a frightened bourgeoisie -- the proletariat. Or that these social convulsions should be reduced to an ideological quarrel between the generations. May 1968 is presented to us as the result of youthful disenchantment with the modern world. Thus the French sociologist Edgard Morin declared in an article published in Le Monde, 5 June 1968:
“First of all, this was a whirlpool stirred up by a struggle between the generations (the young against the senile, youth against adult society) but at the same time it provoked a class struggle, a revolt of the dominated, the workers. The struggle between young and old sounded the toxin for a struggle between workers and authority, (the bosses and the state).”
The same kind of explanation was given by the Liege anarchist paper Le Libertaire which said:
“If they reject structures and responsibilities, it is because they distrust an adult world in which democracy is betrayed. With them we’re seeing an extraordinary return to the utopian socialism of the nineteenth century.” (Le Libertaire, no.6, June 1968)
As for the International Communist Party, in its organ Le Proletaire of May 1968, it explained the causes of the movement as follows:
“A number of motives are mixed up in all this ferment -- among them the war in Vietnam and the demand for direct student participation in the ‘running of the university’, ie for reforms of the structure.”
Among the innumerable analyses published on the May events, some explain that the factory occupations which suddenly multiplied across the whole country were a response to the occupation of the Sorbonne by the students. The workers on strike were imitating the Parisian students. Others, like ICO, refer to the Fifth Republic’s political inability to understand the problems of youth:
“The weak link of French capitalism is undoubtedly its young people and the problems they are posing to a ruling class which can’t even perceive them, because it’s so imprisoned in a political practice in which promises take the place of action, and immobilism and respect for the power of money replace dynamic solutions.”
III. The integration of the working class?All these ‘analyses’ and explanations emphasize the spectacular role of the student movement and attempt to minimize the role of the working class, going so far as to deny that the working class has any revolutionary role to play:
“It is vital to say strongly and calmly that in May 1968 the industrial proletariat was not the revolutionary vanguard of society; it was its dumb rearguard.” (Coudray alias Cardan alias Castoriadis in La Breche)
This is no accident. The bourgeoisie, with its accredited ideologues and with the help of various fringe utopians, has always tried to mask the reality of capitalist exploitation. It’s always done everything it could to divert the working class from developing its consciousness, using all kinds of mystifications to demobilize and demoralize the proletariat. The attitudes and explanations which seek to negate the revolutionary nature of the proletariat have their source in the leftist intelligentsia, crushed and pulverized by the decline of world capitalism. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Stalinist sympathizers of the Institute for Social Research (Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno) began to lay down the framework used today by the ‘radical’ theoreticians who have been recuperated by the bourgeoisie; these ideologues claimed that ‘advanced’ or ‘modern’ capitalism had eliminated the differences between society’s economic base and its superstructure. Implicitly this notion means that the working class has been ‘bought off’ by a capitalism which itself suffers no fundamental economic contradictions. It follows that the contradictions of capitalism have moved from the base to the superstructure. Thus the critique of everyday life assumed a preponderant importance for these ideologues. Marcuse analyzed the various aspects of consumer society, explaining that although the citizen would be assured of comfort from now on, he would be denied any right to exercise freedom and responsibility, any ability to protest. In a word he would be deprived of nearly all his human dimensions, hence the title of his book One Dimensional Man. For Marcuse the student revolt was one of the first signs of man rebelling against a machine which negated him because it took away his freedom and any control over his own actions:
“This revolt isn’t directed against the misfortunes of this society, but against its benefits. It’s a new phenomenon unique to what can be called the opulent civilization. We must have no illusions, but neither must we be defeatist. It would be pointless to wait for the masses to join the movement and participate in the process. Things have always begun with a handful of intellectuals in revolt.”
Marcuse asserted that the consumer society was particularly adept at integrating rebellions. It produced ‘slaves’ who were all the more enslaved because they were not aware of their oppression. In particular the working class was no longer a revolutionary force because all its demands had been accepted and assimilated by society. The only ones who remained revolutionary were the intellectuals who had a critical enough spirit to see that the opulent society was a trap and the marginal elements who didn’t enjoy its ‘benefits’.
IV. The reaffirmation of the revolutionary nature of the proletariat“The proletariat is dead. Long live the Provotariat!” cried the young marginals of Amsterdam. A premature funeral. The May-June movement set things straight about the real nature of the proletariat: against the conception of a humanity acting on the basis of eternal and inexplicable ideals, the proletariat advances the notion of societies divided into economic classes and evolving as a result of economic struggles. The revolutionary project can only be defined by a class, ie by a part of society defined by its specific position within the relations of production. This class is the working class, “The antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle whose highest expression is total revolution”, wrote Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy. The specificity of the proletariat in relation to other classes in society lies in the fact that it represents the living force of associated labor. It is when society enters into an economic crisis that classes reveal their true historical nature. Because of its situation as a collective producer, the proletariat cannot envisage an individual solution to the economic crisis. Placed at the heart of production, creating the essential wealth of society, working in an associated manner, having only a collective relationship to the means of production, the industrial proletariat is the only class in society which can understand, desire and carry out the collectivization of production. The essence of capitalist social life is the struggle for surplus value between those who create it and those who consume it and use it. The motor of the proletariat’s activity is this battle against the extraction of surplus-value, against wage labor. As long as capital exists, the entire activity of the proletariat is and will remain determined by the fundamental antagonism between itself and capital. Communism is a real possibility because of the objective contradictions of the capitalist system and because they correspond to the movement of the proletariat. Concrete historical conditions determine which of these possibilities are real ones in a given period, although the choice between the various objective conditions always depends on the consciousness, will and activity of the workers.
V. The student movementIt’s obvious that May 1968 was marked by the decomposition of many of the values of the ruling ideology, but this ‘cultural’ revolt was not the cause of the conflict. In his Preface to a Critique of Political Economy Marx showed that:
“With the change of the economic foundation the entire, immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic -- in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”
All the expressions of ideological crisis have their roots in the economic crisis, not the other way round. It is the state of crisis which indicates the real direction things are taking.
The student movement was certainly an expression of the general decomposition of bourgeois ideology, the warning signal of a much deeper social movement, but precisely because of the place the university and its component elements occupy in the system of production, they only rarely have any connection with the class struggle. It would be wrong to think that student riots with barricades and battles with the police are a recent discovery. Ever since the Middle Ages the history of all the great European universities has been marked by violent incidents and an intense political activity. The boycott of courses was ‘invented’ eight centuries ago. In the twelfth century, students reproached their teachers with having not moved forward since the days of Charlemagne, just as the rebels of 1968 denounced a university which was still based on the model set up by Napoleon. A campus before the name existed, the student city of Corbeil, which grouped together 3,000 students outside Paris, was at the beginning of a phenomenon of ‘contestation’ in 1104. What is more, when you look back in history, you notice that the students of today have not gone as far as some of their predecessors. In 1893, for example, the students attacked the Police Prefecture. The students, however, are not a class, not even a social stratum. Their movement is not a class movement. The demands put forward by the students are linked to the existence of the bourgeois division of labor and to capitalist society in general. This movement can never have a historical and economic vision of the objective development of the contradictions of society. Some of the German or French students believed that they could open the door to the revolutions of the twentieth century by imitating the communes and barricades of the nineteenth century. But the student revolt put most of its hopes on the ‘radical’ models of state capitalism, from Cuba to Chile, from China to Portugal, and in any case quickly exhausted itself. The already existing leftist sects, Trotskyist, Maoist or anarchist, found their ranks temporarily swollen with new militants, the anti-authoritarians of yesterday, mystified or insecure about their inability to realize their petty bourgeois dreams. At the extremes of isolation and despair, the most marginal elements went into terrorism.
May 1968 demonstrated the intimate relationship between social conflicts and economic deterioration, between the decomposition of the ruling ideology and the crisis of the economy. In this sense, May 1968 was not an unexpected occurrence, a sort of historical accident. The strikes and riots were simply a response to the first symptoms of the new phase of the world capitalist crisis.
VI. The crisis of capitalismMarx explained how capital could only survive by periodically destroying the excess capital created in periods of overproduction, in order to rejuvenate itself and attain still higher rates of expansion: “however these catastrophes which regularly regenerate capitalism are repeated on an ever-greater scale and end up provoking the violent overthrow of the system.” In the massive destruction undertaken with the aim of once more reconstructing, capitalism discovers a dangerous, provisional, but temporarily effective solution to the problem of the market. Thus, in World War I, there wasn’t ‘enough’ destruction: military operations directly affected an industrial sector which represented less than a tenth of world production. The self-destruction of Europe during World War I was accompanied by a growth of 15 per cent in American production. But by 1929 world capitalism was again plunged into crisis. As if the lesson had been learned, the destruction in the Second World War was much more intense and extensive. But still, when the period of reconstruction after World War II began, capitalism had long since ceased to grow through “brusque expansionist thrusts”. For decades, the productivity of labor had grown too quickly to be contained within capitalist relations of production. For thirty years the productive forces had been crashing repeatedly and with increasing violence against the “fetters which hold back their development”, savagely devastating the whole of society. Only the misery and barbarism of these years of growing depression could explain the dazzling economic growth which took place in the reconstruction period.
This growth certainly dazzled those who saw themselves as being “at the highest level of revolutionary consciousness”, the Situationist International. In a work published in 1969, ‘Enrages and Situationists in the Occupation Movement’, the SI wrote “no tendency towards economic crisis was in sight ... the revolutionary upsurge did not come out of an economic crisis ... what was attacked frontally in May was the capitalist economy functioning well.”
At the end of 1945, US commodities allowed production in Europe to start up again, part of Europe’s debts being paid by yielding its enterprises to American companies. But after 1955? The USA stopped its ‘free’ aid, the US balance of trade was positive whereas, for the majority of the other countries, it was negative. American capital continued to be invested more rapidly in Europe than in the rest of the world, which steadied the balance of payments in these countries, but which soon put the US balance of payments into disequilibrium. This situation led to the growing indebtedness of the American treasury, while the dollars invested in Europe or the rest of the world left the world in debt to the US. In the early 1960s this external debt went above the gold reserves of the American treasury, but the non-covering of the dollar wasn’t enough to put the USA in difficulty as long as the other countries were still in debt to the US. The US could thus continue to appropriate the capital of the rest of the world while paying in paper. This situation was reversed with the end of reconstruction in the European countries. This was expressed by the ability of the European economies to throw onto the world market products that could compete with American products. Towards the mid-sixties the commercial balance of most of the formerly assisted countries grew positive whereas, after 1964, the US trade balance deteriorated more and more. As soon as the reconstruction of the European countries was completed, the productive apparatus showed itself to be too prolific in the face of a saturated world market; the national bourgeoisies were forced to increase the exploitation of their proletariats in order to cope with the exacerbation of international competition.
France didn’t escape this situation and in 1967 the French economy had to go through a capitalist restructuration: rationalization, improved productivity, which could only lead to a growth in unemployment. Thus, at the beginning of 1968, unemployment went beyond the 500,000 mark. Partial unemployment affected numerous factories and provoked a reaction from the workers. A number of strikes broke out, limited and contained by the unions, but expressing a definite malaise (see ICO). The threat of unemployment was particularly strong in the generation produced in the post-war demographic explosion.
In connection with this unemployment, the bosses were attempting to lower workers’ living standards. The bourgeoisie and its government mounted an attack on living and working conditions. At this time, France, with its gold reserves, still occupied a privileged position in the world exchequer, but in the general asphyxia that was affecting the world economy, this position was soon lost, and the French bourgeoisie had to go through some spectacular political changes. Thus, in all the industrial countries, in Europe as well as in the US and Russia, unemployment was growing imperceptibly, the economic perspective was becoming more somber, international competition was becoming more acute. At the end of 1967 Britain had to devalue the pound in order to make its products more competitive. But this measure turned to nothing as a whole series of other countries devalued their currencies. The austerity measures imposed by the Labor government of the day were particularly severe: massive reduction in public expenditure, withdrawal of British troops from Asia, a wage freeze, the first protectionist measures. The US, the main victim of the European offensive, reacted strongly, and at the beginning of January 1968, Johnson announced a series of economic measures; and in March 1968, in response to the devaluation of rival currencies, the dollar too fell. This was the economic situation prior to May 1968. It was not yet an open economic crisis but the signs were there for those who wanted to understand the real situation.
VII. The lessons of May 1968We can thus reaffirm that the events of May 1968 mere the result of the reemergence of the economic crisis of capitalism. Instead of making an apology for May 1968, revolutionaries must be able to draw the lessons from these events, emphasizing both its strengths and weaknesses. Although it was the first response of the proletariat to the crisis, May 1968 was not a revolutionary situation. Among its many weaknesses was the total inexperience of the workers in struggle. Although there was a real determination in the struggle, due essentially to the fact that this was a proletariat which had not gone through the defeats of the counter-revolution and the Second World War, the victory of the bourgeoisie was facilitated by the workers’ lack of experience.
The spontaneous movement of the class quickly became immobilized, allowing time for the unions to regain control, and for the bourgeoisie, once its fear had subsided, to go onto the offensive. Paradoxically, in appearance at least, the strikers themselves offered the bourgeoisie the means for regaining control, by occupying the factories. The unions managed to transform the occupations from a clumsy, incomplete expression of the radicalization of the workers into a weapon for defending law and order. What did the strikers want to do when they occupied the factories? First and foremost, to ensure that the strike would be total, to show their determination through mass action, and thus to avoid dispersal. But by skillfully exploiting the corporative limitations of the movement -- expressed precisely by the workers shutting themselves up in their enterprises -- the unions deliberately imprisoned the workers in the factories, thus ensuring that a near-general movement remained fragmented and divided. The streets were forbidden to the workers, as were contacts with other enterprises.
Fifty years of organic break with the wave of struggles in the 192Os, and the absence of a clear, coherent revolutionary minority capable of synthesizing the lessons of the past, weighed heavily on the balance of class forces. But despite the limitations of the proletariat’s actions in May 1968, this expression of proletarian life was enough to topple all the Marcusian theories. The post-1968 period saw the disintegration of the modernist school into various sects who have since wandered into the void. However, reactionary ideas die hard, and the bourgeoisie has been obliged to carry on its work of mystification with more appropriate ideologues.
To state baldly that the proletariat is integrated into capitalism when millions of workers are on strike doesn’t get you very far. But it’s still important for the bourgeoisie to demoralize the working class, to distort the historical significance of its activity, to obscure the relationship between the working class and its vanguard.
VIII. The post-May confusionsSince the fundamental weapons of the proletariat in its struggle against capitalism are its consciousness and its self-organization, in its decisive confrontation with capital the working class expresses this dual necessity, on the one hand through its general, unitary organs, the workers’ councils, and on the other hand through political organizations, proletarian parties, which regroup the most advanced elements of the class and which have the task of generalizing and deepening the development of consciousness, of which they themselves are an expression. In trying to deal with this question, we have seen the appearance of two theories which express a lack of confidence in the revolutionary action of the proletariat: Leninism and autonomism. In both these conceptions, the class and its political organizations are two independent entities, external to one another.
Leninism proclaims that the class is ‘trade unionist’ and gives primacy to the party, whose main function is to struggle against this autonomy or spontaneity and thus to direct the class. For the autonomists, any attempt by the most conscious elements of the class to form organizations distinct from the unitary organs of the class necessarily leads to the setting up of an organization external to the class and its interests. Henri Simon, former leading light of ICO, clearly expressed this position in a work called ‘The New Movement’:
“The appearance of the autonomous movement has led to the evolution of the concept of the party. In former times, the Party, as a ‘leadership’ saw itself as the revolutionary vanguard, identifying itself with the proletariat. It saw itself as a ‘conscious fraction’ of the proletariat, who had to play a determining role in the raising of ‘class consciousness’, the high level of which would be the essential sign of the formation of the proletariat as a class. The modern heirs of the Party are well aware of the difficulty of maintaining such a position; so they entrust the party or the group with the very precise mission of making good what they consider to be any deficiencies in working class activity. This gives rise to groups specialized in intervention, liaison, exemplary action, theoretical explanation, etc. But even these ‘groups’ can no longer exercise the hierarchical function of specialists in the general movement of struggle. The New Movement, that of workers and others in struggle, considers all these elements, the old groups like the new, to be of exactly equal importance as their own actions. They take what they can borrow from those who come to them and reject what does not suit them. Theory and practice appear now to be no more than one and the same element in the revolutionary process -- neither can precede nor dominate the other. No one political group has thus an essential role to play.” (Liaisons, no.26, December 1974. Available in English in Solidarity Pamphlet, no.51. )
The autonomy of the working class has nothing to do with the workers rejecting all parties and political organizations, no matter where they come from, or with the autonomy of each fraction of the working class (by factory, neighborhood, region or nation) from the other -- in a word, with federalism. Against those conceptions, we insist on the necessarily unitary, worldwide, and centralized character of the working class movement. At the same time, the incessant effort of the working class to become conscious of itself gives rise to political organizations which regroup its most advanced elements. These organizations are an active factor in the deepening, the generalization, and the homogenization of consciousness within the class. While the autonomy of the proletariat, ie its independence from the other classes in society, is expressed through its own general, unitary organs, the workers’ councils, it is also expressed on the political, programmatic level through the struggle against the ideological influence of other classes. The lessons of half a century of experience since the 1917-23 revolutionary wave are clear: the unitary organs of the class can only exist in a permanent way in moments of revolutionary struggle. They then regroup the entire class and are the organs through which the proletariat seizes power. Outside of such periods, in the various struggles of resistance against exploitation, the unitary organs formed by the working class -- strike committees based on general assemblies -- can only exist during the struggles themselves. On the other hand, the political organizations of the class, since they are expressions of the continuing effort of the class to develop its consciousness, can exist in the different phases of the struggle. The basis of their existence is necessarily an elaborated and coherent program, the fruit of the whole experience of the class. This question is completely evaded by Leninism which sees only one motor for the proletariat’s action: the party. A party which, whatever the circumstances, can set the proletariat in motion. The Trotskyist leader Krivine summed up this view when he wrote:
“For the revolutionary explosion of May 1968 to have succeeded, all that was lacking was a well-implanted revolutionary organization, recognized by the mass of workers. Lenin saw this as the indispensable subjective condition for the maturation of the revolutionary crisis. Such an organization would have ensured that all the struggles converged and extended themselves. It would have put forward slogans that could have advanced the struggle, such as the unlimited general strike, leading inevitably to slogans calling for the seizure of political power. If May 1968 didn’t succeed, if it was only a ‘general rehearsal’, it is precisely because such a party didn’t exist ...”
The same idea is put forward by the Bordigists of Programme Communiste who in their manifesto on the general strike distributed in June 1968 called on the proletariat to organize itself under the banner of the party and to create red trade unions:
“This will prepare the workers, under the leadership of the world communist party, by chasing from their own ranks the various prophets of pacifism, reformism and democratism, by impregnating the union organizations with communist ideology and making them transmission belts for the organ of political direction -- the party ...”
These ideas introduce a qualitative separation into the class struggle of the proletariat: the ‘political’ struggle on the one hand, which is external to the ‘economic’ struggle on the other hand. The movement from economic to political can only take place through the mediation of the party. In this conception the struggle of the proletariat can only develop through the ideology and initiative of the party. For the defenders of this position, it’s logical to say that the proletariat can only express itself when the party exists: thus Battaglia Comunista denies the proletarian character of the May-June strikes because they were not led by the Party! (See Texts and Proceedings of the International Conference, Milan, 1977, pp. 56-58. )
Thus, between the ‘economic’ and ‘political’ class struggle, between the defense of class interests and the revolution, there is no continuity, it is not one movement which transforms itself by radicalizing itself, but there is only the mediation provided by the party. Instead of seeing the revolutionary movement as a process of breaking from the forms of the capitalist economy, Leninism sees these forms as the historic, material basis for socialism, which is seen to be in continuity with them.
Against these conceptions, we insist that the proletariat makes its history within the limits imposed by the economic and social development of a given situation, within definite conditions; but it is still the proletariat which makes its history, and it does this through its praxis which is the dialectical link between past and future, and which is both cause and effect of the historical process. There is thus an objectivity, an obligation, in the action of the class, not an idealistic movement. The struggle for better working conditions (wages and hours) is an immediate necessity for the working class. The struggle of the proletariat, as we understand it, is first of all a struggle to resist the effects of the accumulation of capital, an attempt to prevent the depreciation of labor power brought about by capitalist development. The act of resisting capitalist exploitation is the basis, the motor-force, for the revolutionary action of the working class. But what gives this struggle all its real importance, which goes beyond the specific demands of the struggle, is the new reality which it can inaugurate: during the course of the resistance against exploitation we see the appearance of association, which momentarily puts an end to division and atomization and annuls the effects of competition. The unfolding dynamic of the struggle is what opens the way to the confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat on a political level. It is thus a question of extending, prolonging, organizing this real movement towards communism. This is the task of the organs which are created when the class acts in a collective manner -- allowing for the association of workers, strengthening solidarity. This is a vital element in the development of proletarian class consciousness.
Revolutionaries intervene in this process in order to clarify the meaning of the struggle, putting forward the general goals of the movement and helping it to go beyond partial demands; they participate in the organizations of the class, defending the most adequate forms of action for extending the movement. As the Communist Manifesto says, the communists are the most resolute elements in the struggle, and have a decisive role to play through the clarification they bring to the movement, but this has nothing to do with any power of decision, which for us remains in the hands of the unitary organs of the class. Revolutionaries, a product of the class movement, are the most conscious elements of the class, and their consciousness is constantly strengthened by the class movement; at the same time they accelerate the maturation of this movement through the theoretical clarification they carry out.
Conclusions
Although the defeat of the proletarian movements of the late sixties and early seventies has allowed the bourgeoisie to regain the initiative through the unions and parties of the left, and thus to bring the world’s attention to the capitalist solution to the crisis -- a new world war -- it remains the case that the working class has not been crushed, and that the class movements which have developed all over the world are the result of the perspective opened up by May 1968: the response of the working class to the increasingly severe crisis of capitalism; the inevitable deepening of the crisis; the radicalization of the proletarian struggle through periods of advance and retreat; the culmination of all this in the revolutionary upsurge of the working class.
FD
The development of class consciousness, which is absolutely indispensable to the emancipation of the proletariat, is a constant and unceasing process. It is determined by the social being of the proletariat, the class which alone bears within it the resolution of the insoluble contradictions of capitalism, the last of all class-divided societies. The historic task of forever doing away with the class antagonisms that rend human society can only be accomplished by the workers themselves. The consciousness of this task can’t be ‘imported’ or ‘inculcated’ into the proletariat from outside; it is the product of its own being, its own existence. It is the economic, social, and political situation of the proletariat in society which determines its practical activity and its historic struggle.
This incessant movement towards the development of consciousness is expressed by the proletariat’s effort to organize itself, and through the formation of political groups within the class, culminating in the constitution of the party.
It is this question, the constitution of the party, which is dealt with in a very long article in Programme Communiste, the theoretical organ of the International Communist Party. The article is entitled ‘On the Road to the Compact and Powerful Party of Tomorrow’ and can be found in Programme Communiste, no.76, March 1978. We should say first of all that the habitually bombastic language of the Bordigists, the turns and detours through numerous pages leading back to the point of departure, the kicking of open doors, the repetition of assertions instead of argumentation, make it extremely difficult to get to the real questions at issue. The technique of proving an assertion by citing one’s own previous assertions, which are themselves based on previous assertions -- and so on till you get dizzy -- can of course prove a continuity of assertion but it can never be a valid method of demonstration. In these circumstances, and despite our firm desire to deal with the assertions which express the Bordigist position on the party -- which we consider erroneous and which have to be fought – it’s impossible to completely avoid going from the assertions in this article to a number of other problems.
A propos the Italian Fraction of the Communist LeftIt must come as quite a surprise to the majority of Programme Communiste’s readers, and probably to the majority of the ICP’s own members, to learn all of a sudden that “despite its objective (?) limitations, the ‘Left Fraction in exile’ is part of the history” of the Italian Left, and is even referred to as “our Fraction in exile between 1928 and 1940” (Programme Communiste, no.76). On this point, Programme Communiste has hitherto accustomed us to its great reserve, its marked silence, and even its reproachful attitude towards the Fraction. How else are we to understand the fact that, in over thirty years of existence, the ICP -- which has spared no effort to reproduce the texts of the Left from 1920-26 in its papers, theoretical journals, pamphlets, and books -- has not found the time or the means to publish a single text by the Fraction, which published the Bulletin d’Information, the journal Bilan, the paper Prometeo, the bulletin Il Seme and many other texts? It’s not simply a matter of chance that Programme Communiste contains no reference to or mention of the political positions defended by ‘our’ Fraction, that it never quotes from Bilan. And certain comrades of the ICP, having vaguely heard people talking about Bilan, have argued that the Party no longer claims any continuity with the activity of the Fraction and the writings of Bilan, while other comrades of the Party don’t even know Bilan ever existed.
Today the ICP has suddenly discovered the ‘merit of our Fraction’, a very limited merit, it’s true, but enough for the ICP to at least raise its hat. Why today? Is it because the gap in organic continuity (a phrase much appreciated by the ICP) between 1926 and 1952 has become a bit embarrassing and it’s now time to plug the gap as best they can, or is it because the ICC has talked so much about the Fraction that it has become impossible to keep silent about it any longer? And why situate the Fraction between 1928 and 1940 when it didn’t dissolve (mistakenly) until 1945 in order to be integrated into the ‘Party’ which had finally been reconstituted in Italy? (This was after the Fraction had denounced the Italian Anti-Fascist Committee in Brussels and expelled its promoter Vercesi -- the same Vercesi who, without any discussion, was admitted into the ICP, and even into its leadership.) Is it out of ignorance or is it because, during the war, the Fraction developed even further the orientation begun by Bilan before the war -- notably on the Russian question and the question of the state and the party -- a development which would highlight even more clearly the distance between Programme Communiste and the positions defended by the Fraction? In any case, the ‘merit’ verbally accorded to the Fraction is rapidly counterbalanced by severe criticisms:
“The impossibility of breaking out of what might be called the subjective circle (?!) of the counter-revolution led the Fraction into certain weaknesses, for example on the national and colonial question, or on the question of Russia, not so much in the appreciation of what it became, but in the search for a way of exercising the dictatorship in a way different from the Bolsheviks ... a way that would, in the future, prevent a repetition of the catastrophe of 1926-27; and also, to a certain extent, on the question of the Party or the International ... (the Fraction) also wanted to wait for the return of a mass confrontation with the forces of the enemy before reconstituting the Party.”
If the ability to remain loyal to the revolutionary foundations of Marxism in a period of defeat is unquestionably meritable, what was particularly meritable about the Fraction, what distinguished it from other groups of the period, was precisely what Programme calls its ‘weaknesses’. As the Fraction put it:
“The framework of the new parties of the proletariat can only arise from the profound understanding of the cause of defeats. And this understanding can endure neither censorship not ostracism.” (‘Introduction’, Bilan no.1, p.3)
For those who think that the communist program is something ‘complete and invariable’, who have transformed Marxism into a dogma and Lenin into an untouchable prophet, the fact that the Fraction dared (Brr, it sends chills up your spine!) to investigate in the light of reality, not the foundations of Marxism, but the political and programmatic positions of the Bolshevik party and the Communist International -- this goes beyond the bounds of toleration. To say that the re-examination -- within the framework of communist theory and the communist movement -- of political positions which played a part in past defeats “can endure neither censorship nor ostracism” is the worst kind of heresy, a ‘weakness’ as Programme would call it.
The great merit of the Fraction, in addition to its loyalty to Marxism and the positions it took up on the most important questions of the day -- against the united front advocated by Trotsky, against the popular fronts, against the infamous mystification of anti-fascism, against collaboration in and support for the war in Spain; its great merit was to have dared to break with the method which had triumphed in the revolutionary movement, the method which transformed theory into dogma, principles into taboos, and stifled all political life. Its merit was to have called revolutionaries to debate and discuss, which led it not to ‘weaknesses’ but to being able to make a rich contribution to the revolutionary project.
The Fraction, with all the firmness it had in its convictions, was modest enough not to claim that it had resolved all problems and responded to all questions:
“In beginning the publication of this bulletin, our Fraction doesn’t believe that it is presenting definitive solutions to the terrible problems posed to the proletariats of all countries.” (Bilan, no.1)
And even when it was convinced that it had responded to a question, it didn’t demand that others simply ‘recognize’ these responses, but called on them to examine them, confront them, discuss them:
“It (the Fraction) does not intend to appeal to its political precedents to demand that everyone accept the solutions to the present situation which it advocates. On the contrary, it calls upon revolutionaries to subject the positions and basic political documents which it defends to the test of events.” (Ibid) And, in the same spirit, it wrote:
“Our Fraction would have preferred this work (the publication of Bilan) to have been carried out by an international organism, because we are convinced of the necessity for political confrontations between those groups who represent the proletarian class in various countries.”
In order to appreciate fully the enormous distance between the Fraction’s idea of the relationship that should exist between communist groups, and the idea held by the Bordigist party, it’s enough to compare the above quote from Bilan with a quote from Programme. Thus speaking about their own group which is weighed down with the title of ‘Party’, Programme Communiste writes:
“Is this just a ‘nucleus of the Party’? Certainly it is if one compares it to the ‘compact and powerful party of tomorrow’. But it is a party. It can only grow on its own basis, and not through the ‘confrontation’ of different points of view, but through battling against those ideas which appear to be ‘close’.” (emphasis by Programme) (Programme Communiste, no.76, p.14)
As a spokesman of the ICP said recently at a public meeting of Revolution Internationale in Paris:
“We haven’t come here to discuss with you or confront our point of view with yours, but simply to put forward our position. We come to your meeting in the same way as we do to a meeting of the Stalinist party.”
Such an attitude isn’t based on firmness of conviction, but on complacency and arrogance. The so-called ‘complete and invariant program’ of which the Bordigists claim to be the heirs and guardians is simply a cover for the most profound megalomania.
The more a Bordigist is beset by doubts and incomprehensions, the less firm are his convictions; and so he feels the need more than ever to rise up from his bed in the morning, kneel with his forehead to the ground, beat his chest and invoke the litanies of Islam “Allah is the only God and Mohammed is his prophet”. Or as Bordiga said somewhere “To be a member of the Party, it’s not necessary that everyone understands and is convinced, it’s enough to believe and obey the Party.”
This is not the place to go into the history of the Fraction, its merits and its faults, the validity and errors in its positions. As it said itself, it was often doing no more than groping for clarity, but its contribution was all the greater because it was a living political body, which dared to open up debate, to confront its positions with those of others; because it wasn’t a sclerotic and megalomaniac sect like the Bordigist ‘Party’. So whereas the Fraction could rightly claim continuity with the Italian Left, the Bordigist party is committing a gross abuse by talking about ‘our Fraction in exile’.
The constitution of the PartyThe indispensable party of the proletariat is constituted on the solid foundations of a coherent program, of clear principles, of a general orientation which allows it to give a detailed response to the political problems emerging from the class struggle. This has nothing in common with the mythical ‘complete, immutable, invariant Program’ of the Bordigists. “In each period, we see that the possibility of constituting the party is determined on the basis of previous experience and the new problems which the proletariat has to face” (Bilan, no.1, p.15).
What is true for the program is equally true for the living political forces which physically constitute the party. The party is not, of course, a conglomeration of all sorts of groups and heterogeneous political tendencies. But neither is it the ‘monolithic bloc’ the Bordigists talk about and which has never existed except in their own fantasies:
“In each period where the conditions exist for the constitution of the party, for the proletariat to organize itself as a class, the party is founded on the following two elements: 1. An awareness of the most advanced position the proletariat has to take up, an understanding of the new paths it has to follow; 2. the increasing demarcation of the forces which are capable of acting for the proletarian revolution.” (Bilan, no.1)
To recognize oneself and none other, on principle and a priori, as the only force acting for the revolution, isn’t a sign of revolutionary firmness; it’s the attitude of a sect.
Describing the conditions in which the 1st International was founded, Engels wrote:
“The very events and vicissitudes of the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to men’s minds the insufficiency of their various favorite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete insight into the true conditions of working class emancipation.” (Engels, ‘Preface to the English Edition of the Communist Manifesto’, 1888)
Reality has nothing to do with the mirror in front of which the Bordigist ‘Party’ spends most of its time and which reveals nothing except its own image. The reality behind the constitution of the party throughout the history of the workers’ movement has been the simultaneous convergence and demarcation of the forces capable of acting for the revolution; otherwise we’d have to conclude that there has never existed any party except the Bordigist party. A few examples: the Communist League which was joined by Marx, Engels, and their friends was the old League of the Just, and was made up of various groups in Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium and England after the elimination of the Weitling tendency. The 1st International involved both the elimination of socialists like Louis Blanc and Mazzini and the convergence of other currents; the IInd International was based on the elimination of the anarchists and the regroupment of the Marxist Social Democratic parties; the IIIrd International came after the elimination of the Social Democrats and regrouped the revolutionary communist currents. It was the same with the Social Democratic party in Germany which came out of the party of Eisenach and the party of Lassalle; and with the Socialist Party in France which emerged out of the party of Guesde and Lafargue and the party of Jaures; same again with the Social Democratic party in Russia, which arose on the basis of the convergence of groups that had been isolated and dispersed all over the towns and regions of Russia, but which also involved the elimination of the Struve tendency. We could give many more examples of the constitution of the party in history, showing the same phenomenon of elimination and convergence. The Communist Party of Italy itself was constituted around the Abstentionist Fraction of Bordiga and Gramsci’s group after the elimination of Serati’s maximalists.
There are no criteria which are absolutely valid and identical in all periods. The whole point is to know how, in each period, to clearly define what are the political criteria for convergence, and what are the criteria for demarcation. This is precisely what the Bordigist ‘Party’ doesn’t know; in fact this party was constituted without criteria and through a vague amalgam of forces: the party constituted in the North of Italy, groups from the South which included elements from the partisans, the Vercesi tendency in the Anti-Fascist Committee in Brussels, the minority expelled from the Fraction in 1936 for its participation in the Republican militias during the war in Spain, and the Fraction which had been prematurely dissolved in 1945. As we can see, Programme Communiste is in a particularly good position to talk about intransigence and organic continuity and to give lessons about revolutionary firmness and purity! Its denigration of any attempt at confrontation and debate between revolutionary communist groups isn’t based on firmness of principles or even on political myopia, but simply on a concern to safeguard its own little chapel.
What’s more, this ‘terrible’ -- in fact purely verbal -- intransigence of the Bordigists against any confrontation and (a fortiori) against any regroupment, which they denounce in advance and without any criteria as a confusionist enterprise, varies (sorry about the invariance) according to the moment and their own convenience. Thus in 1949, they launched an “appeal for the international reorganization of the revolutionary Marxist movement”, an appeal repeated in 1952 and 1957, in which we find the following:
“In accordance with the Marxist viewpoint, the communists of the Italian Left today address an appeal to the revolutionary workers’ groups of all countries. They invite them to retrace a long and difficult route and to regroup themselves on an international and strictly class basis...”1
But it is vital to be able to distinguish between the Bordigist party and any other organization; one would be making a huge mistake to think that what’s permissible for the party, which has exclusive guardianship over the complete and immutable program, could be permissible for a purely mortal organization of revolutionaries. The party hath its reasons which reason knows not, and cannot know. When the Bordigists call for an ‘international assembly’, this is solid gold, but when other revolutionary organizations call for a simple international conference for contact and discussion, this is obviously the worst kind of dross; it’s the ‘merchandizing of principles’, a confusionist enterprise. But isn’t it really because the Bordigists are now more than ever stuck in their sclerosis and are afraid of confronting their uncertain positions with the living revolutionary currents which are evolving today; isn’t that the reason why they would rather turn in on themselves and remain isolated?
It would be worthwhile to recall the criteria put forward for this ‘assembly’ and reaffirmed again in the recent article (mentioned in the beginning of this article):
“The Internationalist Communist Party proposes to comrades of all countries the following basic principles and postulates:
1. Reaffirmation of the weapons of the proletarian revolution: violence, dictatorship, terror ...
2. Complete rupture with the tradition of war alliances, partisan fronts, and ‘national liberations’ ...
3. Historical negation of pacifism, federalism between states and ‘national defense’ ...
4. Condemnation of common social programs and political fronts with non-wage earning classes ...
5. Proclamation of the capitalist character of the Russian social structure (“Power has passed to the hands of a hybrid and shapeless coalition of internal interests of the lower and upper middle classes, semi-independent businessmen and the international capitalist classes”?:?) ...
6. Conclusion: disavowal of any support for Russian imperial militarism, categorical defeatism against that of America ...”
We have cited the six chapter headings, which are followed by commentaries developing the points, too long to be reproduced here. We don’t want to discuss these points in detail now, even though their formulation leaves a lot to be desired, notably on terror as a fundamental weapon of the revolution2, or this subtle nuance in the conclusion about the attitude towards America (defeatism) and Russia (disavowal), or this curious -- to say the least -- definition of the power in Russia, which isn’t called plain state capitalism but a “hybrid coalition of interests of the lower middle classes ... and the international capitalist classes”. We could also mention the explicit absence of other points in these criteria, in particular the defense of the proletarian character of October or the necessity for the class party. What interests us here is emphasizing that these criteria do constitute a serious basis, if not for an immediate ‘assembly’, then at least for contact and discussion between existing revolutionary groups. This is the orientation that the Fraction used to follow, and it’s one we are carrying on with today: it was the basis for last year’s international meeting in Milan.
But the Bordigists, eclipsed by their invariance, don’t need anything of the sort today... because they’ve already constituted the party (“miniscule but still a party”).
But wasn’t this Appeal signed by the ICP at the time, naive readers will ask? Yes ... but this was still only the Internationalist Communist Party and not yet the International Communist Party -- a subtle nuance. But wasn’t this International Communist Party an integral part of the Internationalist Communist Party of the time, didn’t it even claim to be its majority? Yes, ... but it was only just completing its constitution; another nuance. But doesn’t it refer to this Appeal as a text of the Party today? Yes, ... but ... but ... but ...
While we are on this point, can we be told, once and for all, since when has this “valiant miniscule party” existed? Today -- though it’s not clear why – it’s a la mode to say that the party was only constituted in 1952 and the article cited above insists on this point3. However the article also cites “fundamental texts” from 1946 -- the Platform dates from 1945 and other crucial texts from 1948, 1949 and 1951. These texts, all of them as ‘fundamental’ as the other, where do they come from exactly? From a Party, a group, a fraction, a nucleus, an embryo?
In reality, the ICP was constituted in 1943, after the fall of Mussolini, in the North of Italy. It was ‘reconstituted’ a second time in 1945 after the ‘liberation’ from German occupation in the North, which allowed the groups which had meanwhile been constituted in the South to integrate themselves into the organization which existed in the North. It was in order to integrate itself into this party that the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left almost unanimously decided to dissolve itself. This dissolution as well as the proclamation of the ‘Party’ provoked sharp discussions and polemics within the International Communist Left; in France this led to a split in the French Fraction of the Communist Left, in which only a minority agreed with the policy of the Party and separated itself from the majority. The majority declared its opposition to the precipitous dissolution of the Italian Fraction, categorically and publicly condemned the proclamation of the Party in Italy as being artificial and voluntarist, and pointed out the opportunist political basis of the new Party4. At the end of 1945 the First Congress of the Party took place. The Congress published a political Platform and nominated the central leadership of the Party, and an international Bureau composed of representatives of the ICP and the French and Belgian Fractions. The article in Programme itself refers to “‘Elements for a Marxist Orientation’, our text of 1946”. . In 1948 we had more programmatic texts of the Party, and others followed. In 1951 the first crisis in the Party broke out, culminating in a split which left two ICPs, both claiming to be the continuators of the old Party, a claim which Programme has never given up.
Today a new date is invented for the constitution of the Bordigist party. Why? Is it because it wasn’t until 1951 that:
“Our current was able to attain, thanks to the continuity of its struggle, the critical awareness needed to defend a line that was truly general and not circumstantial ...”
thus allowing it to:
“ ... constitute ourselves into an organized critical awareness, into a militant body acting as a Party.”
(Quoted from the same article ‘On the Road to the Compact and Powerful Party of Tomorrow’, Programme Communiste, no.76)
But then where were Bordiga and the Bordigists between 1943-45 and 1951? What happened to the Programme which has been invariable since 1848? Did they lose it during these years, did they have to wait until 1951 to “attain the critical awareness” which had allowed them to constitute the ‘Party’? But hadn’t they been organized since 1943-45 as members, leading members of the ICP? It’s difficult, very difficult, to discuss such a serious question with people who mix up all their terms, who don’t know how to distinguish between the period of gestation and the moment of birth, who don’t know who they are and what stage they’ve reached, who call themselves ‘The Party’ while defending the necessity to constitute the Party. How are we to take seriously people who, according to what’s convenient at a given moment, fix the moment of birth in 1943, 1945, 1952 or perhaps at an undetermined date in the future?
It’s the same with the date of the constitution of the ICP as it is with the Left Fraction in exile. They are accepted or rejected according to what’s convenient. But, whatever the date, concerning the constitution of the Party, “we can say straight away that it was not carried forward by an ascendant movement but, on the contrary, preceded it by a long way.”
This seems clear. The constitution of the Party is in no way conditioned by an ascendant movement of the class struggle, but “on the contrary, precedes it by a long way”. But why this rush then to add that it’s necessary to “prepare the true Party ... the compact and powerful Party which we are not yet.” In sum, a Party which ... prepares the Party! In other words, a Party which isn’t a Party: But why is it that this Party, which possesses the complete and invariant program, which has attained the necessary, organized critical awareness -- why isn’t this the ‘true Party’? What’s missing? It’s certainly not a question of the number of militants, but to say that the “Party under construction” recognizes that it is “in the process of being born” and isn’t complete because “the class party is always being built, from its appearance to the time it disappears” (emphasis in the text) (Programme Communiste, no.76) is quite clearly just juggling with words; it avoids giving the answer that’s required by glossing over the question itself. It’s one thing to say that ovulation is a precondition for a future birth, quite another thing to claim that ovulation is the act of birth, the actual emergence of a living being. The inspired originality of Programme consists in making two different things identical. With such a form of special pleading you can prove anything and square any circle. The need to constantly develop and strengthen the party when it really exists doesn’t prove that it already exists, just as the need to develop and strengthen a child doesn’t prove that the egg is already a child; it’s simply that in certain precise conditions the egg can become a child. The problems posed to one differ greatly from the problems posed to the other.
All this sophistry about the Party existing because it’s under constant construction, and the constant construction by a Party which already exists, is used to surreptitiously introduce another Bordigist theory: the real Party and the formal Party. This is another sophism which distinguishes between the real Party, a pure ‘historic’ phantom which doesn’t necessarily exist in reality, and the formal Party, which does actually exist; in reality but which doesn’t necessarily express the real Party. In the Bordigist dialectic, movement, isn’t a state of matter and thus something material; it’s a metaphysical force which creates matter. Thus the phrase in the Communist Manifesto “the organization of the proletariat into a class, and consequently into a political party” becomes in the Bordigist world-view “the constitution of the Party makes the proletariat into a class”. This leads to contradictory conclusions and also shows a scholastic form of argument: either one affirms -- against all evidence -- that the Party has never ceased to exist since it first appeared (let’s say since Babeuf or the Chartists); or, departing from the obvious fact that the Party has not existed for long periods of history, one concludes (like Vercesi or Camatte) that the class has momentarily or definitively disappeared. The only thing that is constant in Bordigism is its movement from one pole of scholasticism to the other.
For the sake of clarity we can pose the question in a different way. The Bordigists define the Party as a doctrine, a program, and a capacity for practical intervention, a will to action. This rather summary definition of the Party is now completed by another postulate: the existence of the Party is not linked to, in fact must be completely independent of, the conditions of a given period. Now, of these two foundations of the Party -- the program and the will to action -- the first, the program, we are told, has been complete and invariant since the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Here we are confronted with an obvious contradiction: the Program, the essence of the Party, is complete, but the Party, the materialization of the Program, is in perpetual constitution. More than that even -- at times it has purely and simply disappeared. How can this be, and why?
The Communist League dissolved itself and disappeared in 1852. Why? Had the founders of the Program, Marx and Engels, gone and lost the Program? Perhaps one could accuse them of losing the will to action, by referring to the split they engineered against the minority of the League (Willitch-Schapper), their denunciation of the voluntaristic activism of this minority. But wouldn’t this be going from one absurdity to an even greater absurdity? What other explanation can we give to this dissolution except -- whether the Bordigists like it or not -- that it corresponded to a profound change in the situation? Engels, who knew what he was talking about, explained the disappearance of the League thus:
“The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June, 1848 -- the first great battle between Proletariat and Bourgeoisie -- drove again into the background, for a time, the social and political aspirations of the European working class. Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was again, as it had been before the revolution of February, solely between different sections of the propertied classes; the working class was reduced to a fight for political elbow-room, and to the position of extreme wing of the middle class Radicals. Wherever independent proletarian movements continued to show signs of life, they were ruthlessly hunted down. Thus the Prussian police hunted out the Central Board of the Communist League, then located in Cologne. The members were arrested, and, after eighteen months imprisonment, they were tried in October, 1852. This celebrated ‘Cologne Communist trial’ lasted from October 4th till November 12th; seven of the prisoners were sentenced to terms of imprisonment in a fortress, varying from three to six years. Immediately after the sentence, the League was formally dissolved by the remaining members. As to the Manifesto, it seemed thenceforth to be doomed to oblivion.” (Engels, ‘Preface to the English Edition of the Communist Manifesto of 1888’)
This explanation does not seem to convince our Bordigists, who can only find it completely superfluous since for them the Party was never really dissolved -- it continued to exist in the persons of Marx and Engels. In order to prove this they cite a whimsical extract from a letter from Marx to Engels, and, as at other times when they find it convenient, they transform a word, the end of a phrase, into an absolute truth, an invariant and immutable principle5. Between the dissolution of the League in 1852 and the birth of the International in 1864, did anything happen that was important to the existence of the Party? For the Bordigists, absolutely nothing; the program was still invariant, the will to action was present, Marx and Engels were there, and the Party was with them. Nothing of any great importance happened. But this does not seem to be the opinion of Engels who wrote:
“When the European working class had recovered sufficient strength for another attack on the ruling class, the International Workingmen’s Association sprang up.”(Engels, Ibid)
Programme writes in its article that “the revolutionary Marxist party is not the product of the movement in its immediate aspect, ie its phases of ascent and reflux.” Here it simply falsifies the debate -- either out of incomprehension, or intentionally -- by introducing this little word product emphasized in the text. Certainly the need for a party isn’t the result of a particular situation but of the general historic situation of the class (this is something you learn in an elementary course in Marxism and really doesn’t require any great knowledge). The controversy is not about this, it’s about whether or not the existence of the Party is linked to the vicissitudes of the class struggle, whether specific conditions are necessary if revolutionaries are to effectively -- and not just in words -- assume the tasks incumbent on the Party. It’s not enough to say that a child is a human product to conclude from this that the conditions necessary for it to live -- air to breathe, food to nourish it, someone to care for it -- are automatically given. Without these conditions, the child is irredeemably condemned to die. The party is an effective intervention, a growing impact, a real influence in the class struggle, and this is only possible when the class struggle is in the ascendant. This is what distinguishes the party and its real existence from a fraction or a group. This is what the ICP has not understood and does not want to understand.
The Communist League was constituted at the time of rising class struggle which preceded the revolutionary wave of 1848, and, as Engels’ quote shows, it disappeared with the defeat and reflux of these struggles. This is not an episodic fact but a general one which has been verified throughout the history of the workers’ movement, and it could not be otherwise. The Ist International emerged “when the European working class had recovered sufficient strength for another attack on the ruling class” (Engels). And we fully endorse the words of the General Council’s Reporter to the First Congress of the International, responding to the attacks of the bourgeois press: “It’s not the International which unleashes the workers’ strikes, it’s the workers’ strikes which give this strength to the International.” In its turn, as had been the case with the Communist League, the International didn’t survive for long after the bloody defeat of the Paris Commune. It perished shortly afterwards, despite the presence of Marx and Engels and the ‘complete and invariant program’.
In order to demonstrate the opposite of what we have just been saying, the article vainly resorts to the “practical verification ... that there are whole areas (like England or America) where social struggles of an extraordinary vigor have developed even though the Party didn’t exist there at all.” This is an argument which proves nothing, except that there is no mechanical link between the struggles of the class and the secretion of the party, or that there are other factors which counteract the process towards the constitution of the party; that in general there’s a gap between objective conditions and subjective conditions, between the existing being and the development of consciousness. For the argument to have some validity, Programme would have to cite cases where the opposite has happened, ie examples of the party being constituted outside of countries and period where the class struggle was in the ascendant. But there are none. The one and only example (let’s not waste time with the Trotskyist IVth International) they can cite is the ICP. But that’s another story, the story of the frog who wanted to be as big as a bull. The ICP has never been a party other than in name.
After the examples of the Communist League and the Ist International, we have the example of the IInd International and its infamous demise, and even more the constitution of the IIIrd International and its ignoble end in Stalinism. These examples are a definitive vindication of the thesis defended by the Italian Fraction, a thesis which we subscribe to wholeheartedly: the impossibility of constituting the party in a period of reflux in the class struggle6. Programme’s view is naturally quite different: the reconstitution of the class party must take place “before the proletariat has raised itself from the abyss into which it has fallen. It must be said that this rebirth must of necessity, as has always been the case, precede this revival of the proletariat” (Programme Communiste, no.76).
We can understand why the article refers with such emphasis to Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? especially to the part about the trade unionist consciousness of the working class. Because what underlies the whole line of reasoning in the article is not so much the overestimation of the role of the party and the Bordigists’ own tendency towards megalomania, but a crying underestimation of the class’s capacity to become conscious, a profound lack of confidence in the class, a barely-hidden distrust of the working class and its ability to understand the world:
“If the future scientifically foreseen by the Party is certain and inevitable for us materialists, this isn’t determined by any ‘maturation’ of consciousness about its historic mission within the class, but because the class will be pushed by objective determinants, before knowing about it, without knowing how to struggle for communism.” (Programme Communiste, no.76)
Throughout the article you can find such distrustful compliments to the working class: a brutal, brutalized mass which acts without knowing or understanding, but which, fortunately enough, will be led by a party which understands everything, which personifies understanding. But allow us to juxtapose this stifling distrust with the fresh air of old Engels’ judgment:
“For the ultimate triumph of the ideas set forth in the Manifesto Marx relied solely and exclusively upon the intellectual development of the working class, as it necessarily had to ensue from united action and discussion.” (Engels, ‘Preface to the German Edition of the Communist Manifesto’, 1 May 1890)
Any comment on this would be superfluous. Let’s go on. In the view of the Bordigists, the reconstitution of the Party -- completely detached from concrete conditions -- requires theoretical maturity and the will to action. Thus the article makes the following judgment of the Fraction:
“If it (the Fraction) was not yet the Party but only a prelude to it, this wasn’t because of a lack of practical activity but rather because of its insufficient theoretical work.”
Well, that’s their judgment. But what would the article accept as sufficient theoretical work? No doubt the restoration, the reappropriation, the conservation of the complete and invariant program. Above all, without any examination of past positions, without searching for answers to new problems. This is the kind of work which the article reproaches the Fraction for carrying out, this is what it sees as its grave weaknesses. These museum keepers who have raised their own sterility into an ideal would like it to be believed that Lenin, like them, did nothing except ‘restore’ the completed theory of Marx. Perhaps they would like to meditate on what Lenin had to say about theory:
“We in no way take Marx’s doctrine for something complete and untouchable; on the contrary we consider that he simply laid the foundation stones of the science which socialists must take forward in all directions if they don’t want to be left behind by life.”7
The article this quote is taken from is precisely entitled ‘Our Program’.
And how do our popes of Marxism measure the degree of theoretical maturity? Are there any fixed measures? If they’re not to be arbitrary, measures must also be measured and there’s no better way of doing that than by verifying this theoretical maturity in the light of the concrete political positions one defends.
If this is the way to measure maturity, if it’s the main criterion for constituting the Party, we can say calmly but with all the necessary conviction that the Bordigists ought not to have constituted the Party in 1943, 1945, and especially not in 1952. They would do much better to wait for the year 2000. Everyone would benefit from that, in particular the Bordigists.
We can’t say exactly how the ‘compact and powerful Party of tomorrow’ will be constituted, but one thing is certain today, and that is that the ICP isn’t it. The drama of Bordigism is that it wants to be what it isn’t -- the Party -- and doesn’t want to be what it is: a political group. Thus it doesn’t accomplish, except in words, the tasks of the party, because it can’t accomplish them; and it doesn’t take on the tasks of a real political group, which to its eyes are just petty. As for its political maturity: to judge by its positions, and by the pace with which things are developing, there’s a good chance that it will never reach its destination, because with every step forward it takes, it takes two or three steps backward.
MC
1 Programme Communiste, nos. 18 & 19 of the French edition. Also published as pamphlet in English.
2 See our article ‘Terror, Terrorism and Class Violence’ in this issue of the Review, where this subject is dealt with more fully.
3 Le Proletaire, no. 268, 8-12 April, is even more explicit when it writes: “… its characteristic theses of 1951 which constitute its act of birth and the basis for joining it.”
4 See L’Etincelle and Internationalisme, publications of the Gauche Communiste de France until 1952.
5 It’s high time to put an end to this incredible abuse which some people make of quotations, making mean all kinds of things. This is particularly true with the Bordigists concerning Marx’s idea of the Party. It might be worthwhile asking them to reflect on and explain this somewhat surprising and enigmatic phrase from the Communist Manifesto: “The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties.”
6 We know that Bordiga was to say the least reluctant to participate in the constitution of the Party and that he yielded half-heartedly to the pressure exerted on him from all sides to associate himself with it. Vercesi, in turn didn’t wait long to publicly question the correctness of setting up a Party. But the wine had been poured, it only remained to drink it. we find an echo of his reticences in the ‘Draft Declaration of Principles for the International Bureau of the (new) International Communist Left’ which he wrote and published in Belgium at the end of 1946. Here we find that “The process of transforming the Fractions into Parties has been determined in broad outlined by the Communist Left, according to the schema which holds that the party can only appear when the workers have begun a movement of struggle which supplies the raw materials for the seizure of power,” (cited in Programme)
7 Lenin, an article written in 1899 and published in 1925. Complete Works, p. 190, translated from the Spanish edition.
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