According to the popular misconception, which is systematically upheld and disseminated by all the mouthpieces of bourgeois ideology from the tabloid press to the professors of academe, communism means a society where everything is run by the state. The whole identification between communism and the Stalinist regimes in the East rested on this assumption.
And yet it is a total falsehood, reality turned on its head. For Marx, for Engels, for all the revolutionaries who followed in their footsteps, communism means a society without a state, a society where human beings run their affairs without a coercive power standing over them, without governments, armies, prisons or national frontiers.
Of course, the bourgeois world-view has its answer to this version of communism: yes. yes, but that's just a utopia, it could never happen; modern society is too big, too complex; human beings are too untrustworthy, too violent, too greedy for power and privilege. The very sophisticated (professors like J Talmon, author of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, for instance) even inform us that the very attempt to create a stateless society must lead to the kind of monstrous Leviathan state that arose in Russia under Stalin.
But wait: if the vision of stateless communism is no more than a utopia, an idle dream, why do the present-day masters of the state spend so much time and energy repeating the lie that communism=state control over society? Could it be because the authentic version is actually a subversive challenge to the existing order, and because it corresponds to the needs of a real movement that is inevitably force to confront the state and the society that it protects?
If marxism is the theoretical standpoint and method of this movement, the movement of the international working class, then it becomes easy to see why bourgeois ideology in all its forms - not least those that label themselves 'marxist' - has always sought to bury the marxist theory of the state under a huge tip of intellectual refuse. When he wrote The State and Revolution in 1917, Lenin talked about the need to "excavate" the real marxist position on the state from underneath the rubble of reformism. Today, in the wake of all the bourgeois campaigns identifying Stalinist state capitalism with communism, this work of excavation still needs to go on. Hence this article, which focuses on a monumental event - the Paris Commune, first proletarian revolution in history - which bequeathed to the working class the most precious lessons on precisely this question.
In 1864 Marx emerged from more than a decade of submersion in profound theoretical investigation to return to the world of practical politics. In the decade that followed, his principal energies were to be directed towards two questions that were political through and through: the formation of an international workers' party, and the conquest of power by the working class.
After the long retreat in the class struggle initiated by the defeat of the great social upheavals of 1848, the proletariat in Europe began to show signs of reawakening consciousness and militancy. The development of strike movements around both economic and political demands, the formation of trade unions and workers' cooperatives, the mobilization of workers around questions of 'foreign policy' such as support for Polish independence or for the anti-slavery forces in the American Civil War, all this convinced Marx that the period of defeat was at an end. This is why he gave his active support to the initiative of English and French trade unionists to form the International Workingmen's Association[1] in September 1864. As Marx put it in the report of the General Council to the 1868 Brussels Congress of the International, "this Association has not been hatched by a sect or a theory. It is the spontaneous growth of the proletarian movement, which itself is the offspring of the natural and irrepressible tendencies of modern society". Thus, the fact that the motives of many of the elements who formed the International had little in common with Marx's views (the chief concern of the English trade unionists, for example, was to use it as a means to prevent the import of foreign strike-breakers) did not prevent him from taking a leading role within it, sitting on the General Council for most of its life and writing many of its most important documents. Since the International was a product of the movement of the proletariat at a certain stage in its historical development, a stage in which it was still forming itself as a force within bourgeois society, it was both possible and necessary for the marxist fraction to work alongside other working class tendencies within the International, to participate in its immediate activities around the day-to-day combat of the workers, while at the same time trying to free the organization from bourgeois and petty bourgeois prejudices and to imbue it as far as possible with the theoretical and political clarity it required if it was to act as the revolutionary vanguard of a revolutionary class.
This is not the place to go into a history of all the doctrinal and practical struggles which the marxist fraction fought within the International. Suffice it to say that they were based on certain principles that had already been laid out in the Communist Manifesto and reinforced by the experience of the 1848 revolutions, in particular:
- that "the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working classes themselves" (opening lines of the Provisional Rules of the IWMA). Hence the need for an organization "established by the working men themselves and for themselves" (speech on the 7th anniversary of the International, London, 1871) and to break free of the influence of bourgeois liberals and reformers - in short, to work out an independent class policy and action for the proletariat even in a period where alliances with progressive bourgeois fractions was still on the agenda. Within the International itself, the defense of this principle was to lead to a rupture with Mazzini and his bourgeois-nationalist followers;
- that, consequently, "the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all parties formed by the propertied classes" and that "this constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end - the abolition of classes" (resolution of the London Conference of the International on Working Class Political Action, September 1871). This defense of the class party - a centralized, international organization of the most advanced proletarians[2] - was waged against all the federalist, 'anti-authoritarian' anarchist elements, notably the followers of Proudhon and Bakunin, who believed that all forms of centralization were inherently despotic, and that in any case the International certainly should have nothing to do with politics, either in the defensive or the revolutionary phases of the proletarian movement. Marx's 'Inaugural Address' to the International in 1864 had already insisted that "To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes". The 1871 resolution was thus a reiteration of this founding principle against all those who believed that the social revolution could come to pass without workers taking the trouble to form a political party and to fight for political power as a class.
In the period between 1864 and 1871, the debate about involvement in 'politics' was largely related to the question of whether or not the working class should enter the sphere of bourgeois politics (the call for universal suffrage, participation of the workers' party in elections and parliament, struggle for democratic rights, etc) as a means to obtaining reforms and strengthening its position within capitalist society. The Bakuninists and the Blanquists[3], champions of the omnipotent revolutionary will, refused to analyses the objective material conditions within which the workers' movement was operating, and rejected such tactics as a diversion from the social revolution. Marx's materialist fraction, on the other hand, recognized that capitalism as a global system had not yet completed its historical mission, had not yet laid down all the conditions for the revolutionary transformation of society, and that consequently it was still necessary for the working class to fight for reforms both at the economic and political levels. In so doing, it would not only improve its immediate material situation, but would be preparing and organizing itself for the revolutionary showdown that would inevitably be produced by capitalism's historical trajectory towards crisis and collapse.
This debate was to continue in the workers' movement for decades to come, though in different contexts and with very different protagonists. But in 1871 momentous events in Continental Europe were to add a whole new dimension to the debate on working class political action. For this was the year of the first proletarian revolution in history, the actual conquest of political power by the working class - the year of the Paris Commune.
"Every step of a real movement is more important than a dozen programs" (Marx to Bracke, 1875)
The drama and tragedy of the Paris Commune are brilliantly described and analyzed in Marx's The Civil War in France, which was published in the summer of 1871 as an official address of the International. In this passionate diatribe, Marx shows how a war between nations, France and Prussia, was transformed into a war between the classes: following France's disastrous military collapse, the Thiers' government based in Versailles had concluded an unpopular peace and sought to impose its terms on Paris; this could only be done by disarming the workers regrouped in the National Guard. On 18 March 1871 troops sent by Versailles tried to seize cannons under the control of the Guard; this was to be the prelude to a massive repression against the working class and its revolutionary minorities. The workers of Paris responded by taking to the streets and fraternizing with the Versailles troops. In the days that followed they proclaimed the Commune.
The Commune of 1871, in name, was an echo of the revolutionary Commune of 1793, organ of the sans culottes during the most radical phases of the bourgeois revolution. But the second Commune had a very different meaning, looking not to the past, but to the future - to the communist revolution of the working class.
Although Marx had, during the siege of Paris, warned that an uprising in conditions of war would be "a desperate folly" ('Second Address of the General Council of the IWMA on the Franco-Prussian War'), when the uprising did come Marx committed himself and the International to expressing the most unwavering solidarity with the Communards - among whom the International's members in Paris played a leading role, even though hardly any were of a 'marxist' political persuasion. He could have no other reaction in the face of the vile slanders that the world bourgeoisie threw at the Commune, and of the horrifying revenge that the ruling class exacted from the Parisian proletariat for daring to challenge its 'civilization': after slaughtering thousands of fighters on the barricades, thousands more - men, women and children - were shot down in mass executions, incarcerated in the most abject conditions, deported to hard labor in the colonies. Not since the days of ancient Rome had such a slave-holders' blood orgy been enacted.
But beyond the elementary question of proletarian solidarity, there was another reason why Marx was driven to recognize the fundamental significance of the Commune. Even though the Commune was 'historically' premature in the sense that the material conditions for a world-wide proletarian revolution had not yet matured, the Commune was none the less an event of world-historical importance, a crucial step on the road to this revolution; it was a treasure-house of lessons for the future, for the clarification of the communist program. Before the Commune, the most advanced fraction of the class, the communists, had understood that the working class had to take political power as a first step towards building the classless human commonwealth. But the precise manner in which the proletariat would establish its dictatorship had not yet been clarified because such a theoretical advance could only be based on the living experience of the class. The Paris Commune was such an experience, perhaps the most vivid proof that the communist program is not a fixed and static dogma but something that evolves and grows in intimate connection to the practice of the working class; not a utopia, but a great scientific experiment whose laboratory is the actual movement of society. It is well known that Engels made a particular point, in his later introductions to the Communist Manifesto of 1848, of stating that the experience of the Commune had rendered obsolete those formulations in the text which conveyed the idea of capturing the existing state machine. The conclusions that Marx and Engels drew from the Commune, in other words, are a demonstration and a vindication of the historical materialist method. As Lenin put it in The State and Revolution:
"There is no trace of utopianism in Marx, in the sense that he made up or 'invented' a new society. No, he studied the birth of the new society out of the old, and the forms of transition from the latter to the former, as a natural-historical process. He examined the actual experience of a mass proletarian movement and tried to draw practical lessons from it. He 'learned' from the Commune, just as all the great revolutionary thinkers learned unhesitatingly from the experience of great movements of the oppressed classes ..."
Our aim here is not to retell the story of the Commune. The main events are already described in The Civil War in France, as well as in many other works, including those by revolutionaries like Lissagaray who fought on the barricades himself. What we shall try to do here is to examine exactly what it was that Marx learned from the Commune. In another article we will look at how he defended these lessons against all the prevailing confusions in the workers movement of his day.
"This was ... a revolution not against this or that Legitimist, Constitutional, Republican or Imperialist form of state power. It was a revolution against the state itself, this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life" (Marx, first draft of The Civil War in France).
The conclusions that Marx drew from the Paris Commune were not, on the other hand, an automatic product of the workers' direct experience. They were a confirmation and an enrichment of an element in Marx's thought that had been a constant since he first broke from Hegelianism and moved towards the proletarian cause.
Even before he clearly became a communist, Marx had already begun to criticize the Hegelian idealization of the state. For Hegel, whose thought was a contradictory mélange of radicalism derived from the impetus of the bourgeois revolution, and of conservatism inherited from the stifling atmosphere of Prussian absolutism, the state - and the existing Prussian state at that - was defined as the incarnation of the Absolute Spirit, the perfected form of social existence. In his critique of Hegel, Marx by contrast shows that far from being man's highest and noblest product, the rational subject of social existence, the state, and above all the bureaucratic Prussian state, was an aspect of man's alienation, of his loss of control over his own social powers. Hegel's thought was upside down: "Hegel proceeds from the state and conceives of man as the subjectivised state; democracy proceeds from man and conceives of the state as objectified man" (Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State, 1843). At this point, Marx's standpoint is that of radical bourgeois democracy (though very radical, as he was already arguing that true democracy would lead to the disappearance of the state), a standpoint which saw human emancipation as something that lay first and foremost in the sphere of politics. But very rapidly, as he began to view things from the perspective of the working class, he was able to see that if the state alienated itself from society, it was because the state was the product of a society founded on private property and class privilege. In his writings on the Wood Theft Law, for example, he was beginning to adopt the view that the state was the guardian of social inequality, of narrow class interests; in The Jewish Question he was beginning to recognize that real human emancipation could not be restricted to the political dimension but demanded a different form of social life. Thus at its very inception Marx's communism was busy demystifying the state, and it never deviated from this path.
As we have seen in the articles on the Communist Manifesto and the revolutions of 1848 (International Reviews 72 and 73), as communism emerged as a current with a definite political program and organization, it carried on in the same vein. The Communist Manifesto, written before the great social upheavals of 1848, looked forward not only to the seizure of political power by the proletariat, but to the ultimate extinction of the state once its roots - a class-divided society - had been dug out and discarded. And the actual experiences of the movements of 1848 enabled the revolutionary minority organized in the Communist League to cast considerable light upon the proletariat's road to power, stressing the need, in any revolutionary upheaval, for the working class to maintain its own arms and class organs, and even (in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) first suggesting that the task of the insurrectionary proletariat was not to perfect the bourgeois state machine but to smash it.
Thus the marxist fraction did not set about interpreting the experience of the Commune without any theoretical patrimony: the lessons of history are not 'spontaneous' in that the communist vanguard builds on an already-existing framework of ideas. But these ideas themselves must be constantly examined and tested in the light of working class experience, and it was to the glory of the Parisian workers that they offered convincing proof that the working class cannot make its revolution by taking charge of a machine whose very structure and mode of functioning is adapted to the perpetuation of exploitation and oppression. If the first step of the proletarian revolution is the conquest of political power, this can only come about through the violent destruction of the existing bourgeois state.
That the Commune arose out of the attempt by the Versailles government to disarm the workers is highly symbolic: it demonstrated that the bourgeoisie cannot tolerate an armed proletariat. Conversely, the proletariat can only come to power with arms in hand. The most violent and ruthless ruling class in history will never allow itself to be voted out of power - it can only be forced out, and the working class can only defend its revolution against all attempts to reverse it by maintaining its own armed force. Indeed, two of the most stringent criticisms that Marx made of the Commune were that it didn't make sufficient use of this force, standing "in superstitious awe" in front of the Bank of France instead of occupying it and using it as a bargaining counter, and failing to launch an offensive against Versailles when the latter still lacked the resources to launch its counter-revolutionary attack on the capital.
But despite its weaknesses in this respect, the Commune made a decisive historical advance when, with one of its first decrees, it dissolved the standing army and introduced the general arming of the population in the National Guard, which was effectively transformed into a popular militia. In so doing, the Commune took the first step towards the dismantling of the old state machine, which finds its expression par excellence in the army, in an armed force standing guard over the population, obeying only the highest echelons of the state machine and totally divorced from any control from below.
Alongside the army, indeed deeply interpenetrated with it, the institution which most clearly identifies the state as a "parasitic excrescence" that has alienated itself from society is the bureaucracy, that Byzantine network of permanent officials who regard the state almost as their own private property. Again, the Commune took immediate measures to free itself from this parasite. Engels summed these measures up very succinctly in his introduction to The Civil War in France:
"Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants of society into masters of society - an inevitable transformation in all previous states - the Commune made use of two infallible means. In the first place, it filled all posts - administrative, judicial and educational - by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And, in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs. In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to representative bodies which were added besides".
Marx also pointed out that by combining executive and legislative functions in itself, the Commune was a "working, not a parliamentary body". In other words, it was a higher form of democracy than bourgeois parliamentarism: even in the latter's hey-day, the division between legislative and executive meant that the latter tended to escape the control of the former and so spawn a growing bureaucracy. This tendency has, of course, been fully confirmed in the epoch of capitalist decadence, in which the executive organs of the state have turned the legislature into a mere facade.
But perhaps the most important proof that the proletarian democracy embodied in the Commune was more advanced than anything evolved under bourgeois democracy is this principle of revocable delegates.
"Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes" (The Civil War...). Bourgeois elections are founded on the principle of the atomized citizen in the polling booth, casting a vote which gives him no real control over his 'representatives'. The proletarian conception of elected and revocable delegates, by contrast, can only function on the basis of a permanent and collective mobilization of the workers and the oppressed. In the tradition of the revolutionary sections from which the Commune of 1793 had emanated (not to mention the radical 'agitators' elected from the ranks of Cromwell's New Model army in the English revolution), the delegates to the Commune's Council were elected by public assemblies held in each arrondissement of Paris. Formally speaking, these electoral assemblies had the power to formulate the mandates of their delegates and revoke them if necessary. In practice, it would appear that much of the work of supervising and pressurising the Communal delegates was carried out by the various 'Vigilance Committees' and revolutionary clubs which sprang up in the working class neighbourhoods and which were the focal points of an intense life of political debate, both about general, theoretical questions confronting the proletariat, and about immediate questions of survival, organisation and defence. The declaration of principles by the Club Communal, which met in the church of St-Nicholas-des-Champs in the Third Arrondissement, gives us a glimpse of the level of political consciousness attained by the proletarians of Paris during the heady two months of the Commune's existence:
"The aims of the Club Communal are as follows:
To fight the enemies of our communal rights, our liberties and the republic.
To defend the rights of the people, to educate them politically so that they may govern themselves.
To recall our mandatories to their principles if they should stray from them, and to support them in all their efforts to save the Republic.
Above all, however, to uphold the sovereignty of the people, who must never renounce their right to supervise the actions of their mandatories.
People, govern yourselves directly, through political meetings, through your press; bring pressure to bear on those who represent you - they cannot go too far in the revolutionary direction...
Long live the Commune!"
Based as it was on the permanent self-mobilization of the armed proletariat, the Commune, as Engels said, "was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word" (letter to Bebel, 1875). Lenin, in his State and Revolution, cites this line and expands on it:
"The Commune was ceasing to be a state since it had to suppress, not the majority of the population, but a minority (the exploiters). It had smashed the bourgeois state machine. In place of a special coercive force the population itself came onto the scene. All this was a departure from the state in the proper sense of the word. And had the Commune become firmly established, all traces of the state in it would have 'withered away' of themselves; it would not have had to 'abolish' the institutions of the state - they would have ceased to function as they ceased to have anything to do".
Thus the 'anti-statism' of the working class operates at two levels, or rather in two stages: first, the violent destruction of the bourgeois state; second, its replacement by a new kind of political power which as much as possible avoids the "worst sides" of all previous states and which ultimately makes it possible for the proletariat to do away with the state altogether, to consign it, in Engels evocative phrase, "to the Museum of Antiquities alongside the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe" (Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State)
The withering away of the state is predicated upon the transformation of the social and economic infrastructure - upon the elimination of capitalist relations of production and the movement towards a classless human community. As we have already remarked, the material conditions for such a transformation did not exist on a world scale in 1871. In addition to which, the Commune was in power only for two months, and only in one besieged city, even though it inspired revolutionary attempts in other cities in France (Marseilles, Lyons, Toulouse, Norbonne, etc).
When bourgeois historians try to debunk Marx's claims about the revolutionary nature of the Commune, they point to the fact that most of the social and economic measures it took were hardly socialist: the separation of Church and State, for example is entirely compatible with radical bourgeois republicanism. Even the measures which had a more specific impact on the proletariat - abolition of nightwork for bakers, assistance with the formation of trade unions, etc - were designed to defend workers against exploitation rather than do away with exploitation itself. All this has led some 'experts' on the Commune to argue that it was more the last gasp of the Jacobin tradition than the first salvo of the proletarian revolution. Others, as Marx noted, mistook the Commune "for a reproduction of the mediaeval Communes which first preceded, and afterwards became the substratum of ... the modern state power" (The Civil War...).
All these interpretations are based on a total failure to understand the nature of the proletarian revolution. The lessons of the Paris Commune are fundamentally political lessons, lessons about the forms and functions of proletarian power, for the simple reason that the proletarian revolution can only begin as a political act. Lacking any economic seat inside the old system, the proletariat cannot undertake a process of social transformation until it has taken over the reins of political power, and this on a world scale. The Russian revolution of 1917 took place in a historic epoch where world-wide communism was a possibility, and it was victorious on the scale of a vast country. And still the fundamental legacy of the Russian revolution relate to the problem of working class political power, as we shall see later on in this series. To have expected the Commune to have introduced communism in a single city would have been to expect miracles, and as Marx insisted "the working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic circumstances, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society is pregnant" (The Civil War...).
Against all the false interpretations of the Commune, Marx insisted that it was "essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor" (ibid).
In these passages, Marx recognizes that the Commune was first and foremost a political form, and that there could be no question of any overnight utopias being established under its rule. And yet at the same time, there is a recognition that once the proletariat takes power into its hands, it can and must inaugurate, or rather "set free", a dynamic leading to the "economic transformation of labor", despite all the objective limitations placed on this dynamic. This is why the Commune, like the Russian revolution, does also contain valuable lessons about the future social transformation.
As an example of this dynamic, this logic towards social transformation, Marx pointed to the expropriation of the factories abandoned by capitalists who had fled the city, and their handing over to workers' cooperatives, who were to be organised in a single union. For him, this was an immediate expression of the Commune's ultimate aim, the general expropriation of the expropriators:
"It (the Commune) wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labour, into mere instruments of free and associated labour. But this is communism, 'impossible' communism! Why, those members of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system - and they are many - have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production - what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, 'possible' communism?" (ibid).
The Commune has also left us with important elements for understanding the relationship between the working class, once it has seized power, and the other non-exploiting strata of society, in this case the urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. By acting as the determined vanguard of the entire oppressed population, the working class showed its capacity to win the confidence of these other strata, who are less capable of acting as a unified social force. And to keep these strata on the side of the revolution, the Commune introduced a series of economic measures that lightened their material burdens: abolition of all kinds of debts and taxes, transformation of the immediate embodiments of the peasant's oppression, "his present bloodsuckers - the notary, advocate, executor - into salaried communal agents, elected by, and responsible to, himself" (ibid). In the case of the peasants, these measures remained largely hypothetical, since the Commune's authority did not extend to the rural districts. But the workers of Paris did to a considerable extent win the support of the urban petty bourgeoisie, particularly through the postponement of debt obligations and the cancelling of interest.
The Commune's electoral structures also enabled the other non-exploiting strata to participate politically in the revolutionary process. This was inevitable and necessary, and was to be repeated during the Russian revolution. But at the same time, from the retrospective of the 20th century we can see that one of the main indications that the Commune was an 'immature' expression of the proletarian dictatorship, that it was the creation of a working class which had not yet reached its full development, was the fact that the workers did not have a specific and independent organization within it, or a preponderant weight in its electoral mechanisms. The Commune was elected exclusively from territorial units (the arrondissements) which, while being dominated by the proletariat, could not have allowed the working class to impose itself as a clearly autonomous force (especially if the Commune had spread to embrace the peasant majority outside Paris). This is why the workers' councils of 1905 and 1917-21, elected by workplace assemblies and grounded in the main industrial centers, were an advance upon the Commune as a form of the proletarian dictatorship. We would go so far as to say that the Commune-form corresponded more closely to the state composed of all the Soviets (workers', soldiers', peasants', town residents') which emerged out of the Russian revolution.
The Russian experience has made it possible to clarify the relationship between the specific organs of the class, the workers' councils, and the Soviet state as a whole. In particular, it showed that the working class cannot identify directly with the latter, but must exert a constant vigilance towards and control over it through its own class organizations, which participate in it without being engulfed by it. This is a question which will be examined later on in this series, though it has already been dealt with extensively in our publications (see in particular the ICC pamphlet The State in the Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism). But it is worth nothing that Marx himself had a glimpse of the problem. The first draft of The Civil War in France contains the following passage:
"...the Commune is not the social movement of the working class and therefore of a general regeneration of mankind, but the organized means of action. The Commune does not do away with the class struggles, through which the working classes strive to the abolition of all classes and therefore of all class rule ... but it affords the rational medium in which that class struggle can run through its different phases in the most rational and humane way".
Here is a clear insight into the fact that the real dynamic towards the communist transformation does not come from the post-revolutionary state, since the function of the latter is, like all states, to contain class antagonisms, to prevent them tearing society apart. Hence its conservative side in comparison to the actual social movement of the proletariat. Even in the brief life of the Commune, we can determine certain tendencies in this direction. Lissagaray's History of the Paris Commune, in particular, contains a good deal of criticism of the hesitations, confusions, and, in some cases, empty posturings of some of the Commune Council delegates, many of whom indeed embodied an obsolete petty bourgeois radicalism that was frequently outflanked by the more proletarian neighborhood assemblies. At least one of the local revolutionary clubs declared the Commune to be dissolved because it was not revolutionary enough!
Engels, in a more famous passage, is surely delving into this same problem when he says that the state - even the semi-state of the period of transition towards communism - "is at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat will have to lop off as speedily as possible, just as the Commune had to, until a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to discard the entire lumber of the state" (Introduction to The Civil War in France). Further proof that, as far as marxism is concerned, the strength of the state is the measure of man's unfreedom.
There is another vital lesson of the Commune which relates not to the problem of the proletarian dictatorship, but to a question which has been a particularly thorny one in the history of the workers' movement: the national question.
As we have already indicated, Marx and his tendency in the First International recognized that capitalism had not yet reached the apogee of its development. Indeed, it was still being held back by the vestiges of feudal society and other archaic remnants. For this reason, Marx supported certain national movements in so far as they stood for bourgeois democracy against absolutism, for national unification against feudal fragmentation. The support the International gave to Polish independence against Russian Tsarism, for Italian and German unification, for the American North against the slaveholding South in the Civil War, was based on this materialist logic. They were also causes which mobilized the sympathy and active solidarity of the working class: in Britain for example, there were mass meetings in support of Polish independence, and large demonstrations against British intervention on the side of the American South, even if the cotton famine resulting from the war led to real hardships amongst textile workers in Britain.
In this context, where the bourgeoisie had not yet exhausted its progressive historical tasks, the problem of wars of national defense was a very real one that had to be considered seriously by revolutionaries in each war between states; and it was posed with great acuity when the Franco-Prussian war broke out. The policy of the International towards this war was summarized in the 'First Address of the General Council of the IWMA on the Franco-Prussian War'. In essence, this was a statement of basic proletarian internationalism against the "dynastic" wars of the ruling class. It cited a manifesto produced by the French section of the International when war broke out: "Once more, on the pretext of the European equilibrium, of national honour, the peace of the world is menaced by political ambitions. French, German, Spanish workmen! let our voices unite in one cry of reprobation against war! ... war for a question of preponderance or a dynasty, can, in the eyes of workmen, be nothing but a criminal absurdity..." Such sentiments were not restricted to a socialist minority: Marx recounts, in the First Address, how internationalist French workers chased the pro-war chauvinists off the streets of Paris.
At the same time, the International held that "on the German side, the war is a war of self-defense". But this did not mean poisoning the German workers with chauvinism: in answer to the statement of the French section, the German affiliates to the International, while sorrowfully accepting that a defensive war was an unavoidable evil, also declared "the present war to be exclusively dynastic ... we are happy to grasp the fraternal hand stretched out to us by the workmen of France ... Mindful of the of the watchword of the International Workingmens' Association: proletarians of all countries unite, we shall never forget that the workmen of all countries are our friends and the despots of all countries our enemies" (resolution of a meeting at Chemnitz of a delegation representing 50,000 Saxon workers).
The First Address also warned that German workers should beware that the war did not turn into a war of aggression on the German side as well, and it already contained a recognition of Bismarck's complicity in the war, even though this was before the revelations about the Ems telegram, which proved the extent to which Bismarck actually lured Bonaparte and his 'Second Empire' into the war. In any case, with the collapse of the French army at Sedan, the war did become a war of conquest by Prussia. Paris was besieged and the Commune itself arose around the issue of national defense. The Bonaparte regime was replaced by a Republic in 1870 because the Empire had proved itself incapable of defending Paris; now the same Republic proved that it would rather deliver the capital to Prussia than allow it to fall into the hands of the armed workers.
But although in their initial actions the Paris workers were still thinking in terms of a defensive kind of patriotism, of preserving the national honor besmirched by the bourgeoisie itself, the rise of the Commune in fact marked a historic watershed. Faced with the prospect of a workers' revolution, the Prussian and French bourgeoisies closed ranks to crush it: the Prussian army released its prisoners of war to swell the counter-revolutionary French forces under Thiers, and allowed the latter through their lines in their final push against the Commune. From these events, Marx drew a conclusion of historic significance:
"That after the most tremendous war of modern times, the conquering and the conquered hosts should fraternize for the common massacre of the proletariat - this unparalleled event does indicate, not, as Bismarck thinks, the final repression of a new society upheaving, but the crumbling into dust of bourgeois society. The highest heroic effort of which old society is still capable is national war; and this is now proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle of classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as that class struggle bursts out into civil war. Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national governments are one as against the proletariat!" (The Civil War...)
For its part, the revolutionary Parisian proletariat had already begun to take a number of steps beyond its initial patriotic stance: hence the decree enabling foreigners to serve on the Commune, "because the flag of the Commune is the flag of the Universal Republic"; the public destruction of the Vendome Column, symbol of France's martial glory ... the historic logic of the Paris Commune was to push towards the world-wide Commune, even if this was not possible at that time. This is why the uprising of the Paris workers during the Franco-Prussian war, for all the patriotic phrases that accompanied it, was in reality the harbinger of the explicitly anti-war insurrections of 1917-18 and the international revolutionary wave which followed them.
Marx's conclusions also pointed towards the future. He may have been premature to say that bourgeois society was crumbling to dust in 1871: this year may have marked the end of the national question in Europe, as Lenin noted in his Imperialism, Highest Stage of Capitalism, but it continued to be a question in the colonies as capitalism entered into its last phase of expansion. But in a deeper sense Marx's denunciation of the humbug of national war anticipated what would become a general reality once capitalism had entered its decadent phase: henceforth, all wars would become imperialist wars and there could no longer be any question of national defense as far as the proletariat was concerned. And the revolutionary upheavals of 1917-18 also confirmed what Marx had said about the capacity of the bourgeoisie to unite against the threat of the proletariat: faced with the possibility of a world-wide workers' revolution, the bourgeoisies of Europe, who had been tearing each other apart for four years, suddenly discovered that they had every reason to make peace in order to stifle the proletariat's challenge to their blood-soaked 'order'. Once again, the governments of the world were "one as against the proletariat".
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In the next article, we will look at the struggle that Marx and his tendency waged against those elements in the workers' movement who failed to understand, or even sought to undermine, the essential lessons of the Commune, in particular the German Social Democrats and Bakunin's anarchists. CDW
[1] The name International Workingmen's Association was of course a reflection of immaturity in the class movement, since the proletariat has no interest whatever in institutionalizing sexual divisions in its own ranks. As in most great social upheavals, the Paris Commune saw an extraordinary ferment amongst proletarian women, who not only vociferously challenged their 'traditional' roles but also were often the bravest and most radical defenders of the Commune, in the revolutionary clubs as well as on the barricades. This ferment also gave rise to the formation of women's sections of the International, which was an advance at the time even if such forms have no function in today's revolutionary movement.
[2] The term "constitution of the proletariat into a party" reflects certain ambiguities about the role of the party which were also a product of the historical limitations of the period. The International contained some of the features of a unitary organization of the class; and throughout the 19th century, the notion that the party either represented the class, or was the class in its organized form, was very deeply implanted in the workers' movement. It was not until the 20th century that such ideas were overcome, and then only after much painful experience. Nevertheless, there already existed a basic grasp of the fact that the party is the organization not of the whole class, but of its most advanced elements. Such a definition is already outlined in the Communist Manifesto, and the First International also saw itself in such terms when it said that the workers' party was "that section of the working class which has become conscious of the common class interest" ('The Prussian Military Question' and the German Workers' Party', written by Engels in 1865).
[3] The Blanquists shared the Bakuninists' voluntarism and impatience, but they were always clear that the proletariat had to establish its dictatorship in order to create a communist society. This is why Marx was, on certain crucial occasions, able to form an alliance with the Blanquists against the Bakuninists on the question of working class political action.
To listen to the bourgeoisie's propaganda, one would think that they only had the good of humanity at heart. The talk about the "defense of freedom and democracy", "human rights", or "humanitarian aid" are completely at odds with reality. All the noise that accompanies the speeches is proportional to the size of the lie it carries. As the master of Nazi propaganda, Goebbels, said: "The bigger the lie, the better its chance of being believed". The whole bourgeoisie applies this rule assiduously. The decadent capitalist state has developed a monstrous propaganda apparatus, rewriting history, drowning out events with media noise to mask capitalism's barbaric and criminal nature, which no longer brings any progress to humanity. This propaganda weighs heavily on the consciousness of the working class. That is what is designed for.
The two articles that follow - "The secret workings of the Italian state", and "The Mexican bourgeoisie in the history of imperialism" - show how, behind all the propaganda, the bourgeoisie of decadent capitalism is a class of gangsters, whose various fractions are ready for anything to defend their interests in their confrontations in the capitalist and imperialist arena, or united against the common danger of the proletariat.
To fight the enemy, you must first know him. This is especially true for the proletariat, whose main weapon is its consciousness and clarity in the struggle. The class' ability to lay bare the lies - especially "democratic" - of the ruling class, to discern, behind the propaganda mask - the reality of barbaric capitalism and the class that incarnates it, will determine its future ability to play its historic role: through communist revolution, putting an end to the most somber chapter in human history.
In February, the imperialist war in ex-Yugoslavia moved up a step. For the capitalist world, the stakes were raised, as the massacre in the market at Sarajevo was followed by direct military intervention by Russia and ther USA. The madness of war is spreading throughout the planet: to the old southern and eastern republics of the ex-USSR, to the Middle East, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Africa.
At the same time, the economic crisis is spreading, ravaging the lives of billions of human beings. Here too, disaster and the threat of a drastic fall into poverty is covering the planet, which cannot help but nourish still further conflict and war.
Capitalism is leading the world to desolation and destruction. The war in ex-Yugoslavia is neither a survival from the past, nor the mark of a transitional period, the price to pay for the end of Stalinism: it is a modern imperialist war, born of the situation created by the disappearance of the Eastern bloc and the USSR. It is a war of decadent capitalism's phase of decomposition, which heralds the only future that capitalism can offer humanity.
Nationalism and imperialist interests have exacted a toll of some 200,000 dead, and who knows how many wounded and crippled, from the population of Bosnia and the other Yugoslav republics. Lives torn apart, massive "ethnic cleansing", families chased from their homes and deported or broken up - maybe never to see each other again - this is the reality of capitalism. We denounce the terror imposed by each side, by militias and military drunk with blood, rape, and torture. We denounce the terror exercised by the Bosnian, Serb and Croat states, against refugees press-ganged into the contending armies under pain of death in the case of desertion. We denounce the misery and the hunger, the horror of old people reduced to beggary, picked out by snipers because they do not run fast enough to dodge the bullets, of mothers and fathers ripped to pieces by a mortar shell while looking for supplies, of children traumatized for life, both mentally and physically. We denounce the barbarity of capitalism. It alone is responsible for these tragedies.
We also denounce the new "values" and "principles" emerging from the "new world order" that the bourgeoisie promised us following the fall of the Berlin Wall: chaos and every man for himself. Shifting alliances and betrayals are the order of the day: cease-fires are violated when the ink on them is scarcely dry. Bosnians, Serbs, Croats have all been each other's allies, only to turn against their allies of yesterday. Croats and Bosnians slaughtered each other in Mostar under the benevolent eye of the Serb militia, while at the same time fighting together against the Serbs in Sarajevo. The "Muslims" of the Bihac enclave even turned against each other while encircled!
Once the present conflict comes to an end, if it ever does, there will be no return to the pre-war status quo. The surviving states will be devastated, and will never recover in a surrounding atmosphere of world economic crisis. The local bourgeoisie could not have escaped this even were it not blinded by its own nationalism its own local interests; the war in ex-Yugoslavia will not give birth to strengthened and viable states. At best a few war-lords or local chieftains will be able to set up their own rackets, until a rival comes to supplant them. This is what happened in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Cambodia; it is what is happening in Georgia, Palestine, Tadjikstan and elsewhere. Yugoslavia is now being "Lebanonised" in its turn.
Great powers' imperialist intervention is responsible for the worsening war
While the break-up of Yugoslavia was a direct result of decomposition, this same decomposition, there as elsewhere, has proved a fertile terrain for imperialism's sinister maneuvering. At the outset, it was Germany that encouraged the Croats and Slovenes to declare independence, while the USA and France supported the Serb reaction to teach both Croats and Germans a lesson.
"Nobody is disinterested. As soon as the Bosnian problem became a Balkan problem, it also became a problem of the political balance of power, and the interests of the great powers came to dominate the conflict" (Liberation, 22/2/94).
For two years, the great powers have intervened directly in the conflict, both diplomatically and militarily under cover of the UN and NATO. If anyone still doubted its imperialist nature, the events of February, with the threats of aerial bombardment, the dispatch of UN troops, NATO's F16 fighters shooting down Serbian aircraft have all shown the imperialist powers defending their interests against their rivals: "Effective international policy continues to be thwarted by the competing interests of major European powers. With Britain, France and Russia effectively shielding the Serbs, and the United States doing what it can on behalf of the Muslim-led government, the United States is now putting pressure on the third party to the struggle, the Croats, whose traditional protector, Germany, finds it impolitic to stand up to the other powers" (International Herald Tribune, 3/3/94)
The "humanitarian" mask feels a long time ago. The bourgeoisie's press no longer talks about it. And all of a sudden, the real aim of all the grand "humanist" and pacifist declarations for an end to the massacre, and the "salvation" of Bosnia, appear for what they are. For two years, they have been used to try to mobilize the population, and especially the working class, of the great industrialized nations behind the imperialism of their own national bourgeoisie. Once again, the great pacifists - "philosophers", writers, artists, vicars, ecologists - have shown themselves up as dangerous war-mongers in the service of imperialism.
The US counter-offensive
During the Gulf War, the US clearly demonstrated their world leadership. Since then, the American bourgeoisie has suffered a series of setbacks, if not defeats, in Yugoslavia. To begin with, they were unable to prevent the latter's disintegration, and so the independence of Croatia, which represented a step forward for Germany. Then, the US betted on Bosnia as a bridgehead in the region, but despite their power proved incapable of ensuring the new state's integrity and unity. The result was an independent Slovenia and Croatia under German influence, Serbia falling under first French then largely Russian influence, and the dismantling of Bosnia which is now hardly a firm anchorage point. The end result was negative for the world's greatest imperialist power. The United States could not allow such a defeat to damage their credibility and weaken their leadership in the eyes of the rest of the world. They could not allow it to encourage either their great European and Japanese imperialist rivals, or the "second-rate" imperialisms to assert themselves and call the American "new world order" into question.
Reduced to impotence in the Balkans, the US counter-offensive developed around two axes: the intervention in Somalia, and the opening of peace negotiations between Israel and the PLO - at the cost of a bloody Israeli invasion of Lebanon in July 93.[1] The US thus demonstrated their military and diplomatic ability to "settle conflicts", which only served to highlight, by contrast, the Europeans' inability to put an end to the war in Bosnia. All the more so, since the US did everything they could to sabotage the European plans to put an end to the war in Bosnia by dividing it up in the Serbs' favor: in particular, by encouraging the Bosnian government to remain intransigent, and by re-equipping the Bosnian army so that it was able to go back on the offensive against both Serbs and Croats during the winter.
However, this was not enough to recover the ground lost, or to wipe out the impression of weakness given by the world's greatest power. It had succeeded in blocking the Europeans' plans, but without being able to regain the initiative itself. The more the bloody conflict continued, the more it damaged the "credibility" of the US themselves. The massacre in the market of Sarajevo could not have come at a better time to reshuffle the imperialist pack.
Although Clinton was still justifying the American air force's failure to intervene on the grounds of French and British refusal, more and more voices in the American state machine were pushing for action: "We will continue to have a problem of credibility if we do not act" said Tom Foley, Speaker of the House of Representatives (Le Monde, 8/2/94). Clearly, Tom Foley is more concerned with US military credibility than with any of the "humanitarian" considerations that are put forward on the TV for the consumption of the working class.
The NATO ultimatum gives the initiative to the United States
Following the massacre of the market in Sarajevo, the NATO ultimatum was a punishment for the impotence of the Europeans, especially the British and the French who were forced to agree to air strikes which they had rejected and sabotaged ever since the conflict began. It demonstrated the greater weight of NATO, dominated by the Americans, over the UN where Britain and France played a greater role. The withdrawal of Serb canons under the threat of NATO air power was a success for the USA. Their ultimatum allowed them to regain the initiative, and to put a foot in the door both militarily and diplomatically, but nonetheless the success remained limited. It was only a first step, and could not efface the setbacks of the previous months, especially the partition of Bosnia.
"European governments have been playing a cynical game. (...) The Europeans were perfectly willing to use the shelling of Sarajevo and other cities to pressure the Bosnian government to accept a bad partition plan that denied them vital territory and transit routes. If they now agree to endorse NATO air strikes against the siege guns, they fully expect Washington, in return, to join in their diplomatic gang-up, at the very moment when the Bosnian government has begun to gain military strength, reversing some of its earlier losses" (New York Times, 9/2/94).
Moreover, the American display of strength was diminished by the reluctance of the Serb retreat, and its protection by the arrival of Russian blue berets. "The [NATO] alliance has not proven itself. Its will and capacity will continue to be doubted" (Courrier International, 24/2/94). The Americans tried to correct this bad impression somewhat, by shooting down four Serbian aircraft violating Bosnian air space (whereas almost 1000 violations had already taken place without provoking any reaction from NATO). US "credibility" demanded that they seize an appropriate occasion, and they did so.
The US ultimatum sidelines the Europeans
The USA's return to the game has been concretized by the signature of the Croat-Muslim agreement. US pressure has been applied to Croatia since February: "It is time now to make Croatia pay a price, economic and political" (International Herald Tribune, 26/2/94). Threats gave way to blackmail. The Croats understood this straight away, as can be seen from the removal of the ultra-nationalist Bosnian Croat leader Mate Boban, and his replacement by someone more "reasonable" and more easily controlled. After the threat came the "deal", the proposal: "The only way Croatia can get international support for reclaiming the Krajina (...) is to reforge its alliance with Bosnia" (International Herald Tribune, 26/2/94).
It goes without saying that this new alliance, under the American aegis, which promises the return of occupied Krajina to Croatia, is directly aimed at the Serbs. Here is a step towards "peace" which brings with it a still more terrible aggravation of the war, both on the quantitative level - spreading it to the whole of ex-Yugoslavia - and on the qualitative level by involving the regular armies of both Serbia and Croatia in total war.
As we write this, the confrontations between Croats and Muslims have not yet come to an end, especially around Mostar. But there is no doubt that this is a success for the USA, since the European countries have been forced to "welcome" the initiative, despite their lack of enthusiasm for it. The Muslim-Croat agreement has sidelined the Geneva negotiations, at least for the moment, and revealed the impotence of their European Union sponsor. Revenge was sweet for the Americans after two years of European insolence, when Warren Christopher the US Secretary of State was photographed on the White House Lawn between the two signatories to the accord. "Europe has had its day as the main arbiter of the Yugoslav crisis" (The Guardian).
Russia's aggressive imperialism
Another expression of the rearrangement of the imperialist game since the massacre at the Sarajevo market, is Russia's return in strength to the "concert of nations", with its firm opposition to the NATO ultimatum, its diplomatic success in saving the Serbs' face by "persuading" them to withdraw their artillery from Sarajevo, and the dispatch of its own blue berets. Russia's imperialist arrogance has reawaken, and Russia now clearly aspires to play a major role on the world stage.
Up till now, the United States has given unfailing support to Yeltsin, both internally against the conservative Stalinist fractions, and externally when Russia has intervened in its old empire.
The US bourgeoisie could not but be satisfied to see Russia oppose the imperialist aspirations of "Islamic" Iran, or of a Turkey inclining more and more towards Germany; or to see Russia imposing its conditions on Ukraine, which is still the world's third greatest nuclear power despite its economic collapse, and so forcing Ukraine to abandon its flirt with Germany.
But when Russia turned its attention to the ex-Warsaw Pact countries to oppose their integration into NATO, this alarmed the European bourgeoisies, Germany in particular, and even raised doubts amongst the Americans, although Clinton did accede to this demand by putting off the enlargement of NATO. But when Russia at last gains a military foothold, for the first time in its history, in the Balkans, and through them access to the centuries-old objective - the Mediterranean - then alarm bells rang in the White House. Enough is enough! The Russian aspiration to Mediterranean access, like that of Germany, is simply unacceptable to the French, British and US bourgeoisies, whether Yeltsin is in power or no. "We are not dealing with black and white, but with grey. Inevitably, there will be things that we don't like", said Clinton about Russia (Le Monde, 27/2/94).
Worse still as far as the Western powers are concerned, as the situation in Russia runs more and more out of control, while chaos and anarchy deepen, the pro-US "reformers" like Gaidar have been forced ut of the Yeltsin government to make way for the "conservative" fractions of the Russian ruling class, whose ultra-nationalist and revengeful spirit is most clearly expressed by the outrageous Zhirinovsky.
Clearly, whatever the fraction in power, Russia's return to the forefront of imperialist antagonisms does not mean a return to the situation of international "stability" which prevailed from Yalta to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and which fed the imperialist conflicts of the day. It does not mean the reappearance of two great powers able to impose limits on their respective vassals. There will not be a return to the situation where an imperialist Eastern bloc led by Russia opposed the US bloc in the West. The return of Russia, dangerously fuelled by the chaos overwhelming the country, and the Russian bourgeoisie's desperate search for a way out of its terrible situation, will increase imperialist tensions and antagonisms; it will encourage still more chaos and war at the international level.
The use of NATO (founded to contain the USSR in 1949) to impose an ultimatum on Serbia, is a real slap in the face for the Russians. It was designed as a warnming to Russia: to Yeltsin, of course, but also to the other fractions of the Russian state, especially the nostalgics for the past glory of the USSR. The Americans intended to send a clear message to their "partner" (the US press no longer talks about their "ally"): take care, there are lines which cannot be crossed. And in case the Russians missed the point, the destruction of Serbian planes by the American F16s was there to drive it home. This is the first time in its 45 year history that NATO has fired in anger.
The direct military interventions of both the USA and Russia in ex-Yugoslavia are new elements, of extreme importance, in the international situation. They mark a new step in the war, another step in the exacerbation of imperialist tensions, a new step into chaos and "every man for himself" both in the Balkans, whose wretched populations are not at the end of their suffering, and internationally.
European impotence
The new international situation is marked by the return in strength of Russian and American imperialism in ex-Yugoslavia. It is marked also by its corollary: the impotence of the European powers, in particular France and Britain. For two years, the latter have been able to sabotage the American efforts to intervene militarily and to play a major role on the military and diplomatic stage; today they have been forced to swallow their pride and support the NATO air strikes against the Serbs that before they had systematically refused. As for Germany, it has had to watch, impotently, the American counter-offensive, which although it was directed against the Serbs (which could only please the Germans), also put pressure on their Croatian allies.
The German advance is halted
Recent events have placed a whole series of barriers in the way of Germany's asserting itself as an alternative leading imperialist power to the United States. Russia, with American agreement, is contesting its influence over Central Europe and the Ukraine. Unthinkable only two months ago, America is now contesting German influence in Croatia, which is hoping the obtain from the Americans what Germany proved unable to offer: the Krajina. "Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia can no longer count on clear German leadership" (International Herald Tribune, 26/2/94). The US has even prevented Germany from playing any real role in the negotiations between Muslims and Croats. Absent from the terrain, because it does not have its own troops in the NATO contingent, and with Japan alone among the great powers in not having a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, Germany can only play an underhand game, and in the meantime watch impotently the American counter-offensive.
The new-found Russian arrogance is also alarming Germany. Even if Germany attempts sometimes to flirt with Russia, since both have in common the aim of reaching the Mediterranean, in the long term both powers' imperialist interests are contradictory, especially in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Germany is thus caught between its aspiration to a place among the great imperialist powers, and so assert itself against the USA especially, and its fear of a chaotic Russia, against which only the Americans can offer military protection.
Unable to raise the American stakes, France has been forced out of the game
Although "Maintaining French-German political cooperation as the core of the European Community continues to be France's diplomatic priority" (idem), on a general and historic level, it has opposed the German advance towards the Mediterranean in Croatia. At the same time, it has opposed any American interference. It has thus tried to play its own game, with the British, and has found this beyond its capacity.
No longer listened to by the Serbs, threatened by the Bosnian offensive, the peace negotiations they sponsored paralysed, France and Britain found themselves in a dead-end. Uncomfortable situation. Having played all its trump cards, the French bourgeoisie could only ask the Americans and NATO to intervene. They had to accept defeat in this round, to be allowed to stay at the table of the imperialist game, just as they did during the Gulf War: this is what Mitterand calls "maintaining one's station in life".
Britain under American pressure
Britain's failure has been of much the same order. Britain is the US historic lieutenant, its most faithful ally in the imperialist game, and just as hostile to any German advance into the Balkans. Nonetheless, the British bourgeoisie has tried to defend its own specific interests in Yugoslavia, and has not wanted to "share" its own military and political influence in the region with the American bourgeoisie. The new situation created by the bombardment of the Sarajevo market, and the NATO ultimatum which had been opposed by the Major government, have been accompanied by a strong pressure before the Prime Minister's voyage to Washington.[2]
"The short-term approach to the Bosnian disaster orchestrated by Britain threatens to destabilize much of Europe (...) John Major should leave Washington in no doubt that his Bosnia policy is being closely scrutinized and that any more flights of expediency that exacerbate the Balkan crisis will not be lightly forgotten or forgiven" (International Herald Tribune, 26/2/94).
This American pressure, and the difficult situation confronted by Britain in Bosnia, has forced the British bourgeoisie back into line: they have had to give their approval to the NATO ultimatum (especially since the French had left them in the lurch). As the Guardian said: "In a speech to the Commons, Douglas Hurd betrayed the hidden motive behind this about-face. He emphasized three times the need to re-establish credibility and solidarity within NATO, and especially the US support for the Organization".
The US uses NATO to force the Europeans back into line
The USA has strikingly reasserted its world leadership. They have finally succeeded in bringing off the same coup as in the Gulf War: they have forced the main European powers back into their orbit - at least in Yugoslavia and for the moment. This is especially true for France, Germany, and second-rank countries like Italy, Spain and Belgium for example, which try to defend their own imperialist interests by playing the European, so anti-American, card. Moreover, the impotence of the Europeans, who have been forced to call in the Americans, has a wider meaning for all those imperialisms throughout the world which might have been tempted to oppose American interests. It is a victory for the American bourgeoisie, but a victory which bears within it the exacerbation of imperialist antagonisms and wars.
Towards the worsening of imperialist tensions and chaos
The US success in ex-Yugoslavia is not yet complete. They have to go further. If it is concluded, the Muslim-Croat alliance they have sponsored will take the confrontation with Serbia to a higher level. The European powers have taken a hiding, and will not hesitate to throw oil on the fire. Yeltsin, pushed by the conservative and nationalist elements, cannot but strengthen Russia's imperialist policies. But worse still, since all states are imperialist, the chain of conflicts will drag countries down into an irreversible and inextricable process of confrontations and antagonisms: in the Balkans there are Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Turkey; in ex-Soviet Asia there are Turkey, Russia and Iran; in Afghanistan there are Turkey, Iran and Pakistan; in the Kashmir, Pakistan confronts India, both of them nuclear powers; India faces China in Tibet; China and Japan are lined up against Russia over frontier disputes and the Kurile islands, etc. The war is one of all against all, and this list is very far from being exhaustive.
This chain of conflicts, dragging countries down one after the other into chaos and disorder, is stretching more and more. It is pulling the capitalist world into the most terrible military barbarism. And so the situation confirms the marxist position: capitalism is imperialist war; "peace" is only a preparation for war. It confirms the marxist position that in decadence all nations, great or small, are imperialist. It confirms the marxist position that the international proletariat can give no support to nationalism, to its own ruling class, and that such a political surrender leads to the abandonment of its class interests, its struggles, and to sacrifice on the altar of nationalism. Decadent capitalism has nothing to offer humanity. It is dragging it to destruction. As communists have said since the beginning of this century, there is only one alternative: socialism, or barbarism.
At the price of immeasurable suffering, blood and tears, the decisive historic moment is approaching. Destroy capitalism, before it destroys the whole human race: this is the dramatic, gigantic mission of the proletariat!
RL
[1] The Hebron massacre perpetrated by a fanatical religious Jewish settler, whom the Israeli soldiers apparently allowed to act at will, expresses the reality of the "peace" that the United States are imposing on the Middle East. While the crime is useful to the Israeli state, which will use it to justify the disarming and gagging of its own extremists, it deepens the chaos into which the Occupied Territories and Israel itself are sinking. While the peace negotiations and the formation of a Palestinian state represent a success for the United States, which has thus eliminated all its imperialist rivals in the region, the situation of disorder, anarchy, and decomposition in both states and the region as a whole will continue to get worse.
[2] The visa granted by the US government to the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, the publicity given to his visit to the USA, and his interview with the famous CNN journalist Larry King during prime time, were also the expression of American pressure on the Major government.
In numbers 90, 91, and 92 of the review Programme Communiste, published by the International Communist Party (which also publishes the papers Il Comunista in Italian and Le Proletaire in French) [1] [21], there is a long study on ‘Imperialist war in the bourgeois cycle and in marxist analysis', which conveys this organisation's conception of this vitally important issue for the workers' movement. The fundamental political positions that these articles affirm constitute a clear defence of proletarian principles faced with all the lies spread around by the various agents of the ruling class. However, some of the theoretical developments upon which these principles are based, and the predictions that follow from them, are not always equal to the statements of principle and run the risk of weakening rather than reinforcing them. This article proposes to criticise these erroneous theoretical conceptions in order to draw out the most solid possible basis for the defence of proletarian internationalism.
The ICP (Il Comunista) claims descent from the tradition of the Italian communist left, i.e. one of the international currents that held onto class positions in the face of the degeneration of the Communist International in the 1920s. In the article published in Programme Communiste (PC), we can see that, on a whole series of essential questions, this organisation has not lost sight of this current's. In particular, this article contains a clear reaffirmation of the foundations of the communist position on imperialist war:"Marxism is completely foreign to the empty and abstract formulae which hold that being ‘anti-war' is a suprahistorical principle and which see war, in metaphysical fashion, as an Absolute Evil. Our attitude is based on a historical and dialectical analysis of war crises in liaison with the birth, development and death of social formations.We therefore make a distinction between:a) wars of bourgeois progress (or development) in the European zone between 1792 and 1871;b) imperialist wars, characterised by the reciprocal clash of highly developed capitalist nations...c) revolutionary proletarian wars" (PC no. 90, p 19)."The fundamental orientation is to take a position for wars which push forward the general development of society, and against wars which obstruct and hold it back. Consequently, we are for the sabotage of imperialist wars, not because they are more cruel and more frightful than the previous ones, but because they run counter to the historic future of humanity; because the imperialist bourgeoisie and world capitalism can no longer play any ‘progressive ‘ role, but have become on the contrary an obstacle to the general development of society" (PC no. 90, p 22).The ICC could sign these passages with both hands. They concur with what we have written many times in our territorial press and in this Review [2] [22].Similarly, the ICP's denunciation of pacifism is particularly sharp and clear:"... capitalism is not the ‘victim' of war provoked by this or that tub-thumper, or by ‘malign spirits' left over from a previous barbaric epoch, against whom it is periodically necessary to defend itself ... bourgeois pacifism necessarily ends up in war-mongering. The idyllic dream of a peaceful capitalism is not in fact innocent. It's a dream soaked in blood. If you say that capitalism and peace can go together, not in a momentary and contingent manner, but permanently, you are compelled, when the war crisis mounts, to argue that something alien to civilisation is threatening the peaceful and humanitarian development of capitalism; and that the latter has to defend itself, including with weapons if other means are not sufficient, by gathering together all men of good will, all the ‘peace-loving' elements. Pacifism then accomplishes its final pirouette and turns into war-mongering, as an active factor, a direct agent for the war mobilisation. This is an obligatory process; it derives from the internal dynamic of pacifism, which naturally tends to transform itself into war-mongering..." (PC no. 90, p 22).From this analysis of pacifism, the ICP develops a correct orientation towards so-called the anti-war movements which from time to time flourish in the present period. Along with the ICP, we obviously consider that there can be a proletarian anti-militarism (like the one that developed during the First World War and which led to the revolution in Germany and Russia). But this anti-militarism cannot develop on the basis of the mobilisations orchestrated by all the good souls of the bourgeoisie:"With regard to the current ‘movements for peace', our ‘positive' policy is one of intervening from the outside, to propagandise and proselytise towards those proletarian elements captured by pacifism and caught up in petty bourgeois mobilisations, in order to draw them away from this kind of political action. In particular we say to these elements that the anti-militarism of tomorrow cannot be prepared by the pacifist parades of today, but only by the proletariat's intransigent struggle to defend its living and working conditions, against the interests of the company and the national economy. Just as the discipline of labour and the defence of the national economy prepare the discipline of the trenches and the defence of the fatherland, today's refusal to defend and respect the interests of the company and of the national economy prepare the anti-militarism and defeatism of tomorrow" (PCno. 92, p 61). As we will see later on, defeatism is no longer an adequate slogan for the present or future. However, we can only stress the validity of the ICP's general approach here. Finally, the article in PC is also very clear on the role of bourgeois democracy in preparing for and conducting imperialist war:"... in ‘our' civilised states, capitalism reigns thanks to democracy ... when capitalism puts its generals and cannons centre stage, it does so by relying on democracy, its mechanisms and its hypnotic rites" (PC no. 91, p 38)."The existence of a democratic regime gives the state greater military efficiency because it allows it to use its maximum potential both in preparing the war and in waging it" (ibid)."... fascism can only appeal politically to national sentiments, pushed to the level of racist hysteria, in order to cement ‘national unity'; whereas democracy possesses a more powerful resource for binding the whole population to imperialist war: the fact that the war emanates directly from the popular will freely expressed in elections; in other words, thanks to the mystification of electoral consultation, it appears to be a war for the defence of the interests and hopes of the popular masses and the working class in particular" (PC no. 91, p 41).We have reproduced these long quotes from PC (and we could have given others, notably those providing historical illustrations of the theses put forward) because they represent exactly our position on the questions concerned. Rather than reaffirming with our own words our principles about imperialist war, it seemed useful to show the profound unity of views that exists on this question within the communist left, a unity that constitutes our common patrimony.However, as important as it is to emphasise this unity of principles, it is equally the duty of revolutionaries to demonstrate the lack of theoretical consistency and coherence of the Bordigist current, which considerably weakens its capacity to provide the proletariat with an effective compass. And the first of these inconsistencies resides in the refusal of this current to recognise the decadence of the capitalist mode of production.
The recognition that, since the beginning of the century, and particularly since the First World War, capitalist society has entered its phase of decadence, constitutes one of the touchstones of the communist movement's perspective. During the first imperialist holocaust, revolutionaries like Lenin relied on this analysis in order to emphasise the necessity for the proletariat to reject any participation in the war, to "turn the imperialist war into a civil war"(see in particular Imperialism, highest stage of capitalism). Similarly, capitalism's entry into its period of decadence was at the heart of the positions of the Communist International at its foundation in 1919. It was precisely because capitalism had become a decadent system that it could no longer be a question of struggling to obtain reforms within it, as had the workers' parties of the Second International. From now on the proletariat's only historical task was to carry out the world revolution. And it was on this granite basis that the international communist left, and its Italian fraction in particular, was able to elaborate the totality of its political positions [3] [23].However, it was the ‘originality' of Bordiga and the current that he inspired to deny that capitalism had entered its decadent phase [4] [24]. And yet the Bordigist current, notably the ICP (Il Comunista) is in fact obliged to recognise that something changed at the beginning of the century, in the nature both of economic crises and of wars. On the nature of wars, the above quotations from PC speak for themselves: they show that there is an essential difference between the wars waged by capitalist states last century, and those of this century. For example, six decades separate the Napoleonic wars against Prussia from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, while the latter was only four decades away from the 1914 war. However, the 1914 war between France and Germany was fundamentally different from all the previous ones between these two countries. That is why Marx could call on the German workers to participate in the war of 1870 (see the First Manifesto of the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association on the Franco-Prussian war), and still remain quite clearly on a proletarian class terrain; and why in 1914 the call of the German Social Democrats for the workers to engage in ‘national defence' was definitely on a bourgeois terrain. This is exactly what revolutionaries like Lenin and Luxemburg defended tooth and nail at this time against the social-chauvinists who claimed to take their lead from Marx's position in 1870: this position was no longer valid because war had changed in nature, and this in turn was the result of a fundamental change in the life of the capitalist mode of production as a whole.Furthermore, PC says the same thing when it affirms that imperialist wars "run counter to the historic future of humanity; because the imperialist bourgeoisie and world capitalism no longer play any ‘progressive' role, but on the contrary have become an obstacle to the general development of society". Similarly, taking up a passage written by Bordiga, it considers that "world imperialist wars demonstrate that the crisis of capitalism's disintegration is inevitable because of the opening up of a period in which its expansion no longer represents the augmentation of the productive forces but the accumulation of greater and greater destruction" (PC, no. 90, p 25). However, imprisoned in old Bordigist dogmas, the ICP is incapable of drawing the logical consequences of this from the standpoint of historical materialism: the fact that world capitalism has become an obstacle to the general development of society means quite simply that this mode of production has entered its phase of decadence. When Lenin and Luxemburg affirmed this in 1914, they weren't pulling such an idea out of their hats: they were simply making a scrupulous application of marxist theory to an understanding of the historic facts in front of them. The ICP, like all the other ICPs belonging to the Bordigist current, claims adherence to marxism. This is a very good thing: today, only those organisations that base their programmatic positions on the teachings of marxism can hope to defend a revolutionary perspective. Unfortunately, the ICP provides us with the proof that it has a hard time understanding the marxist method. In particular, it may be very fond of using the term ‘dialectical', but it only reveals that, like someone trying to hide their ignorance by using complicated words, it doesn't know what it's talking about.For example, this is what we can read in PC about the nature of crises:"The ten-yearly crises of youthful capitalism were very minor incidents; they were more crises of international trade than of the industrial machine... They were crises of unemployment, i.e. of closures, the stopping of industries. Modern crises are crises of dis-aggregation of the whole system, which afterwards finds it difficult to reconstruct its different structures" (PC no. 90, p 28). There follows a whole series of statistics, which demonstrate the considerable breadth of 20th century crises, and the fact that they bear no comparison to those of last century. But the ICP doesn't see that the difference in scale between the two kinds of crisis reveals not only a fundamental difference between themselves, but also in the way of life of the system they affect. The ICP puts its regal foot on one of the basic elements of the marxist dialectic: the transformation of quantity into quality. In effect, for the ICP, the difference between the two types of crisis remains purely quantitative and doesn't concern the fundamental mechanisms of the system. It proves this by writing "last century there were 8 world crises: 1836, 1848, 1856, 1883, 1886 and 1894. The average length of the cycle according to Marx was ten years. This ‘juvenile' rhythm was followed, in the period between the beginning of the century to the outbreak of the Second World War, by a more rapid succession of crises: 1901, 1908, 1914, 1920, 1929. To the immeasurable growth of capitalism there corresponded an augmentation of organic composition ... which led to a growth in the rate of accumulation: this is why the average length of the cycle was reduced to 7 years" (PC no. 90, p 27). This arithmetic about the length of the cycles proves that the ICP puts the economic convulsions of last century on the same level as those of this century without understanding that the very nature of the notion of the cycle has fundamentally changed. Blinded by its faith in the divine words of Bordiga, the ICP fails to see that, in Trotsky's words, while the crises of the 19th century were the heartbeats of capitalism, those of the 20th are the rattles of its death-agony. The ICP shows the same blindness when it tries to point to the link between crisis and war. In a way that is argued systematically without being very rigorous (we will come back to this later on), PC tries to establish that, in the present period, the capitalist crisis necessarily leads to world war. This is a laudable concern since it aims to refute the illusory and criminal discourse of pacifism. However, it doesn't occur to the ICP to ask whether the fact that the crises of the 19th century didn't lead to world war, or even to local wars, means that there is a fundamental difference with those of the 20th century. Here again, the ICP's ‘marxism' is rather poverty-stricken: we have here not just a misunderstanding of what the word dialectical means, but a refusal, or at least an incapacity, to go beyond a fixation with apparent analogies between the economic cycles of the past and those of today, and to examine in depth the major, determining phenomena of the life of the capitalist mode of production. Thus, faced with a question as crucial as that of imperialist war, the ICP shows itself to be incapable of adequately applying marxist theory and grasping the difference between the ascendant phase of capitalism and its decadent phase. And the striking concretisation of this incapacity can be seen when the ICP tries to attribute to the wars of the present period an economic rationality similar to that of 19th century wars.
Our International Review has already published numerous articles on the question of the irrationality of war in the decadent period of capitalism [5] [25]. Our position is in no way an ‘original discovery' of our organisation. It is based on the fundamental acquisitions of marxism since the beginning of the 20th century, notably as expressed by Lenin and Luxemburg. These acquisitions were formulated with great clarity in 1945 by the Communist Left of France against the revisionist theory developed by Vercesi on the eve of the Second World War, a theory which led his organisation, the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, into total paralysis when the imperialist conflict broke out:"In the epoch of ascendant capitalism, wars ... expressed the forward march of an enlarging and expanding capitalist economic system ... Each war justified and paid its costs by opening up a new field for greater expansion, ensuring the development of a greater capitalist production ... War was the indispensable means for capitalism to open up possibilities for its further development at a time when these possibilities existed and could only be opened up by violent means. By the same token, the collapse of a capitalist world that has historically exhausted all its possibilities of development finds its clearest expression in modern war, imperialist war, which, without opening up any possibility for the further development of production, simply hurls the productive forces into the abyss and accumulates ruins upon ruins at a rapidly growing rate" (Report on the international situation to the June 1945 conference of the Communist Left of France, republished in International Review59).As we have seen, PC also makes this distinction between the wars of last century and those of this century. However, it doesn't draw the consequences and after taking a step in the right direction, makes two in the wrong direction by looking for an economic rationality in the imperialist wars that dominate the 20th century.This rationality, "the demonstration of the fundamental economic reasons which push all states towards war" (PC no. 92, p 54), PC tries to find in quoting Marx: "a periodic destruction of capital has become a necessary condition for the existence of any current rate of interest ...Considered from this point of view, these horrible calamities which we are used to waiting for with so much disquiet and apprehension ... are probably only the natural and necessary corrective for an excessive and exaggerated opulence, the vis medicatrix thanks to which our social system as it is currently moulded is able from time to time to free itself from a constantly renascent plethora which threatens its existence, and return to a solid and healthy state " (Grundrisse). In reality, the destruction of capital, which Marx evokes here, is the type provoked by the cyclical crises of his time (and not by wars), at a moment when these crises constituted the heartbeats of the capitalist system (even if they already posed the perspective of the historical limitations of this system). In numerous parts of his work, Marx shows that the way capitalism surmounted these crises resided not only in a destruction (or rather a de-valorisation) of a momentarily excessive amount of capital but also, and above all, by the conquest of new markets, particularly those outside capitalist relations of production [6] [26]. And since the world market could not be indefinitely extended, since the extra-capitalist sectors could only get narrower and narrower to the point of disappearing completely as capital subjected the whole planet to its laws, capitalism was condemned to increasingly catastrophic convulsions.This was an idea developed much more systematically by Rosa Luxemburg in her book The Accumulation of Capital, but she didn't invent it, as some ignorant people think. What's more, the outline of such an idea appears in passages of PC's text, but when the latter makes reference to Rosa Luxemburg, it's not to base itself on her remarkable theoretical developments which explained with great clarity the mechanisms of the crises of capitalism and particularly why the laws of this system condemned it historically, but to take up the only really dubious position in The Accumulation of Capital - the thesis that militarism is a ‘field of accumulation' which can partially relieve capitalism from its economic contradictions (see PC no. 91, p 31-33). It was just such an idea that Vercesi unfortunately fell into in the 1930s, and which led him to think that the formidable development of arms production after 1933, by allowing capitalist production to get going again, made the prospect of world war more remote. At the same time, when PC tries to give a systematic explanation of the mechanism of the crisis, in order to show the link between the latter and imperialist war, it adopts a unilateral vision based mainly on the thesis of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall:"Since the bourgeois mode of production became dominant, war has been decisively linked to the law, established by Marx, of the fall in the average rate of profit, which is the key to capitalism's tendency towards final catastrophe" (PC no. 90, p 23). There follows a resume, which PC borrows from Bordiga (Dialogue with Stalin) of Marx's thesis according to which the constant elevation, within the value of commodities, of the part supplied by machines and raw materials (due to constant progress in productive techniques), in relation to that part supplied by the labour power of the workers, results in a historic tendency for the rate of profit to fall, since it is only the worker's labour power that can produce profit, i.e. produce more value than it costs.It should be pointed out that, in its analyses, PC (and Bordiga, whom it quotes abundantly), does not ignore the problem of markets and the fact that imperialist war is the consequence of the competition between capitalist states: "The geometrical progression of production requires each national capitalism to export, to conquer on its external markets outlets adequate to its production. And as each national pole of accumulation is subjected to the same rule, war between capitalist states is inevitable. From economic and trade wars, financial conflicts, disputes over raw materials, from the political and diplomatic confrontations that result, we finally arrive at open warfare. The latent conflict between states breaks out first in the form of military conflicts limited to certain geographic zones, of localised wars where the great powers don't confront each other directly, but through interposed agencies: but it leads in the end to generalised war, characterised by the direct clash between the great state monsters of imperialism, in which they are thrown against each other by the violence of their internal contradictions. And all the minor states are drawn into the conflict, whose theatre of operations extends to the entire planet. Accumulation-Crises-Local wars-World war". (PC no. 90, p 24).We can only subscribe to this analysis, which actually repeats what marxists have been saying since the First World War. However, the weak point here is that the search for external markets is seen by PC as simply a consequence of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, whereas it remains the case that capitalism has a permanent need for markets outside its own sphere of domination, as Luxemburg masterfully showed, in order to realise that part of value destined to be reinvested in the further cycle of capitalist accumulation. Starting from this unilateral vision, PC attributes to world war a precise economic function, thus giving it a real rationality in the functioning of capitalism:"The origin of the crisis lies in the impossibility of continuing accumulation, an impossibility which manifests itself when the growth of the mass of production can no longer compensate for the fall in the rate of profit. The mass of surplus labour is no longer sufficient to ensure a profit on the capital advanced, to reproduce the conditions for a return on investment. By destroying constant capital (dead labour) on a grand scale, war then plays a fundamental economic role: thanks to the dreadful destruction of the productive apparatus, it permits later on a gigantic expansion of production to replace what has been destroyed, and thus a parallel expansion of profit, of the total surplus value, i.e. the surplus labour which is the source of capital. The conditions for the revival of the accumulation process have been re-established. The economic cycle picks up again ... The world capitalist system enters aged into the war, but there receives a bath of blood which gives it a new lease of life and it comes out with the vitality of a robust new-born child" (PC no. 90, p 24).PC's thesis is not new. It was put forward and systematised by Grossmann in the 1920s and taken up afterwards by Mattick, one of the theoreticians of the council communist movement. It can be summarised simply in the following terms: by destroying constant capital, war reduces the organic composition of capital and thus allows for a rise in the rate of profit. The problem is that it's never been proved that during the recoveries that have followed world wars, the organic composition of capital is lower than what it was before the war. In fact the contrary is the case. If you look at the Second World War, for example, it is clear that, in the countries affected by the destructions of the war, the average productivity of labour and thus the relationship between constant and variable capital very quickly (i.e. by the beginning of the 50s), reached what it had been in 1939. Indeed, the productive potential that was reconstituted was much more modern than the one that had been destroyed. PC even notes this itself, and makes it one of the causes of the post war boom!: "The war economy transmits to capitalism both the technological and scientific progress realised by the military industries and the industrial implantations created for arms production. These were not all destroyed by bombing nor - in the case of Germany - by the dismantling carried out by the allies ... The large scale production of equipment, installations, buildings, means of transport etc, and the reallocation of means of production with a high technological composition coming from the war industry ... all this creates the miracle" (PC no. 92, p 38). As for the USA, in the absence of destruction on its own soil, the organic composition of its capital was much higher in 1945 than it had been 6 years earlier. However, the period of ‘prosperity' which accompanied the reconstruction went on long after that (in fact up to the mid-60s), i.e. well after the point where the pre-war productive potential had been reconstituted, taking the organic composition to its previous level[7] [27].Having already devoted numerous texts to criticising the conceptions of Grossmann/Mattick, which PC, following Bordiga, has taken up, we won't go over all this again here. On the other hand, it is important to show what theoretical aberrations (and aberrations pure and simple) result from Bordiga's conceptions, repeated by the ICP today.
The central preoccupation of the ICP is perfectly correct: to show the ineluctable character of war. In particular, it seeks to reject firmly the idea of a ‘superimperialism', as developed during the First World War by Kautsky, who sought to ‘demonstrate' that the great powers could agree amongst themselves in order to establish a shared, peaceful domination over the world. Such a conception was obviously one of the spearheads of the pacifist fraud, which aimed to make workers believe that you could put an end to wars without destroying capitalism. To respond to such a vision, PCcomes up with the following argument: "a superimperialism is impossible; if by some extraordinary means imperialism managed to suppress the conflicts between states, its internal contradictions could compel it to divide once again into competing national poles of accumulation and thus into conflicting blocs of states. The necessity to destroy enormous masses of dead labour could not be satisfied by natural catastrophes alone" (PC no. 90, p 26). In sum, the fundamental function of imperialist blocs, or of the tendency towards their constitution, is to create the conditions for large-scale destructions. With such a point of view, it becomes impossible to see why the capitalist states couldn't simply get together in order to carry out, when necessary, the destruction needed to restore production and the rate of profit. They certainly have the means to do this, while keeping control of the destruction in order to preserve their respective interests as much as possible. But what PCrefuses to take into consideration is that the division into imperialist blocs is the logical result of competition between national sectors of capitalism, a competition which is part of the very essence of this system, and which is exacerbated when the crisis hits with all its force. In this sense, the constitution of imperialist blocs is not at all the result of a sort of incomplete tendency towards the unification of capitalist states, but on the contrary of the necessity for them to form military alliances, since none of them is in a position to make war on all the rest. The most important thing about the existence of blocs is not the convergence of interests that can exist between the allied states (a convergence which can easily be put into question, as shown by all the turnabouts in alliances during the 20th century), but the fundamental antagonism between the blocs, which is the expression at the highest level of the insurmountable rivalries between all national sectors of capital. This is why ‘superimperialism' is a nonsensical term.Because it uses weak or debatable arguments, the ICP's rejection of the idea of a ‘superimperialism' loses a great deal of its force, which isn't the best way to combat the lies of the bourgeoisie. This is particularly evident when, after the above-cited passage, the ICP continues:"These are human wills, masses of human beings who have to do things, human masses arrayed against each other, energies and intelligences straining to destroy what is defended by other energies and other intelligences". Here we can see the whole weakness of thee ICP's thesis: frankly, with the means that capitalist states have at their disposal today, in what way are "human wills" and above all "human masses" indispensable to carrying out a sufficient level of destruction, if, as the ICP says, that is the economic function of imperialist war?In the final analysis, the ‘Bordigist' current pays a high price for the theoretical and political weaknesses of the analysis upon which it bases its positions on imperialist war and blocs. Thus, having chased the notion of superimperialism out of the door, it lets it back in through the window with its idea of a ‘Russo-American condominium' over the world:"The Second World War gave birth to an equilibrium correctly described by the formula of a ‘Russo-American condominium' ... If peace has reigned so long in the imperialist metropoles, it's precisely because of this domination by the USA and the USSR..." (PC no. 91, p 47)."In reality, the ‘cold war' of the 1950s expressed the insolent certainty of the victors of the conflict and the stability of the world equilibrium sanctioned at Yalta; it corresponded, within this framework, to the requirements of ideological mobilisation and control over social tensions within the blocs. The new ‘cold war' which took the place of detente in the second half of the 70s corresponded to a need to master the antagonisms no longer (or not yet) between classes but between states which were finding it more and more difficult to tolerate the old system of alliances. The Russian and American response to these growing pressures consisted in trying to direct the imperialist aggression of their allies in the direction of the opposing camp" (PC no. 92, p 47).In sum, the first ‘cold war' had no other ideological motivation than to ‘master the antagonisms between classes'. This is really the world turned upside down. It's true that at the end of the First World War we saw a real retreat in imperialist antagonisms, and that this was because the main concern of the bourgeoisie was to deal with the revolutionary wave which began in Russia in 1917, to establish a common front against the threat posed by the mortal enemy of all sectors of the bourgeoisie: the world proletariat. But the Second World War immediately led to the development of imperialist antagonisms between the two main victors, and the war economy was kept at a very high level; this was precisely because the danger from a proletariat already deeply affected by the counter-revolution had been completely eradicated during the war and in its aftermath by a bourgeoisie that had learned from its historical experience (cf our article ‘Workers' struggles in Italy 1943' in IR 75). In fact, with PC's vision, the Korean war, the war in Indochina, and later in Vietnam, not to mention all the ones in the Middle East between an Israeli state strongly supported by the USA and the Arab states receiving massive aid from the USSR (and we won't mention dozens of other up to the war in Afghanistan which went on until the end of the 80s) - all these wars were nothing to do with any fundamental antagonism between the two great imperialist monsters but were a sort of ‘bluff', either ideological campaigns against the proletariat or dictated by each super-power's need to keep order in its own stable. Furthermore, this last idea is contradicted by PC itself, which attributes to the ‘detente' between the two blocs, between the end of the 50s and the middle of the 70s, the same function as the cold war:"In reality, detente was simply the response of the two superpowers to the lines of fracture which appeared more and more clearly in their respective spheres of influence. What it meant was an increasing pressure from Moscow and Washington on their allies, aimed at containing their centrifugal tendencies" (PC no. 92, p 43).It is true that communists must never take what the bourgeoisie, its historians and journalists, say at its face value. But to claim that the hands of the superpowers were not behind most of the wars (more than a hundred) that ravaged the world from 1945 to the end of the 80s is to turn one's back on observable reality. It would also mean throwing away what PC itself says quite correctly: "The latent conflict between states breaks out firstly in the form of military conflicts limited to certain geographic zones, of localised wars in which the great powers do not confront each other directly, but through interposed agencies" (see above).In fact, the ICP can always explain, by referring to the ‘dialectic', the contradiction between reality and what it recounts, or between its various arguments: it thus shows us that rigour is not its strong point and that it can end up saying what it likes, which isn't a very good way to fight the lies of the bourgeoisie and strengthen the consciousness of the proletariat.All this turns into a caricature when, to combat the lies of pacifism, it turns to an article by Bordiga written in 1950, where the latter makes the indices of steel production one of the major factors in the evolution of capitalism itself: "War in the capitalist epoch, i.e. the most ferocious type of war, is the crisis inevitably produced by the necessity to consume the steel produced, and to struggle for the right to monopolise the supplementary production of steel" (‘His majesty steel', Battaglia Comunista no. 18, 1950).Always preoccupied by its desire to find a ‘rationality' in war, PC is led to the point of making it seem that imperialist war is not only a good thing for capitalism but for the whole of humanity, and thus for the proletariat, when it affirms that: "...the prolongation of bourgeois peace beyond the limits defined by an economic cycle which involves war, even if it were possible, would only result in situations worse than war". There then follows a quote from Bordiga which is worth its weight in peanuts (or in steel, if you like):"Let us suppose for a moment ...that instead of two (world) wars ... we had had bourgeois peace, industrial peace. In about 35 years, steel production would have increased by 20 times; it would have become 20 times bigger than the 70 millions in 1915, arriving today (i.e. in 1950, editor's note) at 1400 million. But all this steel would not be eaten or consumed and would not be destroyed if the peoples were not getting massacred. The two billion human beings in the world weigh about 140 million tons; thus in one year they would be producing ten times their own weight in steel. The gods punished Midas by turning him into a lump of gold; capital turns human beings into lumps of steel and turns the earth, the water and the air in which they live into a metal prison. Bourgeois peace is thus a more bestial prospect than war."This was, unfortunately, one of the deliriums that Bordiga was prone to. But instead of taking its distance from it, the ICP goes even further:"Above all if you consider that the earth, transformed into a steel coffin, would become nothing more than a place of putrefaction where men and commodities in excess would peacefully decompose. Here, our dear pacifists, is the fruit of the governments ‘coming to reason', of being converted to the ‘culture of peace'. But this is precisely why it's not Folly, but Reason - of course, the Reason of bourgeois society - which pushes all governments towards war, towards salutary and hygienic war" (PC no. 92, p 54).In writing these lines, which PC lays claim to, Bordiga was turning his back on one of the very bases of the marxist analysis: capitalism produces commodities, and if you are talking about commodities you are talking about the possibility of satisfying a need, however perverted it may be, like the ‘need' of capitalist states for instruments of death and destruction. If capital produces steel in great quantities, it is to a large extent to satisfy the demand of states for heavy industries used for making war. However, this production cannot go beyond the demand of the states: if the steel industrialists are no longer able to sell their steel to the military, because the latter have already consumed a sufficient quantity, they won't carry on producing for long or their enterprises will be in ruins. They are not mad. On the other hand, Bordiga was a bit mad when he imagined that the production of steel could go on indefinitely without any limit than that imposed by the destructions of imperialist war.It's lucky for the ICP that ridicule doesn't kill (and Bordiga himself didn't die from it either): the workers might well greet such meanderings with a loud outbreak of laughter. But in fact it's all very regrettable for the cause that the ICP wants to defend: by using stupid and ridiculous arguments against pacifism, it is unwittingly led into playing the game of this enemy of the proletariat.There's one good thing in all this however: through its delirious arguments justifying the ‘rationality' of war, the ICP demolishes the very idea. And this is no bad thing when this idea leads it to put forward a perspective that could demobilise the proletariat by making it underestimate the danger that capitalism represents for humanity. Such an idea is summarised in particular in the following passage:"It flows from this (war as a manifestation of economic rationality) that inter-imperialist struggle and the confrontation between rival powers could never lead to the destruction of the planet, because this struggle derives not from excessive greed but from the necessity to escape overproduction. When the excess has been destroyed, the war machine stops, whatever the destructive potential of the weapons used, because at that point the causes of the war have also disappeared" (PC no. 92, p 55).In the second part of this article we will come back to this dramatic underestimation of the threat of imperialist war that the ICP's analysis leads to, and more concretely to the way that the slogans of this organisation are a means of demobilising the working class. FM
[1] [28] It is necessary to make this precision because at present there are three organisations calling themselves the ‘International Communist Party': two of them come from the old organisation of the same name, which broke up in 1982 and which published Il Programma Comunista in Italian; today these two splits publish respectively under this same title and Il Comunista. The third ICP, which was formed on the basis of an older split, publishes Il Partito Comunista.
[2] [29] See in particular the articles published in IR nos. 52 and 53: ‘War and militarism in decadence'.
[3] [30] On this question, see in particular (among many texts devoted to the defence of the notion of the decadence of capitalism) our study ‘Understanding the decadence of capitalism' in International Review nos. 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 56 and 58. The question of the link between the analysis of decadence and political positions is dealt with in no. 49.
[4] [31] See ‘Understanding the decadence of capitalism'. The critique of Bordiga's conceptions is made in particular in IR nos. 48, 54 and 55.
[5] [32] See ‘War in capitalism' (no. 41) as well as ‘War and militarism In decadence' (nos. 52 and 53).
[6] [33] See on this point our pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism as well as numerous articles in this Review, notably no. 13 ‘Marxism and crisis theory' and no.76 (‘Communism is not a nice idea but a material necessity').
[7] [34] On the study of economic mechanisms of reconstruction see in particular part V and VI of our study ‘Understanding the decadence of capitalism' (IR nos. 55 and 56).
There are many factors that confer on Mexico a particular importance within imperialist relations: its role as a reserve of raw material (minerals and oil), and especially its geographic position - a large frontier with the United States - all of which means it is a "priority" for the world's first power. In our article on the NAFTA treaty[1], we have already pointed out that the treaty's fundamental aim is the preservation of stability in Mexico (and throughout Latin America via the "Initiative of the Americas"), since all situations of chaos or war will affect the United States. At the same time, there is also the necessity for the United States to stop some Latin American bourgeoisies flirting with other powers, such as Germany or Japan. But an even greater priority for the bourgeoisie of the United States is to guarantee a stable government on its southern border (and also its northern one, Canada), a government that will be an unconditional ally and not suffer from too much disorder.
It is clear that the capitalist class in Mexico is allied to that of the United States. Nevertheless, in the light of a situation where in other countries, including in Latin America, governments are questioning, to a lesser or greater extent, their loyalty to the United States, where bourgeoisies are inclined more towards Germany (or Japan), or where internal divisions are provoking political crises which shake the unity of the capitalist state, we have to ask ourselves whether Mexico could find itself in a situation of destabilization and even come to question its submission to the United States, as is occurring in other countries; or, on the contrary, is Mexico a territory that is 100% secure for the United States?
In the final decades of the last century, the United States ascended to complete economic and political domination over the countries of Latin America. This domination has not been free from disputes and difficulties. In fact, the application of the so-called "Monroe Doctrine", according to which "America is for the Americans" (which is to say, Latin America is for the bourgeoisie of the United States) primarily meant the liquidation, by the beginning of the century, of the influence of the old powers, who throughout the 19th century had predominated in Latin America, with Britain in first place. Later, in the first half of the 20th century, the struggle was against those trying to take a piece of American's cake. Finally, after the Second World War, the United States had to fight the destabilizing influence of the USSR. Throughout the 20th century, the political crises which have occurred in the countries of Latin America, violent changes of government, assassinations of rulers, coups and wars, have had as their backdrop - when they are not the fundamental cause - these squabbles. The attitude of Latin America bourgeoisies cannot be seen as being passive, but as seeking to take the best advantage; on more than one occasion, spurred on by the other great powers, they have more or less seriously questioned the supremacy of the United States, although of course without shaking it off. Mexico is a classic example.
The so-called "Mexican revolution", or, where does the loyalty of the Mexican bourgeoisie come from?
One of the most important results - if not the most important - of the war of 1910-1920, the so-called "Mexican revolution", was the definitive weakening of the national bourgeoisie which had grown up in the shadow of the old powers, and its substitution by a "new bourgeoisie" submissively and unconditionally allied to the United States. In fact, during the second half of the 19th century and especially during the 30 years of the presidency of Porfirio Diaz, an aggressive and vigorous national capital had arisen (in the mines, railways, oil, textiles, etc as well as finance and commerce) under the influence of such countries as France and Britain. At that time, the Mexican bourgeoisie was preoccupied by the advances and aspirations of the United States towards Latin America and Mexico in particular and tried to counteract it by opening its doors to the other powers, in the vain hope that by increasing the investments and political influence of Europe no power would be able to pre-dominate.
However, by the turn of the century, Diaz's iron dictatorship was beginning to break up. The form of military dictatorship was already too narrow for the advance of economic development and various factors were pushing for its modification. These were expressed by faction fights within the capitalist class in the struggle for the succession of the already old Diaz, especially by the vigorous faction of the landowner\capitalists in the north, who aspired to a predominant role in the government, in accordance with their economic power. At the same time a profound discontent was growing amongst the exploited classes of the countryside (peons on the haciendas throughout the country, rancheros in the north, communeros in the south) and amongst the young industrial proletariat who already could not bear its pitiless exploitation. These factors produced a social upheaval that lead to ten years of internal war, though, contrary to what the official histories say, this did not constitute a real social revolution.
In the first place, the war in Mexico between 1910 and 1920 was not a proletarian revolution. The young and dispersed industrial proletariat did not constitute a decisive class during it. In fact, its most important efforts at rebellion, the wave of strikes at the beginning of the century, had been completely crushed on its eve. To the extent that some sectors of the proletariat participated in the war, they trailed behind some of the bourgeois factions. As for the agricultural proletariat, without the lead of its industrial brothers and still chained to the land, it was integrated into the peasant war.
The peasant war, at the same time, didn't constitute a revolution. The war in Mexico demonstrated for the umpteenth time that the peasant movement is characterized by the lack of its own historical mission, and could only end up by being liquidated or integrated into the movement of the historic classes (the bourgeoisie or the proletariat). In Mexico, it was in the south where the peasant movement acquired its "classical" form, where the peasant masses, still living in the old traditional communities, destroyed the Porfiristas haciendas; however, once they had taken over the land they abandoned their arms. They could never form a regular army or a government capable of controlling for any time the cities they took. These masses end up being attacked as much by the new "revolutionary" regime as by the old one and were finally cruelly defeated. The northern rancheros' war suffered a similar fate. Their tactic was to take cities through assault by cavalry: this had been an effective tactic in the previous century against the Porfirista Federal army, but was a noisy failure against modern trench warfare, barbed wire and the machine guns of the new regime's army. The defeat of the peasants (communeros in the south and rancheros in the north) led to the recovery of their land by the old landlords and the formation of new latifundias in the first years of the new regime.
Finally, it is not possible to see this war as a bourgeois revolution. It did not lead to the formation of a capitalist state, because one already existed and all that happened was that one form of this state was replaced by another. Its only merit was to have put in place the basis for the adoption of capitalist relations in the countryside, with the elimination of the system of "tiendas de rayas" which tied the peons to the haciendas and therefore impeded the free movement of the labor force (although, in general, rapidly developing capitalist relations of production had already fully existed and were predominant even before the war).
The great powers in the Mexican war
The so-called "Mexican Revolution" was not only an internal social conflict, it was also fully inscribed in the imperialist conflicts which unfolded throughout the world at the beginning of the century and which led to the First World War. In fact, the succession of governments that followed the fall of Porfirio Diaz, the government (and assassination) of Madero, then the government and expulsion of Huerta, and then the government and assassination of Carranza, that the official histories call a succession of misfortunes caused by "good" and "bad" men, "traitors" and "patriots" - all this can be explained much more logically by the struggle between the great powers for economic and political predominance in Mexico via control of the government; the sometimes 180 degree turnabouts that took place were thus the result of inter-imperialist struggles. To be exact, behind the scenes, we find the United States trying to establish a government in Mexico that supported and was subordinated to it[2].
The United States actively pushed for the disintegration and fall of the Diaz government, through its support for the northern landowner/capitalist fractions (led by Madero), with the aim of gaining economic and commercial concessions and weakening the influence of the European powers. However, Madero did not seek to destroy in favor of the US the "balance" of forces between the different powers that had existed in the days of Diaz, nor did he really improve the situation of the exploited classes. Unable to deal with the peasant revolts, Madero became an obstacle to the US's plans, who then backed Huerta's conspiracy to assassinate him and to take power.
Then, Huerta tried to use the struggle between the great powers to his own ends. The only result of which was that he ended up being abandoned by them all. Concurrently, the peasant movement reached its peak and Huerta was also cast aside. At the same time, the First World War erupted in Europe and from then on the situation in Mexico began to be influenced by another power: Germany
Germany was struggling with the other powers in order to gain a place in the imperialist arena for the division of the world market, to which it had arrived late. As regards Mexico, though it did have some economic interests there, these were not their main concern. Germany understood Mexico's strategic importance and sought to make good use of it in order to obstruct the United States. Germany's secret and diplomatic services first of all tried to use Huerta and then with better judgment Carranza, as a means of provoking an armed conflict between the United States and Mexico. Through this Germany intended to divert the military efforts of the United States, which was already supplying arms to the "Allies" and was preparing to enter the war. At its peak, the German bourgeoisie dreamt of a Japanese-Mexican-German alliance which would confront the United States in America. However at this time Japan was more concerned about seizing power in China and was not strong enough to challenge the United States. In the end, the "Allies" were able to foil Germany's plans. After this, understanding how close it was to defeat, Germany changed its policy and, through economic treaties, it tried to maintain a certain influence in Mexico, in the hope of better times.
At the beginning of the 1920's, the First World War being over and the internal conflict having died down, a new bourgeoisie was to be found in power in Mexico, whose "original" capital was derived from war profits. The United States was in the ascendant throughout the continent, and the influence of the old powers, Britain and France was in full retreat, although not totally liquidated. For example, Britain would continue to contest the control of oil, with the US, for another two decades. While the governments "emanating from the revolution", after that of Carranza (who was certainly assassinated) did not again call into question the supremacy of their neighbor in the north.
Nevertheless, the old bourgeoisie of the Porfirista period, although profoundly weakened, was not totally defeated. And before accepting it had to adapt it to the new situation and that it had no other option than to live and fuse together with the "new" capitalists, some of its sectors still had enough strength to call into question the new government.
The war of the "Cristeros"
The war of 1910-1920 did not totally settle accounts between the two parts of the national capital: this meant that between 1926-1929 a new and bloody war broke out between them. The war embraced the republic's central and western states (Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacion) and once again the peasants served as cannon fodder. As for the influence that the great powers exercised over Mexico, it is very interesting to observe that the "old" faction once again received support from some sections of European Capital (France, Spain, Germany) via the Roman Catholic church. In fact, this faction had "religious freedom" as its slogan, because this was supposedly being infringed by the "revolutionary regime" (in reality, what it was doing was seizing the "old" faction's areas of economic power, including those inside the Catholic church). And behind this slogan was the ideology of "Synarchy". Behind the "old" faction's cry of "Viva Cristo Rey" (from which the name Cristeros is derived) was the idea of the search for the new "world kingdom" led by the old powers (France, Germany, Italy, Spain...) - the ideological antecedent of European fascism in the 30's. Hence, once again we find European capital (or at least sections of it) trying to use an internal conflict to destabilize the country: only a few years later the same countries would confront the US on the military terrain. The Cristeros were defeated and the "old" fraction had no option but to change colors, integrate themselves with the others and bury its pro-European aspirations. The governments of the 30's and 40's served at the United States table, turning Mexico into a supplier of raw materials during the Second World War. This was the case, not only with the government of Avila Camacho who "declared war" on the Axis powers, but also his predecessor and elector (in Mexico the president is decisive in the election of his successor): Lazaro Cardenas, a distinguished general in the war against the Cristeros, whose mythical "expropriation of oil" in 1938 fundamentally led to the definitive expulsion of the British oil companies and the conversion of Mexico into an exclusive energy reserve for the United States.
The interlude of the Stalinist imperialist bloc
The end of the Second World War opened up what could be called a historical "parenthesis" in the world struggle that the United States and Germany had sustained throughout the century. For more than 40 years Russian imperialism challenged the world supremacy of American imperialism[3]. The formation of a new alignment of imperialist blocs found the old enemies on the same side: Germany on the same side as the United States.
In Latin America, the United States strengthened its economic and political domination, despite the USSR's intensions and intervention in the region (via some guerrilla movements and flirtations with "Socialist" governments). However, given the relative weakness of the USSR, these were - with the exception of Cuba[4] - no more than attempts to destabilize the region, as Germany had tried to do in an earlier period.
Nevertheless, this digression finished at the turn of the present decade, when the eastern imperialist bloc collapsed, the western bloc dissolved and the USSR fell apart. And contrary to what the bourgeois media says, this did not mark the end of the conflicts between the great powers, the "end of history" or anything like it.
Today, imperialist relations are a morass of destabilization, chaos and wars, which covers the whole world. No country, no matter how great or small can escape the sinister logic of imperialist struggles, especially the one around the two great powers, rivals throughout the century: the United States and Germany. However, the "New World Disorder" blunts the tendencies towards the formation of a new pair of imperialist blocs with these two powers as their axes, around which all the other countries would polarize. The allies of yesterday have become today's enemies, in an endless whirlwind of chaos, which does not stop these tendencies but feeds them, while the latter, at the same time, further increase chaos. And there is no way that Mexico can escape this dynamic of international capitalist relations.
Mexico "always loyal"?
We will now try to answer the questions we asked at the beginning of this article about the Mexican capitalist class' "loyalty" to the United States.
The American bourgeoisie has been assured the loyalty of Mexican bourgeoisie throughout the last seven decades, and in general terms, it will continue to receive it.
There are still some sections of the Mexican bourgeoisie who have never adjusted to domination by the United States. However, we would not call them a fraction (that would imply a deep fissure in the ruling class and that is not the case). These sections, although a relative minority, were still able to get one of their men into the president's seat, which was the situation with President Diaz Ordaz in the 60's. This was clearly only possible in a period when the tensions between the "pro-Europeans" and the "pro-Americans" were secondary to the confrontation with the "main enemy", Russian imperialism, and an alliance existed between Western Europe and the United States.
Nothing like that will happen again in the future. The United States will seek a guarantee of absolute loyalty from the Mexican executive, in order to avoid any "mistakes" which could bring to power a representative of the sections more inclined to the powers of the old continent.
Despite this, we can expect to see these minority sectors, fired up by the Germans, showing their heads, getting worked up, "protesting" and "demanding", creating further problems for the pro-American government. Likewise, we can expect to see the United States' rivals using these sectors, not to dispute control over Mexico, but in order to create social instability in its backyard, on the principle that everything that hinders the US and causes it to divert resources (economic, political, military) is a move they can use to their advantage.
We can already see signs of this. For example: the reanimation in recent months of the heirs of Synarchy (the Partido Democrata Mexicano and other similar regroupments). In the split of the Partido Accion Nacional - never more than a secondary electoral force in the country - one part aligning itself with the Salinas government, while the other, which contains the "historic leaders", decided to remain and form another party, that is ideologically closer to the Synarchists. The struggle in the Catholic Church is also significant. It is between one part which is seeking to reconcile itself with the government and the other which constantly attacks it from the pulpit. And finally, there is the resurgence of the ceremonies of "Cristo Rey" and the "Cristeros"; it is no accident that these are being pushed by the Vatican (which, according to the evidence, is drawing closer to Germany). There has been a religious rally in Guanajuato on the hill which symbolizes the Cristeros movement, which was presided over by the governor (a member of PAN). In Mexico City a rally took place in order to celebrate the beatification by the Pope of some thirty martyrs of the War of the Cristeros ...
We want to underline that these minority sections of capital favorable to an "anti-American" and therefore "pro-European" attitude cannot put into question the supremacy of the United States. However, they will certainly be able to create problems, of more or less gravity. We will see this in time.
Should the proletariat support one side or other of the bourgeoisie?
It is vital that the working class understands that its interests have nothing in common with these imperialist struggles. That it has nothing to gain from supporting one faction of the bourgeoisie against another and everything to lose. Two world wars between the different imperialist gangsters for the redivision of the world market have left the working class with tens of millions dead. In Mexico, the wars of 1910-1920 and 1926-1929 have also left it with millions of dead and its chains of oppression strengthened.
The proletariat must be aware that behind the calls for the defense of the "homeland" or "region" lurks the aim of dragging workers into defending interests which are not their own, including killing each other for the benefit of their exploiters. These calls are certainly going to increase in vehemency, until they become deafening, as the bourgeoisie's search for cannon fodder for its struggles becomes increasingly urgent. The proletariat must reject these calls, and oppose the continuation of these imperialist struggles, through developing its own class struggle, which is the only way of definitively putting an end to the capitalist system, which has nothing to offer humanity other than wars and chaos.
Leonardo, July 1993
Some Spanish terms used:
Haciendas and Latifundias: large landed estates
Peon: landless peasants forced to work on these estates
Ranchero: small independent farmer found in north of Mexico
Communero: peasants still working on a communal basis
[1] Revolucion Mundial no 12, "TLC: El gendarme del mundo asegura su traspatio" (TLC are the Spanish initials for NAFTA)
[2] F Katz' book La Guerra secreta en Mexico is a very full study and reveals the level of the influence of the great powers in the "Mexican Revolucion". We have taken from it much of what we have presented here.
[3] We are not able here to develop on our analysis of Stalinism. Thus, we recommend reading our "Manifesto of the 9th Congress of the ICC" and the International Review.
[4] On Cuba read Revolucion Mundial issues 9 and 10
The first part of this article[1] dealt with the general framework for understanding that in decadent capitalism the state develops towards a totalitarian way of functioning even when it has a democratic form. The second part is an illustration of the fact using the example of Italy.
For the last few years recurrent scandals have tainted the political life of the ruling class in Italy. The affairs referred to as the P2 Lodge[2] and the Gladio network and the links with the Mafia in particular have lifted a corner of the virtuous veil that covers the bourgeois state and given a glimpse of the sordid and criminal reality of its workings. The bloody succession of terrorist and Mafia attacks, of "suicides" motivated by financial bankruptcy, traces its origins to the very heart of the state, to its tortuous maneuvers to safe-guard its hegemony. One "affair" follows hard on the heels of another and the ruling class knows exactly how to use the apparent uniqueness of each scandal to make us forget the previous ones. Today the other big western "democracies" point an accusing finger at the Italian bourgeoisie that is guilty of such crimes in an attempt to make us believe that the situation there is peculiar to that country. Aren't Machiavelli and the Mafia as typically Italian as Chianti and Parmesan cheese? In reality the whole scandalous history of the Italian bourgeoisie and all its ramifications demonstrates just the reverse. What is specific to Italy is that its democratic covering is more fragile historically than in the other democracies. A closer inspection shows that what the Italian scandals unveil is not at all peculiar to Italy. On the contrary it's an expression of decadent capitalism's general tendency towards state totalitarianism and of the imperialist antagonisms that have marked the twentieth century in every part of the world.
The history of Italy since the beginning of the century is an ample demonstration.
The Mafia at the heart of the state and of imperialist strategy
In the middle of the 1920s Mussolini declared war on the Mafia: "I'll drain them dry the way I drained the Pontin marshes", he stated. In Sicily this task was assigned to the chief of police Mori and his men. But the years passed and the Cosa Nostra held out. When the prospect of the Second World War loomed the Mafia became an important strategic weapon for the future belligerents as it was firmly implanted both in the south of Italy and in the USA. Mussolini was interested in increasing his influence among Italo-Americans and so forming a "fifth column" in enemy territory. For this reason in 1937 he welcomed with open arms Vito Genovese, nick-named Lucky Luciano, who was the boss of the American Mafia and had a somewhat delicate relationship with US law. Genovese became a protégé of the fascist regime and was invited on more than one occasion to eat a friendly plate of spaghetti at the table of Il Duce in the company of such celebrities as Count Ciano (Mussolini's son-in-law and minister for foreign affairs) and Hermann Goering. In 1943 he received the highest distinction of the fascist regime; Il Duce himself pinned the Ordine di Commendatore on his breast. Genovese carried out little services for the fascist regime. He eliminated members of the Mafia who hadn't understood the new rules of the game; in New York he arranged for the assassination of an Italo-American journalist, Carlo Tresca, who ran an influential anti-fascist newspaper, Il Martello. But more important still, the help he gave put Lucky Luciano in a privileged position which enabled him to set up a network for all kinds of trafficking and also to enlarge his sphere of influence. The chief of police in Naples, Albini, became his man and in 1943 Genovese managed to get him named deputy secretary of state for the Ministry of the Interior. Ciano too was under Genovese's control because, as a drug addict, he depended upon him for his supply of drugs.
During this period the USA, which had entered the war in 1941, was quite aware of the strategic importance of the Mafia. On its home ground the US had to prevent a front being created among immigrants of Italian origin within the US. This meant that it became indispensable for the American state to negotiate with the Mafia as among other things they controlled the dockers' and lorry drivers' unions, sectors that were vital for army transportation and supplies. To reinforce their credibility the Mafia organized the sabotage of the liner The Normandy; it was set alight in February 1942 in the port of New York while being refitted to transport troops. Shortly afterwards a general dock strike, instigated by the Mafia-controlled union, brought the port to a standstill. In the end the American Navy asked Washington for permission to negotiate with the Mafia and its boss, Luciano, although he was in prison at the time, and Roosevelt eagerly agreed. The American state has always denied this and the details of Operation Underworld (as it was called) have always been classified. Lucky Luciano too insisted right up to his death that all this was no more than "bullshit and tall stories made up for idiots"[3]. However after decades of silence on the question it's now generally recognized that the American state negotiated an alliance with the Mafia. In accordance with their promise Luciano was freed after the war and "exiled" to Italy. As public prosecutor Thomas Dewey had arranged for the arrest and sentencing of Luciano ten years earlier and by virtue of the ensuing publicity had become governor of the state of New York in the intervening period. In an interview with the New York Post, he justified Genovese's release in these words: "An exhaustive enquiry has established that the help given by Luciano to the Navy during the war was considerable and valuable".
In fact the Mafia did help the American state a great deal during the war. Initially it placed a foot in both camps but in the middle of 1942 when the balance of forces tipped more clearly in favor of the Allies, the Mafia put its forces at the disposal of the USA. Within the US it did so by committing its unions to the war effort but it was most clearly illustrated in Italy. When American troops disembarked in Sicily in 1943 the support they received from the Mafia there was efficient and of great assistance to them. The disembarkation on 10th July was more like a day's outing; the American soldiers encountered little opposition and only seven days later Palermo was under their control. At the same time the British 8th army, which probably didn't receive the same degree of support from the Mafia, was forced to fight for five weeks and sustained numerous losses just to attain part of its objectives. According to some historians this alliance with the Mafia saved the lives of 50,000 American soldiers. From that time onwards General Patton called the Sicilian godfather, Don Calogero Vizzini, who organized the rout of the Italian-German forces, the "Mafia General". As a reward the latter, who up to then had spent many a year in prison, was elected Mayor of his town Villalba under the benevolent eye of the Allies. On 25th July, a week after the fall of Palermo, the fascist Grand Council removed Mussolini and one month later Italy capitulated. The sphere of influence established by Genovese was to be very important in the events following the disembarkation in Sicily. Ciano helped Badoglio to remove Mussolini. The black market structure set up in the Naples region worked in complete harmony with the Allied forces to their mutual benefit. Vito Genovese became the right hand man of Charlie Poletti, the American military governor of the whole of occupied Italy. Afterwards when he returned to the US Genovese became the most important Mafia boss there in the post-war period.
The alliance between the American state and the Mafia that was born during the war was not to be dissolved when the war ended. The Honorata Societa had proved itself such an efficient and useful partner that the American state couldn't run the risk that its services might be exploited by other interests especially when a new rival imperialist bloc emerged at the end of the Second World War: the USSR.
The Gladio affair: a manipulative structure for the strategic interests of the US bloc
In October 1990 Prime minister Giulio Andreotti revealed the existence of a clandestine organization that was run in parallel with the official secret services, financed by the CIA and integrated into NATO; its function was to counter-attack in the event of a Russian invasion and by extension to fight against Communist influence. This was the Gladio network. The revelation provoked a huge outcry; not only in Italy but internationally as a similar structure had been constituted in every country of the western bloc under the control of the USA.
"Officially" the Gladio network was constituted in 1956 but its real origin goes back to the end of the war. Even before the Second World War was over, once the fate of the Axis forces was sealed, the new rivalry developing between the USA and the USSR was monopolizing the attention of the most important states and their secret services. War crimes and those responsible for them were forgotten in the face of the new war that was beginning against the influence of the new Russian adversary. Throughout Europe the allied services, especially the American ones, were recruiting old fascists and Nazis in abundance, executioners and adventurers of all kinds, all in the name of the holy struggle against "Communism". For the "losers" this was an excellent opportunity to renew their virginity at little cost.
In Italy the situation was particularly delicate as far as western interests were concerned. It had the strongest Stalinist party in Western Europe which came out of the war covered in glory because of the decisive role it had played in the resistance against fascism. During the run up to the 1948 election, held in accordance with the new constitution set up after the Liberation, concern grew among western strategists because they were not at all sure what the result would be, and a victory for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) would be catastrophic. Given that Greece was plunged in civil war and the CP was threatening to take power by force, and that Yugoslavia was still within the Russian orbit, if Italy fell under the influence of the USSR it would represent a strategic disaster of the highest order for western interests. The danger was of losing control over the Mediterranean and therefore over access to the Middle East.
In the face of this danger the Italian bourgeoisie quickly forgot their old wartime divisions. In March 1946 they dissolved the High Commission which had been given the task of purging the state of those who had been too committed to supporting Mussolini. They demobilized the partisans. They replaced those who had been given positions of responsibility by the Liberation Committees, especially at the head of the police, by those who had been chosen by Mussolini in the past. From 1944 to 1948 an estimated 90% of personnel who had formed part of the state apparatus under the fascist regime were reinstated.
The electoral campaign that was supposed to christen the new democratic republic was in full swing. Financial and industrial establishments, the army, the police, all of whom had formed the bulwark of the fascist regime, began trumpeting the virtues of their old enemy, western democracy, and warning of the danger of "Communism". The Vatican, which is an important fraction of the Italian bourgeoisie, had initially supported Mussolini's regime; during the war it played a double game (as it is wont to do). It now threw itself into the electoral campaign. In front of 300,000 believers gathered in Saint Paul's Square the Pope declared that, "whoever offered their assistance to a party that didn't accept the existence of God was a traitor and a deserter". In the south of Italy the Mafia was active in the electoral campaign, financing Christian Democracy and instructing their contacts to vote for them.
All this took place under the benevolent eye and active support of the USA. In fact the American state spared no effort. In the USA the "letter to Italy" campaign was mounted urging Italo-Americans to send letters to their family in Italy advising them to vote the "right" way. The Voice of America radio station, which had vilified the wrong-doings of the fascist regime during the war, now denounced, day after day, the dangers of Communism. Two weeks before the elections the Marshall Plan was approved but the USA had not waited until then to inundate the Italian government with dollars; a few weeks earlier an aid package of $227 million was voted by Congress. Parties and organizations hostile to the PCI and to the Democratic Front which it was part of received aid in hard cash; the American press estimates the sum spent in this way at $20 million.
But, in case all this failed to prevent the PCI's Democratic Front from winning, the USA set in motion a secret strategy that would go into action in the event of a government dominated by the Stalinists coming to power. The American secret services contacted and coordinated the activity of the various clans within the Italian bourgeoisie who were opposed to the PCI, those at the head of the state apparatus, the army, the police, the big industrialists and financiers, the Vatican, the Mafia godfathers. They set up a clandestine resistance network that was to go into action if the "Communists" seized power and which recruited its members from among the "old" fascists, the army, the police, the Mafia milieu and generally among committed "anti-communists". The re-emergence of fascist groups was encouraged in the name of the defense of "liberty". Weapons were distributed secretly. The feasibility of a military coup d'état was considered and it was no accident that a few days before the election 20,000 police carried out maneuvers with armored weapons and that Mario Scelba, minister for the Home Office, announced that he'd set up a structure able to deal with armed insurrection. The decision was made that, in the event of the PCI winning, Sicily would secede. The USA was able to count on the Cosa Nostra to see to this as they supported the "independence" struggle of Salvatore Giuliano for this reason. In the meantime the American general staff would make serious plans for the occupation of Sicily and Sardinia by its armed forces.
In the end, on 16th April 1948 Christian Democracy with 48% of the votes carried the majority with 40 seats. The PCI was relegated to the opposition and Western interests were safe. But the first elections of the new Italian democratic republic that came out of the liberation were not at all democratic. They were the result of enormous manipulation. Anyway even if the result had gone the wrong way the "democratic" forces of the west were ready to organize a coup d'état, to sow disorder, to stir up civil war in order to re-establish their control over Italy. It was under these auspices and in these conditions, which couldn't have been any less democratic, that the Italian republic was born. It carries the marks to this day.
In order to achieve this electoral result a clandestine structure (a far cry from the official framework of how "democracy" functions) was set up under the leadership of the USA. It regrouped those sectors of the bourgeoisie who were most favorable to western interests and who thus formed the dominant clan within the Italian state. This was later to be called the Gladio network. In secret it regrouped a political nerve center (the summit), an economic body, various interest groups who profited from financing it, an armed wing, a rank-and-file who were recruited by the secret services and were responsible for low level tasks. This structure proved effective. It was maintained because the development of imperialist antagonisms in what's called the "cold war" period and the fact that the PCI continued to be a powerful party in Italy means that what was useful for western strategic interests post war remains so today.
However manipulating the election results by means of a tight control over the political parties, the main state organs, the media and the heart of the economy wasn't enough; there remained the danger that the situation would turn to the advantage of the PCI. In order to deal with "Communist subversion" the Gladio organization (or its equivalent under another name) has been preparing a prospective military coup d'état since the end of the war in order to preserve the foundations of western bloc domination:
- in 1967, L'Expresso denounced in its columns the putchist preparations organized three years earlier by the police and secret services. In the subsequent enquiry legal representatives came up against state secrets, the secret services tampering with evidence, obstruction from ministers and influential political figures and a series of mysterious deaths among those involved in the affair.
- on the night of 7/8 December 1970 commandos of the extreme right occupied the Home Office in Rome. But the plot failed and the several hundred armed men who paraded around in the Roman night went home at dawn. An escapade on the part of a few fascist elements? The preliminary investigations that went on for seven years showed that the plot was organised by Prince Valerio Borghese, that the military were involved at the highest level, that politicians within Christian Democracy and the Social Democratic Party were involved, that the military attaché to the American Embassy was in close liaison with those who initiated the coup. From then on the enquiry was gradually stifled, although Admiral Miceli, head of the secret services, was dismissed in 1974 following the issue of a warrant for his arrest which accused him of "having promoted, formed and organized together with others a secret association of military and civil personnel with the aim of stirring up armed insurrection".
- in 1973 another plot to instigate a coup d'état was uncovered by the Italian police. This one was organized by Eduardo Sogno, formerly Italian Ambassador to Rangoon. Once again the enquiry was impeded in the name of preserving "state secrets".
However if you look closely these plots have more the appearance of political maneuvers to maintain a certain political atmosphere than real attempted coups that failed. In fact in 1969 Italy experienced a wave of strikes, the "hot autumn", which marked the re-awakening of the class struggle and which revived the fear in the minds of NATO strategists that the social situation in Italy would be destabilized. After 1969 a strategy was to be developed that was intended to re-establish order and strengthen the state: the strategy of social tension.
The strategy of social tension: provocation as a method of government
In 1974 Roberto Caballero, a bureaucrat in the fascist union Cisnal, stated in an interview with L'Europeo: "When trouble arises in the country (disturbances, union unrest, violence) the Organization goes into action to create the conditions to restore order. If such trouble doesn't arise it's created by the Organization itself through the intermediary of all those groups of the extreme right (if not the groups of the extreme left) who are now involved in black subversion". He also goes on to say that the group of people controlling this organization "who include representatives of the Italian and American secret services as well as influential multinational companies, have chosen a strategy of disorder and tensions which serve as a justification for restoring order".
In 1969, 145 attacks were carried out. The climax that year was reached on 12th December with the bloody explosions in Rome and Milan which left 16 dead and about a hundred injured. The inquiry into these bombings was to spend three years on a false trail in pursuit of anarchists before discovering, in spite of all the obstacles placed in its path, the black trail: that of the extreme right and the secret services. 1974 was marked by two bloody attacks at Brescia (7 dead, 90 injured) and in a train, The Italicus (12 dead, 48 wounded). Once again the trail led to black terrorism. However from 1974 the "black" terrorism of the extreme right gave place to the terrorism of the Red Brigades. This reached its height with the kidnapping and assassination of the Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Then in 1980 the extreme right made a violent come-back with the bloody attack at Bologna station (90 dead) which was finally attributed to them. Once more the preliminary investigations implicated the secret services and once more the general heads of these services escaped trial.
The "strategy of social tension" was set up cynically and efficiently to create a climate of terror in order to justify a strengthening of the state's means of repression and control over society. The link between the terrorism of the extreme right and the secret services emerged clearly from the inquiries conducted even if these were suppressed. On the other hand such links weren't clearly shown by the police inquiries in relation to the terrorism of the extreme left as carried out by groups such as the Red Brigades and Prima Linea. However here too, with the benefit of hindsight, the facts and evidence gathered tend to show that "red" terrorism was encouraged, manipulated, used, if not directly instigated by the state and its parallel services.
It is already evident that the Red Brigade attacks had the same result as those of the neo-fascists: they created a climate of insecurity that served the state's ideological campaigns to justify the strengthening of the forces of repression. In the second half of the 1970s they helped to make the public forget what the earlier enquiries had begun to show: that the bombs from 1969 to 1971 were not the work of anarchists but of fascist elements used by the secret services. Because the perpetrators justified the "red" bombings in terms of a revolutionary phraseology they were more effective in confusing the process of developing consciousness that was taking place within the working class, and they increased the weight of repression that fell upon the most advanced elements of the proletariat and the revolutionary milieu who were lumped together with terrorism. In short, from the point of view of the state it was much more useful than "black" terrorism. That's why the bourgeois media that serves the state's interests attributed the earlier bombings that were carried out by the extreme right to anarchists. That was the whole point of the maneuver, to act as a provocation.
"The situation could arise in which allied countries show themselves to be passive or indecisive when confronted with communist subversion. The military espionage of the United States must be furnished with the means to mount special operations able to convince the governments of allied countries and public opinion that the danger of insurrection is a real one. The military espionage of the United States must try to infiltrate the seats of insurrection by means of agents on special mission with the task of forming action groups within the most radical movements." This quotation is an extract from the US Intelligence Field Manual, the campaign manual for American spies, and the intelligence leaders in Washington claim that it's false. But it's been authenticated by Colonel Oswald Le Winter, an ex-CIA agent and liaison officer in Europe, in a television documentary about Gladio. He also gave a concrete demonstration of what it means when he stated during the interview, "The Red Brigades as well as Baader-Meinhof and Action Directe were also infiltrated. Several of these left-wing terrorist organisations were infiltrated and controlled". He goes on to say that "reports and documents from our bureau in Rome testified that the Red Brigades had been infiltrated and that their nucleus received its orders from Santovito". General Santovito was the head of the Italian secret services (SISMI) at the time. A more reliable source, Frederico Umberto d'Amato, ex-chief of the political police and minister of the Home Office from 1972 and 1974 proudly relates that "The Red Brigades were infiltrated. This was difficult because they had furnished themselves with a very rigid and efficient structure. Nevertheless they were infiltrated spectacularly and with optimum results".
More than any other act committed by the Red Brigades, kidnapping Aldo Moro, killing his escort, holding him in captivity and finally executing him in 1978 arouses suspicion of a maneuver of some clan within the state and the secret services. It's amazing that the Red Brigades who were composed of young elements in revolt, highly motivated and committed but with little experience of clandestine war, were able to carry out an operation of such scope and so well. The enquiry brought to light many disturbing elements: a member of the secret services was present at the place where he was snatched, the bullets found on the scene had been treated in a particular way used by the special services, etc. The scandal provoked by the discovery that the state had had a hand in the bombings from 1969 to 1974, which had been wrongly attributed to the anarchists, had been forgotten. Even so the suspicion reigned within public opinion in Italy that state manipulation had lain behind the Red Brigade attacks. In fact Aldo Moro was kidnapped just before he was due to sign the "historic compromise" which was to seal a governmental alliance between Christian Democracy and the PCI. It was Moro who had master-minded the idea. His widow said that "I learnt from my husband or someone else that around 1975 he had been warned that his attempts to bring together the various political forces to govern for the good of the country had displeased certain groups and individuals. He'd been told that if he persisted with this political project he was likely to pay very dearly for his stubbornness". The "historic compromise" might have opened the doors of government to the PCI. As Prime Minister Moro was aware of the existence of Gladio. He probably thought that the infiltration of the PCI that it had carried out over the years in order to lessen the east's influence, and the fact that the party was distancing itself increasingly from Russian political choices, made it acceptable in the eyes of his western allies. But the way that the state abandoned him when he'd been seized shows that this was not the case. In the end the "historic compromise" wasn't signed. So the death of Moro corresponds perfectly with the interests that Gladio defended, and when D'Amato speaks of the "optimum results" obtained from the infiltration of the Red Brigades one wonders whether he is thinking of Moro's assassination.
The various enquiries have always been obstructed by certain state sectors, administrative delaying tactics and the sacred "secret d'état" but the discovery of the P2 Lodge in 1981 confirmed the suspicions of the judiciary as to the existence of a secret government, a parallel structure that was pulling the strings from the shadows and organizing the "strategy of social tension".
The P2 Lodge: the real hidden power of the state
In 1981 customs officials discovered a list of 963 "brother" members of the P2 Lodge. This list contained the cream of the Italian bourgeoisie: 6 current ministers; 63 high ranking civil servants in government ministries; 60 politicians including Andreotti and Cossiga; 18 judges and prosecutors; 83 big industrialists including Agnelli, Pirelli, Falk, Crespi; bankers such as Calvi and Sindona; members of the Vatican such as Cardinal Caseroli; important figures from the communications sector such as Rizzoli, owner of Corriere de la Sera or Berlusconi, owner of numerous television channels; practically all the heads of the secret services over the years among whom the generals Allavena, the head of SIFAR from June 1965 to June 1966, Miceli, named as head of the secret services in 1970, Admiral Casardi who succeeded him, General Santovito then patron of SISMI; 14 army generals; 9 admirals; 9 police chiefs; 4 air force generals and 4 top customs officials. This is just to mention those in the most prominent positions although names could also be cited from the universities, among trade unionists, the leaders of extreme right wing groups. Apart from radicals, leftists and the PCI the whole Italian political spectrum is represented. This list is certainly not complete however. A number of other names were mentioned at the time of the scandal without any proof being given. Among the rumours that were never substantiated it was even suggested that influential members of the PCI belonged to the P2.
However you can say that there's nothing very unusual in all this. In fact it's quite usual to find within the Freemasons a number of well-known figures who practice rituals and find this a good way to cultivate contacts and fill their address books. Even so the personality of the Grand Master, Licio Gelli, is disturbing.
Gelli was the head of this Lodge and unknown to the general public. However the course of the enquiry and subsequent revelations were to show the determinant influence that he's had over Italian politics over the years. His personal history is edifying. Gelli began his career as a member of the fascist party; at 18 he joined the Black Shirts who were to fight in Spain; during the war he actively collaborated with the Nazis to whom he handed over dozens of partisans and deserters. It seems that from 1943 he started to play both sides. He contacted the Resistance and the American secret services. After the war he fled to Argentina and returned to Italy with no difficulty in 1948. At the beginning of the 60s he joined the Freemasons, was active in the Propaganda Two Lodge, of which he rapidly became Grand Master and where he was joined by the most important heads of the secret services. There are a number of proofs of his subsequent power. When one of his children got married such prominent personalities as Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani and apparently Pope Paul VI sent sumptuous gifts. According to the enquiries Agnelli offered him a telephone in solid gold as a token of friendship. At the beginning of the 1980s, Gelli telephoned almost every day to the prime minister, the minister of trade and industry, the minister for foreign affairs, to the leaders of the main Italian political parties (Christian-Democrat, Socialist, Social-Democrat, Republican, Liberal and neo-Fascist). The cream of the Italian establishment filed to his residence near Florence and his private rooms at the luxury hotel Excelsior. The most noteworthy of these is Andreotti who is in fact his official political representative, his tool.
The conclusion of the commission of enquiry on the P2 Lodge is interesting. It considers that Gelli "belongs to the secret services of which he's the head; the P2 Lodge and Gelli are the expression of an influence exerted by the American masons and the CIA over the Giustiniani Palace since it reopened after the war; an influence that is evidence of the economic dependence on the American masons and its head Frank Gigliotti". Gigliotti is himself a CIA agent. In 1990 an ex-CIA agent, Richard Brenneke, stated, in a television interview that caused a scandal, "The United States government financed P2 to the tune of 10 million dollars a month". Look how clear it is. P2 and Gladio are one and the same. The charge sheet of 14th June 1986 refers to "the existence in Italy of a secret structure composed of military and civil elements whose final goal is to govern the existing political balance by controlling the democratic evolution of the country and who have used various means to realize this objective, including the use of attacks committed by neo-fascist organizations". It also speaks of "a sort of invisible government in which P2, deviant sectors of the secret services, organized crime and terrorism are tightly bound together".
However this lucid opinion of the judiciary will not change the way the Italian state functions to any great extent. Suspected of complicity in the Bologna bombing, Gelli left the country, was arrested in a Swiss bank on 14th September 1982 while he was drawing out 120 million dollars from a numbered account. On 10th August 1983 the old man carried out an incredible escape from his Genevan prison and disappeared into thin air until four years later when he gave himself up to the Swiss authorities. The Swiss extradited him to Italy. But although in 1988 he'd been condemned in his absence to ten years imprisonment, he was re-tried in 1990 and finally acquitted. The P2 scandal was banalised and forgotten. The P2 Lodge has disappeared but no doubt another secret structure, equally efficient, has replaced it. In 1990 Cossiga, ex-member of P2 and then prime minister, could say with satisfaction of Gladio that, "he's proud that the secret was kept for 45 years". The dozens killed in attacks are forgotten; forgotten too the countless murders. New scandals arrive in the nick of time to make us forget the old ones.
Some lessons
All these events, in which Italian history and crime are fused together, have not had much echo outside the country. It's all been presented as an "Italian business", with no link to what happens in the other big western democracies. In Italy itself, the role of the Mafia has been portrayed as a regional product of the south of Italy; the "strategy of tension" as the work of bent sectors of the secret services, and political scandals as the simple product of the corruption of certain politicians. In short, the real lessons have been glossed over and, with all the scandals, revelations, televised trials and resignations of statesmen, the illusion that the state is fighting against these affronts to democratic order has been kept up. However, this brief history of the "affairs" that have shaken the Italian republic since the 1930s shows something quite different:
- these affairs are not a specifically Italian product, but the result of the international activity of the bourgeoisie, in a context of sharpening imperialist rivalries. In these conditions, this means that Italy, far from being an exception, is an example of what's going on everywhere;
- they are not the expression of a corrupt minority of the ruling class, but of the totalitarian operation of the state in decadent capitalism, even if it hides behind the democratic mask.
Both the history of the rise of the Cosa Nostra and the revelations about the Gladio and P2 networks show that these are international, not just Italian affairs.
This is particularly obvious with the Gladio affair. The Gladio network, by definition, was a secret structure of NATO, and so an international one. It was the secret transmission belt for the USA's control over the countries of its bloc, whose function was to oppose by all available means both the maneuvers of the other bloc and the dangers of social instability. This is why it was secret. In the same way as it existed and acted in Italy, it existed and acted in other countries of the western bloc. There is no reason for it to have been otherwise: from the same causes, the same effects.
With this clarification, we can understand more easily the forces at work behind the colonels' coup d'état in Greece in 1967, Pinochet's in 1973, and all the others that followed in Latin America in the 70s. Similarly, it is not only in Italy that, from the end of the 60s, we have seen a wave of terrorist attacks, allowing the state to wage intense ideological campaigns aimed at disorienting a working class that was returning to the path of struggle, and at justifying the reinforcement of its weapons of repression. In Germany, in France, in Britain, in Japan, in Spain, in Belgium, in the USA, we can in the light of Italian events reckon that, behind the actions of terrorist groups of the far right, the far left, or the nationalist ones, lies the hand of the state and the secret services, and an organized international strategy under the auspices of the bloc.
Again, the edifying example of the role of the Mafia in Italy is not something recent, nor a specifically local product. The integration of the Mafia into the heart of the Italian state is not a new phenomenon: it goes back more than 50 years. It is not the product of a slow gangrene affecting only the most corrupt politicians: it is the result of the overturning of alliances that took place during the Second World War. The Mafia, acting on behalf of the Allies, played a decisive role in the fall of Mussolini's regime and, as payment for these services, gained a central place in the state. The alliance formed during the war didn't end with the war. The Mafia remained, as a clique within the Italian bourgeoisie, the USA's main source of support within the Italian state. The weight and role of the Mafia within the Italian state is thus above all the result of American imperialist strategy.
Is this an unnatural alliance between the US champion of democracy and the symbol of crime, dictated by the imperatives of world strategy? Alliance yes, unnatural no. Italian reality simply highlights a worldwide phenomenon of decadent capitalism: in the name of the sacrosanct imperatives of the state and imperialist interests, the great powers which, in front of the media, trumpet their democratic convictions, are behind the scenes engaged in all kinds of alliances which show that their official discourse is nothing but lies. It's a banality to note that the numerous dictators who reign in the peripheries of capitalism do so thanks to the patronage of one great power or another. The same goes for the various mafia-type clans around the world: their activity can only develop with impunity because they render such important services to the dominant imperialisms who have carved up the planet.
These mafia are very often an integral part of the ruling fractions of the bourgeoisie. This is obvious for a whole series of countries where the production and export of drugs is the essential economic activity, thus facilitating the ascent, within the ruling class, of the gangs which control this increasingly important sector of the capitalist economy. But this reality is not limited to the underdeveloped countries and we can find examples in the upper echelons of world capitalism. Thus, the alliance between the American state and the Italian Mafia during the Second World War extended into the USA itself, where at the same time the American branch of the Cosa Nostra was invited to participate in the affairs of state. The situation in Japan is quite similar to that in Italy and the recent scandals that have broken there show the omnipresent links between the politicians and the local mafia. The Italian example is thus also valid for the two biggest economic powers in the world, where a mafia has conquered a choice place within the state. This is not only due to the latter's economic weight, thanks to its control over extremely lucrative economic sectors - drugs, gambling, prostitution, rackets of all kinds - but also to the 'specialized' services that these cliques of gangsters can provide, services that correspond perfectly to the needs of the state in decadent capitalism.
It is true that the most 'respectable' bourgeoisies have always used the services of special agents when this was necessary, or those of its shadier fractions for 'unofficial' (i.e. illegal, according to its laws) activities. There are plenty of examples in the 19th century: espionage of course, but also the resort to criminal strong-arm elements to break strikes or the use of local mafia in the penetration of the colonies. But at this time this aspect of the life of capitalism was limited and circumstantial. Since it entered its phase of decadence at the beginning of the century, capitalism has been in permanent crisis. In order to ensure its domination, it can no longer rely on the progress it used to bring about. Unable to do that anymore, it can only base its power on lies and manipulation. What's more, during the course of the 20th century, which has been marked by two world wars, the exacerbation of imperialist tensions has become a preponderant factor in the life of capitalism. In the free-for-all that reigns all over the planet, everything is permitted, even the lowest blows. In order to respond to such requirements, the functioning of the state has had to adapt. To the extent that lies and manipulation, whether for the needs of imperialist defense or of social control, have become essential to the survival of the system, secrecy has become a central part of the capitalist state; the kind of classical democratic functioning of the bourgeoisie and its state which we saw in the 19th century are no longer possible. It is only kept up as an illusion aimed at hiding the reality of state totalitarianism, which has nothing democratic about it. The realities of power have been hidden because they are so inadmissible. Not only has power been concentrated in the executive, at the expense of the legislative, whose representative, parliament, has become a screen feeding the campaigns of the media; even within the executive, power has become concentrated in the hands of specialists in secrecy and all kinds of manipulations. In these conditions, not only has the state had to recruit an abundance of specialized manpower, creating a multitude of special services, each one more secret than the next; within the state, the result has been the ascent of those cliques of the bourgeoisie most experienced in secrecy and 'illegal' activity. In this process, the totalitarian state has extended its grip to the whole of society, including the underworld, culminating in a symbiosis in which it has become difficult to distinguish a politician from a businessman, a secret agent or a gangster.
This is the basic reason for the growing role of mafia-type bodies in the life of capital. But the Mafia isn't the only example. The P2 Lodge affair shows that Freemasonry, because of its occult functioning and its international affiliations, is an ideal instrument for use as a network of influence by secret services for the needs of imperialist policy. The different Masonic groupings in the world have been used for a long time by the state and the various western imperialist powers. The same is probably true for all the other important secret societies.
But the P2 Lodge was not only a tool of American imperialist policy. It was first of all part of Italian capital and it shows the reality of state totalitarianism behind all the democratic blather. It regrouped within itself bourgeois clans which have been dominating the state in a hidden manner for years. This does not mean that it regrouped the whole Italian bourgeoisie. The PCI was excluded since it represented another fraction whose foreign orientation was directed towards the east. It is also probable that other cliques exist within the Italian bourgeoisie, which could explain why the scandal broke. Furthermore, within the P2 Lodge several clans cohabited, linked by convergent interests under the American aegis and faced with the common danger of Russian imperialism and 'Communist' subversion. The list found at Gelli's house makes it possible to identify certain of these clans: the big industrialists of the north, the Vatican, a very important sector of the state apparatus, notably the upper echelons of the army and secret services, and, in a more discrete manner, the Mafia. The links between the latter and the P2 Lodge appears with the bankers Sindona and Calvi: the first one died of poisoning in prison, the second was found hanging from a bridge in London. Both of them had been involved in financial scandals when they were managing the funds of the Vatican and the Mafia. Strange alliances perfectly typical of contemporary capitalism. The P2 Lodge is a sulphurous cocktail which shows us that reality often outdoes the most outlandish fiction: occult societies, secret services, the Vatican, political parties, the milieux of business, industry and finance, the Mafia, journalists, trade unionists, academics, etc.
In fact, the exposure of the P2 Lodge revealed the veritable center of hidden decision-making which has presided over the destinies of Italian capitalism since the war. Gelli called himself, with cynical humor, "the grand puppet-master", the one who pulled the strings from behind the scenes, and whose "puppets" were the politicians. The great democratic process of the Italian state was thus no more than a skillful bit of stage-management. The most important decisions were taken elsewhere than in the official structures (national assemblies, ministries, presidency, etc) of the Italian state. This secret structure of power was maintained no matter what the result of the numerous electoral consultations which took place over these years. What's more, the P2 Lodge had all the cards it needed to manipulate the elections and keep the PCI out of power, as in 1948. Virtually all the leaders of the Christian Democratic, Socialist and Republican parties were under its thumb and the democratic game of "alternatives" was just sleight of hand. The reality of power did not change. Behind the scenes, Gelli and his P2 Lodge continued to control the state.
Here again, there is no reason why this should be an Italian specificity, even if elsewhere the occult decision-making center may not take the rather romantic form of a Masonic Lodge. For a number of years, the brutal aggravation of the crisis and the overturning of imperialist alignments resulting from the disappearance of the eastern bloc has provoked a shift in alliances between the various cliques within each national capital. Far from being the expression of a sudden desire to restore a more democratic way of operating, the present campaigns developing in a number of countries, stressing the need to clean out the most rotten apples from the state, are no more than a settling of scores between different cliques vying for control over the state. The manipulation of the media, the use of compromising dossiers is the weapons in this struggle, which can also take bloodier forms.
In fact, all this shows, in hindsight, that Italy, far being an exception with its succession of political scandals, is an edifying example and harbinger of what is now happening everywhere.
JJ
Some references:
On the Mafia: Le Syndicat de Crime by J M Charlier and J Marcilly, Presse de la Cite, Paris 1980. On Gladio and the P2 Lodge: Intelligences secretes, by F Calvi and O Schmidt, Hachette, Paris 1988; Gladio, EPO, Bruxelles 1991; as well as the documentary televised in three parts, Gladio, BBC, 1992. On the strategy of tension in Italy: Il partito del golpe, G Flamini, Ferrara, Boloventa, 1981.
[1] See International Review no 76
[2] P2 means "Propaganda Due" - Propaganda Two
[3] Testimony of Lucky Luciano
The beginning of 1994 has been marked by a major reality: the worldwide explosion of unemployment. The governments of the seven biggest western economic powers organized for the occasion, greatly reinforced by media propaganda, a meeting exclusively devoted to this question, qualified as 'problem number one'. The American president personally presented 'a global plan against unemployment' based on the 'success' of American methods. At the heart of Europe, in the biggest power on the continent, unemployment beat records unknown since the 30s. The German economic minister, Gunter Rexold, recognized: 'The fact that more than 4 million citizens cannot find work is one of the greatest challenges for the state and society since the foundation of the Federal Republic.' A report of the International Labor Organization affirmed that today 30% of workers in the world are unemployed or under-employed. That means 820 million people: 120 million are officially 'registered' unemployed, 700 million are 'under-employed'. What is the significance of this new aggravation of unemployment? Are the methods of the American government an effective remedy against the sickness? What are the perspectives for the class struggle?
An unprecedented situation
The more the dominant ideology, following in the footsteps of the campaigns on the 'collapse of communism', presents capitalism as the only possible form of social organization for modern humanity, the more devastating are the ravages created by the continuation of this system. The plague of unemployment, source of poverty, isolation, despair, which incarnates to the highest degree the absurd and merciless dictatorship of capitalist profit over the conditions of existence of the immense majority of society, is without doubt the most significant of these calamities.
The present increase in unemployment, expressing the new open recession in which capitalism has been now stuck for four years, did not sweep down on a world of 'full employment'. Far from it. It is now more than a quarter of a century, since the recession of 1967, which marked the end of the prosperity of the post-war reconstruction, that the contagion of unemployment has systematically infected the whole planet. The sickness has extended according to the slower rhythm of economic 'growth', with moments of acceleration and periods of relative stagnation. But the periods of relief have never annulled the effects of the preceding aggravation and through various fluctuations the number of unemployed has continued to increase in every country[1]. Since the beginning of the 70s, even the term 'full employment' has disappeared from the vocabulary. The adolescents of the last two decades are known as the 'unemployed generation'.
The explosion of unemployment which marked the beginning of the 90s did not therefore create a new problem. It only worsened an already dramatic situation. And how.
Germany, the biggest economic power in Europe, has suffered a massive increase in unemployment since 1991. In January 1994 the official figure of job seekers passed the 4 million mark. If we add to this figure those unemployed on 'social security' we get 6 million. Its the highest level since the 30s depression. The official rate of unemployment has reached 17% in former East Germany, 8.8% in the West. The perspective for the immediate future is also catastrophic: 'experts' have forecast 450,000 more unemployed from now to the end of the year. Massive redundancies are expected in the most powerful and competitive sectors of the German economy: 51,000 at Daimler-Benz, 30,000 in the chemical industry, 16,000 in aeronautics, 20,000 at Volkswagen...
The expenses of German unification momentarily created a market which allowed Europe to delay a little its entry into the open recession after that of the United States and Great Britain. The decline of the German economy into recession was accompanied by an explosion of unemployment in the whole of Western Europe. So in little more than 3 years the rate of (official) unemployment has gone from 9% to more than 12% in France, from 1.5%% to more than 9% in Sweden, from 6.5% to more than 10% in Holland and Belgium, from 16% to 23.5% in Spain.
According to estimates a minimum growth of 2.5% per year in Europe would be necessary simply to prevent the growth of unemployment. We are far from it. Even the most optimistic don't expect unemployment to diminish in Europe until 1995, or even 1996. For 1994 alone the OECD expects another million unemployed on the old continent.
To this quantitative increase, one must add a rapid qualitative deterioration , marked by the development of 'long-term' unemployment and youth unemployment[2] accompanying the generalized decrease in unemployed benefit both in value and over time.
In Japan, which has suffered the worst recession since the Second World War, unemployment is also increasing. Even if the absolute level is still low by comparison with the other powers, the number of 'official' unemployed has passed from 1.3 to nearly 2 million in three years. These figures however only give a very partial idea of the reality. The Japanese government has followed a policy of keeping the unemployed in the factories, paying them less and reducing work time, rather than putting them in the street. But this policy, accompanying that of 'employment for life' in the great industrial conglomerations, is giving way to the increase in redundancies. Toyota has clearly announced the future by proclaiming the end of its policy of guaranteed employment[3].
Faced with this situation, the government of the United States and, those of Canada and the United Kingdom, claim to have succeeded over two years in creating new employment and stopping the growth of unemployment. It is true that in the 'Anglo-Saxon' powers the official statistics show a reduction in unemployment. But this affirmation hides two major realities:
On the purely quantitative level, the present 'recovery' in employment appears insignificant in relation to that which followed the recession of 1979-82.
Thus, in the manufacturing sector in the United States, the number of employed has, at best, only been broadly maintained for 3 years, while certain sectors have even seen substantial falls. The big industrial enterprises continue to announce massive redundancies: in the month of November 1993 alone Boeing, ATT, NCR, and Philip Morris announced 30,000 job losses for the years to come. In the course of the Reagan recovery of the 80s industrial employment increased by 9%, while today this increase hasn't gone beyond 0.3%. In the tertiary sector the Clinton Administration claims to have increased employment by 3.8%, but this figure was 8% after 1982. The budget presented by Clinton for 1995 is one of the most rigorous for years: 'we must distinguish between luxury and necessity'. It anticipates the elimination of 118,000 jobs in the public administrations, a stage toward the 250,000 announced for the five years to come.
As far as the United Kingdom and Canada are concerned, the recovery of employment is limited for the moment to marginal, insignificant changes.
The facts are simple: there are today in all these three countries 4 million more unemployed than there were three years ago.[4]
As for the quality of employment, the reality of the United States illustrates the scale of the economic disaster. Workers are more and more reduced to a situation of permanent instability and insecurity. You are unemployed for six months, then work for three. The famous 'mobility' of employment actually means a sort of sharing of employment. You are unemployed for less time than in Europe but more often. According to a recent poll among the people in work in the United States, 40% are afraid of losing their job in the coming year. The jobs created are, in the main, in the tertiary sector. A great part of them are in 'services' such as parking cars for the big restaurants, walking dogs, minding children, packing shopping at supermarket check-outs, etc. The unemployed have been transformed into (very) cheap servants...30 million people, 25% of the active American population, are outside the normal circuit of employment, that is, live directly under the pressure of unemployment.
Whatever the forms of the sickness, whether in the United States or in Europe, in the industrialized countries or in the under-developed countries, unemployment has become effectively 'problem number one' of our epoch.
What does this reality mean?
The significance of the massive and chronic development of unemployment.
For the working class the negative significance of unemployment is an everyday reality. The proletarian who cannot find work is expelled from the process of production: the basis of social relations. For some time, when he is able to receive benefit, he has the impression of being a 'parasite' on society, then isolation, total poverty. For those who work still more abuse from the dominant class: 'if you are not happy, there are thousands of unemployed who are ready to take your place'. For the proletariat unemployment, whether a threat or a reality, is one of the most effective forms of repression, one of the worst aggravations of what makes the capitalist machine an instrument of exploitation and oppression.
The negative significance of unemployment may appear however less evident for the capitalist class. On the one hand the latter suffers from the classic blindness of exploiting classes, incapable of really perceiving the social damage of their domination; on the other hand it needs to believe and make believe that the irresistible growth of unemployment for more than a quarter of a century is not a sickness belonging to the historic senility of its system, but a 'natural' phenomenon, a sort of fatality due to technical progress and to the necessary adaptation of the system. "We have to live with it friends, yesterday's jobs are not coming back", declared the US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich during the G7 meeting on unemployment.
In fact, the propaganda on the "new recovery" is trying to theorize a situation that is developing in several countries (United States, Great Britain, Canada), where production has begun to grow without producing any significant fall in unemployment.
But there is nothing either "natural" or "healthy" in the massive development of unemployment. Even from the viewpoint of the health of capitalism itself, chronic mass unemployment is an unequivocal sign of senility.
For the capitalist class, unemployment is a reality which, at least to begin with, increases its power over the exploited by providing a blackmail weapon which forces down wages. This is one reason why the ruling class always needs a reserve of unemployed as part of the labor force.
But this is only one aspect. From the standpoint of capital, once unemployment rises above a certain minimum, it becomes a negative, destructive factor for capital, and the sign of a sickness. Capital feeds on proletarian flesh. Profit is made from living labor. Profit comes neither from raw materials, nor from machines, but from the "surplus value" of the exploited. When capital makes part of the labor force redundant, it deprives itself of a part of the true source of its own accumulation. If it does so, then, it is not for pleasure but because market forces and the demands of profitability oblige it.
The chronic slide into mass unemployment gives an expression in real life to two fundamental contradictions pointed out by Marx, which condemn capitalism historically:
- capitalism's inability to create through its own mechanisms an adequate solvent market to absorb all that it produces;
- the need to "replace men with machines" to maintain competitivity, which leads to a permanent tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
Today's explosion in unemployment, added to the mass of unemployed that has built up since 1967, has nothing to do with a "healthy restructuring" due to "progress". On the contrary, it is the practical proof of the definitive impotence of the capitalist system.
Capitalist "solutions"
The G7 meeting devoted to the problem of unemployment was a media manipulation typical of the way that the ruling class governs. The operation's media message could be summed up as: "If you are wondering if you're going to lose your job, or find another one; if you're worried about your children growing up unemployed; then you should know that the governments of the West's seven greatest economic powers are concerned about it, and are taking care of the situation".
Of course, no concrete decisions came out of this, apart from a request to the OECD to keep better count of the unemployed, and a promise to hold a new meeting of the G7 in Naples, in July, to talk about the problem again.
Clinton's "world plan against unemployment" is in fact nothing but an assertion on the part of the Americans of their firm intention to intensify the aggressivity of their commercial war against the rest of the world. When Clinton asks Japanese capital to open its domestic markets, or demands that the Europeans lower their interest rates to relaunch production (and so their imports from the US), he merely confirmed the warning delivered by his trade representative Micky Kantor: "Nobody should have any doubt about our commitment to go forward, to open markets, and to develop trade, just as we have done since President Clinton took office".
The spectacle offered by the G7 has at least demonstrated that the different national capitals are indeed incapable of finding a worldwide solution to unemployment. The only thing they know how to and can do is to exacerbate the trade war of each against all.
The grand principles asserted at the meeting are nothing other than the demands of competitivity for each national capital. And from this point of view, American capital could certainly propose its recent economic policy as a model. It has certainly put into practice all the recipes designed to improve the profitability of an ailing economy and arm it against the competition:
Lay off "excess" labor
"If we are honest with ourselves, restoring industrial competitivity is inimical to employment". These were the words of a highly placed official of the European Union at the G7 summit, one of the authors of the White Book presented by Delors. We have seen how US capital has put this into practice by improving "labor mobility".
Improve the profitability and productivity of labor
To achieve this, the Clinton administration has simply applied the good old capitalist method: pay the exploited less, while making them work harder. Clinton has put it in these, very concrete terms: "A longer working week than 20 years ago, for the same salary". And this is really happening: US manufacturing industry's working week is indeed longer today than it was 20 years ago. As for wages, during his electoral campaign Clinton promised to revise the minimum wage, and even to index-link it to inflation. Nothing has come of it. And since the minimum has been effectively frozen since the beginning of the 1980s, in reality the minimum wage has been steadily falling during the last 10 years. As for the so-called "social protection", in other words that part of the wage which capital pays in the form of certain services and state benefits, the Democrat administration has presented its famous Health Reform plan as a progress. In reality, there will be no extra spending by American capital in favor of the exploited, merely an attempt to rationalize an absurd and anarchic reality, which has led to medical expenses per employee being amongst the highest in the world.
Intensify the exploitation of labor power by modernizing the productive apparatus
Industrial investment has increased markedly during the last two years in the United States (+15% in 1993, with a similar rate forecast for 1994). These investments, though considerable in some sectors, are not accompanied by any significant increase in employment. For example, AT&T is preparing to invest colossal sums to develop "communication highways", which has been put forward as the investment program of the decade, and yet at the same time has announced 14,000 redundancies.
American methods are in fact nothing other than the good old recipes for capitalist economic warfare against both the exploited and its competitors. The policies of other national capitals are not fundamentally different. The governments of old Europe, which claim to have an exemplary system of social protection, have for years been systematically reducing "social spending". "Some measures, such as the Social Chapter [an annex to the Maastricht Treaty] need to be relegated to the museum where they belong" declared recently Kenneth Clarke, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer. The same attitude and the same practice have been developed by all governments, though they are not always presented in so provocative a manner.
At best, these policies make it possible to unload the effects of the crisis onto competing capitals[5]. In no way can they provide a general solution.
The growth in the profitability and productivity of labor may favor one capital at others' expense, for a time. But from the global point of view, once this increase in productivity has been generalized, it merely poses the problem of the inability of the market to absorb surplus production still more sharply. Reducing the wages and number of employees means reducing the available outlets. More productivity means that extra markets need to be fund.
Each national capital can only combat the problem at the local level by making it worse at the global level.
Finally, last but not least, the recovery in US investment has been financed, once again, by credit. The net national debt alone has risen from 30% to 39% of GDP. A similar movement has appeared in other countries to confront the recession. This can only aggravate the already fragile and explosive situation of world finance, which has been undermined by two decades of debt and speculation.
To encourage the use of credit, the US government has for three years imposed extremely low rates of short-term interest. The increase in these rates is both inevitable and dangerous for world financial stability. The low cost of short-term money has made possible the accumulation of enormous amounts of speculative capital. Wall Street in particular has been inundated with it[6]. The rise in the cost of credit runs the risk of causing a financial crash which would bring to nothing all the efforts at holding back the rise in unemployment.
The "solutions" that governments offer today to confront the problem of unemployment, apart from the fact that they represent direct attacks on the living conditions of the exploited, are build on the quicksands of colossal debt and unlimited speculation.
What perspectives for the class struggle?
Even if capitalism were to collapse completely, it would not disappear for all that. Without the revolutionary action of the proletariat, capitalism will continue to rot on its feet, dragging humanity down into endless barbarism.
What part will unemployment play in the course of the class struggle?
For the working class, the generalization of unemployment is worse than having police stationed in every home and workplace. It makes the struggle more difficult, because of the ignoble blackmail that it allows the ruling class exercise on the workers.
However, once it reaches a certain point the revolt against this repression itself becomes a powerful stimulant to the class struggle and its generalization. What percentage of unemployed is necessary for this to happen? The question cannot be answered, because it is not a matter of a mechanical relationship between the economy and the class struggle, but of a complex global process where the consciousness of the proletarians has a prime role to play.
Nonetheless, we know that the situation is totally different from the Great Depression during the 1930s.
From the economic viewpoint, the 1930s crisis was resolved by the development of the war economy and the application of Keynesian policies (in Germany on the eve of war, unemployment had almost entirely "disappeared"); today, the effectiveness of the war economy and Keynesianism lies behind us. They have been used to the hilt to bring us to the present situation, leaving a financial time-bomb ready to explode.
From the political viewpoint, the situation of the world proletariat today has nothing to do with that of the 1930s. Sixty years ago, the working class was weighed down by the bloody and dramatic defeats it had suffered during the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, especially in Germany and Russia. Ideologically and physically beaten, the proletariat let itself be atomized and enrolled under the banners of its national bourgeoisie, to march into a second world massacre.
Today's generations of proletarians have not suffered any heavy defeats. Starting with the struggles of 1968 - the first response to the beginning of the economic crisis - they have, with ups and downs, with advances and retreats in combativity, opened and maintained a new historic course.
The governments are right to tremble before what the experts call the "social unrest" which may result from the increase in unemployment.
They are still able to use those aspects of unemployment which make the proletarian struggle more difficult: its repressive, divisive, atomizing aspects, the fact that it is pushing more and more fractions of the revolutionary class - and especially the youth, who find it increasingly difficult to "enter active life" - into a decomposed and destructive marginalization.
But because it attacks the living conditions of the working class so violently, because it is universal and strikes without distinction in every sector and every country, unemployment demonstrates that for the exploited class the solution lies not in improved management, in reforming or restructuring capitalism, but in the destruction of the system itself.
The explosion of unemployment reveals the full extent of capitalism's failure, and the historic responsibility of the world working class.
RV
[1] In 1979, after the ‘recovery' which followed the recession of 1974-75 (known as the "First Oil Crisis"), there will still 2 million more unemployed than in 1973 in the United States, 750,000 more in West Germany. Between 1973 and 1990, on the eve of the present recession, the ‘official' number of unemployed in the OECD countries (the 24 industrialized Western countries, including Australia, New Zealand and Japan) increased by 20 million, from 11 to 31 million. And these are only the richest countries. In the "Third World" or the old "Socialist bloc" the extent of the disaster is incomparably worse. Many under-developed countries have never recovered from the recession of 1981-82, and have fallen without a break into the pit of poverty and under-employment.
[2] At the beginning of 1994, 50% of the unemployed in Europe had been without a job for more than a year. The "experts" predict that by the end of 1994, 25% of unemployed will be under 20 (International Herald Tribune, 14th March 1994).
[3] Japan has to confront a sharp drop in exports, which are the main motive force behind its growth. The effects are being felt throughout the economy, but they are especially significant in the consumer electronics sector where Japan is traditionally very strong. This sector's exports fell by almost 25% in 1993, and are now only 50% of their 1985 level. In 1993, Japan for the first time imported more color TVs than it exported. The paradox is that most of these imports came from Japanese subsidiaries set up in other South-East Asia countries to take advantage of lower labor costs. The exceptional economic "boom" of certain Asiatic economies springs in reality from the economic crisis, which forces the capitals of the major powers, subjected to the most merciless trade wars, to "delocalize" some of their production to countries where labor is cheap (and more disciplined) in order to lower their costs.
[4] 2.3 million more in the USA, 1.2 million in the UK, 600,000 in Canada.
[5] For example, the recent American "recovery" was achieved in part at the direct expense of Japanese capital, which lost market share to the US in some sectors.
[6] This is the case with so-called "derivative" stocks, which are based not on economic criteria linked to the health of the companies they are supposed to represent, but on mathematical equations built on purely speculative mechanisms (it is a sign of the times that a large part of recent US computer investments have been designed to modernize and increase the capacity of companies which speculate with these ultra-modern systems). These stocks represent a colossal sum of money: Salomon brothers holds $600 billion, the Chemical Bank $2,500 billion. These two alone come to $3,100 billion, which is the equivalent of the combined GDP of Germany, France and Denmark!
Links
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