IR15, 4th Quarter 1978         

The course of history

how is it that the ICC can talk about the intensification of inter-imperialist antagonisms today, while at the same time asserting that, since the end of the 1960s, bourgeois society has been in a period of rising class struggle? Isn’t there a contradiction between warning against the danger of war in Africa and the Middle East, and the analysis which holds that the economic crisis has opened up a new course towards proletarian struggle, towards a decisive confrontation between the classes? Are we living through re-run of the 1930s, with generalized war looming on the horizon, or is there a revolutionary perspective in front of us?
    This is a question of considerable importance. In contrast to the idle, feckless thought of social spectators, dynamic revolutionary thought can’t be satisfied with a ‘little of this’ and a ‘little of that’, all mixed up in a sociological sauce with no direction. If marxism only provided an analysis of the past for us to be able to say “well, we’ll see...”, it would be of little use.
    Social action, class struggle, demands an understanding of the forces involved, it demands a perspective. The action of the proletariat differs  according to its consciousness of the social reality in front of it, and to the possibilities offered by the balance of forces. The organized intervention of revolutionaries in the development of class consciousness also differs, if not in its basic content, then at least in its expression, according to the response given to the question: “are we going towards war, or towards a revolutionary confrontation!”
Marxist theory is not the dead letter of the Stalinist hangmen or of the academics; but it is the most coherent attempt to theoretically express the experience of the proletariat in bourgeois society. It is within the framework of marxism – not simply reappropriating it, but actualizing it – that revolutionaries can and must respond to the question of today’s balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat, between war and revolution.

THE HISTORIC PERIOD OF BOURGEOIS SOCIETY

In the first place, the perspective for class struggle is not an immediate question of days or years. It presupposes a whole historical development. During the course of its development, the capitalist mode of production, by destroying the economic, material bases of feudalism and other pre-capitalist societies, has extended its relations of production and the capitalist market across the entire planet. Although capitalism aspires to be a universal system, it comes up against the internal economic contradictions of its own way of functioning, which is based on exploitation and competition. Once it had effectively created a world market and developed the productive forces up to a certain point, capitalism was no longer able to surmount its cyclical crises by extending its field of accumulation. It then entered into a period of internal disintegration, a period of decline as a historical system, and ceased to correspond to the needs of social reproduction. In its period of decadence, the most dynamic system history has ever seen has unleashed a state of generalized cannibalism.
    The decadence of capitalism is marked by the aggravation of its inherent contradictions, by a permanent crisis. The crisis finds two antagonistic social forces confronting each other: the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class, living from surplus value; and the proletariat, whose interests as an exploited class, by forcing it to oppose exploitation, provide the only historical possibility of going beyond exploitation, competition and commodity production: a society of freely associated producers.
    The crisis acts on these two historically antagonistic forces in a different way: it pushes the bourgeoisie towards war and the proletariat towards the struggle against the degradation of living conditions. As the crisis develops, the bourgeoisie is forced to take refuge behind the concerted force of the nation state, in order to be able to defend itself in the frenzied competition of a world market that has already been divided up between the imperialist powers and can no longer extend itself. World imperialist war is the only possible outcome of this competition at international level. In order to be able to survive, capitalism has had to go through the deformations of its final stage: generalized imperialism. The universal tendency of decadent capitalism towards state capitalism is simply the ‘organizational’ expression of the demands of these imperialist antagonisms. The movement towards the concentration of capital, which at the end of the nineteenth century was already expressing itself in the form of trusts, cartels, and then multi-nationals, has been counteracted and transcended by the tendency towards statification. This tendency doesn’t correspond to a ‘rationalization’ of capital; it is a response to the need to reinforce and mobilize the national capital in a semi-permanent war economy, a state totalitarianism which envelops the whole of society. The decadence of capitalism is war – constant massacre, the war of all against all.
    Unlike last century, when the bourgeoisie strengthened itself by developing its domination over society, the bourgeoisie today is a class in decline, weakened by the crisis of its system whose economic contradictions bring only wars and destruction.
In the absence of a victorious proletarian intervention, a world revolution, the bourgeoisie cannot offer us any ‘stability’: on the contrary, it can only offer a cycle of destruction on an ever-growing scale. The capitalist class has no unity or peace in its own ranks; it has only the antagonism and competition engendered by relations of exchange and exploitation. Even in the ascendant period of capitalist development revolutionaries opposed the reformist ideas of Kautsky and Hilferding, according to which capitalism could evolve into a supra-national unity. The socialist left and Lenin in Imperialism, Highest Stage of Capitalism denounced this chimera of a world-wide unification of capital. Although the productive forces tend towards breaking out of the restricted framework of the nation, they can never do this because they are imprisoned by capitalist relations of production.
    After World War II a new version of this theory of supra-nationality was developed by Socialisme ou Barbarie for whom a ‘new bureaucratic society’ was beginning to create this worldwide unification. But ‘bureaucratic society’ doesn’t exist: the general tendency towards the statification of capital is neither a new mode of production nor a progressive step towards socialism as certain elements of the workers’ movement may have believed at the time of the first world war. As the expression of the exacerbation of rivalries between national factions of capital, state capitalism isn’t the realization of any kind of unity: on the contrary. The national capital is forced to regroup behind the great powers of the imperialist blocs, but not only does this not eliminate rivalries within the bloc, it further accentuates international antagonisms at the level of confrontation and war between the blocs. Only when it has to face up to its mortal enemy, the revolutionary proletariat, is the capitalist class able to realize a provisional international unity.
    Faced with the proletarian menace, unable to respond to the demands of the exploited class with a real amelioration of its living standards, indeed forced to impose an even more ferocious exploitation and a mobilization for economic, then military war, its capacities for mystification more and more used up, the bourgeoisie has to develop a hypertrophied police state, a whole apparatus of repression from the unions to concentration camps, in order to maintain its domination over a society in decomposition. But just as world wars express the decomposition of the economic system, the reinforcement of the repressive apparatus of the state shows the real historical weakness of the bourgeoisie. The crisis of the system undermines the material and ideological bases of the power of the ruling class, leaving it no way out except massacre.
In contrast to the bourgeoisie’s collapse into the bloody barbarism of its decline, the proletariat in the decadent epoch represents the only dynamic force in society. The historical initiative is with the proletariat; it alone has the historical solution which can take society forward. Through its class struggle, it can hold back and ultimately stop the growing barbarism of decadent capitalism. By posing the question of revolution, by ‘transforming the imperialist war into a civil war’, the proletariat forces the bourgeoisie to answer it on the battlefields of the class war.

WHAT PERSPECTIVE FOR TODAY ?

We have posed the question whether in the course of a period of rising class struggle, there can be an expression and even an aggravation of imperialist antagonisms; we can clearly answer in the affirmative. The bourgeoisie contains within itself the tendency towards war, whether it’s conscious of this or not. Even when it’s preparing for a confrontation with the proletariat imperialist antagonisms continue to exist. They depend on the deepening of the crisis and don’t originate in the action of the proletariat. But capitalism can only go all the way to generalized war if it has first mastered the proletariat and dragooned it into its mobilizations. Without this, imperialism cannot reach its logical conclusion.
Between the crisis of 1929 and the second world war, capitalism took ten years, not only to set up a war economy sufficient for its destructive needs, but also to complete the physical crushing and ideological disarmament of the working class, which was dragooned behind the ‘workers’ parties’ (Stalinists and Social Democrats), behind the banners of fascism and anti-fascism, behind the Union Sacree. Similarly, before August 1914, it was the whole process of the degeneration of the 2nd International and of class collaboration which prepared the ground for the treason of the workers’ organizations. World war doesn’t break like lightening in a blue sky; it follows the effective elimination of proletarian resistance.
If the class struggle is strong enough, it’s not possible for generalized war to break out; if the struggle weakens due to the physical or ideological defeat of the proletariat, then the way is open to the inherent tendency of decadent capitalism: world war. After this, it is only during the course of the war, as a response to unbearable living conditions, that the proletariat will be able to return to the path of class struggle. There is no way of getting round this: you cannot ‘make the revolution against the war’, answer the mobilization decrees with a general strike. If war is on the verge of breaking out, it is precisely because the class struggle has been too weak to hold the bourgeoisie in check, and there can be no question of selling the proletariat illusions about this.
    Today, workers cannot ignore the gravity of the expressions of imperialist rivalry, the seriousness of the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat. If World War II was simply a continuation of World War I, and the third a continuation of the second, if capitalism only goes through period of ‘reconstruction’ as intervals between wars, the present destructive capacity of the system gives us little hope in the possibility of an upsurge of the proletariat during the course of a third holocaust. It is quite probable that the destruction would be so great that the possibility of socialism would be put off indefinitely if not  forever. The stakes are thus being played for today and not tomorrow; the working class will rise up in response to an economic crisis, not a war. Only the proletariat, by struggling on its class terrain against the crisis and the deterioration of its living standards, can hold back the bourgeoisie’s constant tendency towards war. It is in the present period that the balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will decide whether we are going towards socialism or the final collapse into barbarism.
    Thus if we point out the seriousness of the confrontations between the blocs today, it is in order to unmask the hideous reality of the capitalist system, which we have learnt about through sixty years of suffering. But this general, necessary warning in no way signifies that the perspective today is towards world war or that we are living through a period of triumphant counter-revolution. On the contrary, the balance of forces has tilted in favour of the proletariat. The new generations of workers haven’t suffered the same defeats as the previous ones. The dislocation of the ‘socialist’ bloc as well as the workers’ insurrections in the eastern bloc have considerably weakened the mystifying power of bourgeois Stalinist ideology. Fascism and anti-fascism are too used and the ideology of the ‘rights of man’, which is being given the lie from Nicaragua to Iran, isn’t enough to replace them. The crisis, coming after the deceptive prosperity of the post-war reconstruction, has provoked a general reawakening of the proletariat. The wave of struggles between 1968 and 1974 was a powerful response to the beginnings of the crisis, and the combativity of the workers has left no country untouched. This rebirth of workers’ combativity marks the end of the counter-revolution, and is the touchstone of today’s revolutionary perspective.
    There has never been a simplistic, unilateral social situation. Inter-imperialist antagonisms will never disappear as long as the capitalist system is still alive. But the combativity of the workers is an obstacle, the only one today, to the tendency towards war. When there is a downturn in the class struggle, inter-imperialist antagonisms accelerate and become sharper. This is why revolutionaries insist so much on the development of the autonomous struggle of the working class, on wildcat strikes which break out of the union jail, on the tendency towards the self-organisation of the class, on the workers’ combativity against austerity and the sacrifices demanded by the bourgeoisie.
The crisis in its ever-descending course, leads the decomposing capitalist class to war. On the other hand, it pushes the revolutionary class into sporadic, uneven explosions of struggle. The course of history is the result of these two antagonistic tendencies: war or revolution.
Although socialism is a historical necessity, because of the decadence of bourgeois society, the socialist revolution is not a concrete possibility at every moment. Throughout the long years of the counter-revolution the proletariat was defeated, its consciousness and its organization too weak to be an autonomous force in society.
    Today, on the other hand, the course of history is moving towards a rise in proletarian struggles. But time presses; there is no fatality in history. A historical course is never ‘stable’, fixed for all time. The course towards the proletarian revolution is a possibility which has opened up, a maturation of the conditions leading to a confrontation between the classes. But if the proletariat doesn’t develop its combativity, if it doesn’t arm itself with the consciousness forged in its struggles and in the contributions of the revolutionaries within the class, then it won’t be able to respond to this maturation with its own creative and revolutionary activity. If the proletariat is beaten, if it is crushed and falls back into passivity, then the course will be reversed and the ever-present potential for generalized war will be realized.
    Today, the course is towards the development of the class struggle. Because the working class isn’t defeated, because all over the world it is resisting the degradation of its living conditions, because the international economic crisis is wearing down the dominant ideology and its effects on the class, because the working class is the force of life against the cry of ‘viva la muerte’ of the bloody counter-revolution – for all these reasons, we salute the crisis which, for a second time in the period of capitalist decadence, is opening the door of history.

JA

 

The International Review of the ICC has on several occasions dealt with the question of the period of transition from capitalism to communism. It has published at least ten texts which have in particular gone into the problem of the relationship between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state in the period of transition. The idea that these two notions are not identical has appeared in the following texts: ‘Prob­lems of the Period of Transition’ and ‘The Proletarian Revolution’ (IR, no.1); ‘The Period of Transition’ and ‘Contribution to the Study of the Question of the State’ (IR, no.6); ‘The State and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ and ‘The Communist Left in Russia’ (IR, no.8); ‘The Political Confusions of the CWO’ (IR, no.10) ; ‘Draft Resolution on the State in the Period of Transition’ (Second Congress of the ICC) and ‘State and Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ (IR, no.11). This idea has often been considered as scandalous and ‘absolutely foreign to Marx­ism’ by a number of revolutionary elements, who have rushed forward brandishing that famous quote from Marx in Critique of the Gotha Program where he says that, during the period of transition, “the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The following text is a new contribution on this question. It aims in particular to establish that the non-identity between state and dictatorship of the proletariat is in no way ‘anti-Marxist’; on the contrary, although it may go against certain formulae by Marx and Engels, it is wholly within the framework of Marxism.

Nature and function of the state

At the heart of Marx’s theory of the state is the notion of the withering away of the state.

In his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of the state, with which he began his life as a revolutionary thinker and militant, Marx not only fought against Hegel’s idealism which held that the idea was the point of depart­ure for all movement (making the “idea the subject, the real subject, or properly speaking, the predicate” in all cases, as he wrote in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State), he also vehemently denounced the conclusions of this philosophy, which made the state the mediator between social man and universal political man, the reconcilia­tor of the split between private man and universal man. Hegel, noting the growing conflict between civil society and the state, wanted the solution to this contradiction to be found in the self-limitation of civil society and its voluntary integration into the state, for as he said, “it is only in the state that man has an existence which conforms with reason” and “everything that man is, he owes to the state and it is there that his being resides. All his value and spiritual reality, man only has them through the state”(Hegel, Reason in History). Against this delirious apology for the state Marx said “human emancipation is only completed when man has recognized and organized his own forces as social forces, so that social force is no longer separated from himself in the form of political force”, ie the state (from The Jewish Question).

Right from the start Marx’s theoretical work took up a position against the state, which was a product, an expression of, and an act­ive factor in, the alienation of humanity. Against Hegel’s strengthening of the state, and its absorption of civil society, Marx resolutely stood for the withering away of the state as synonymous with the emancipa­tion of humanity, and this fundamental notion would be enriched and developed throughout his life and work.

This radical opposition to the state and the announcement of its inevitable withering away weren’t the product of Marx’s personal geni­us, even though it was Marx who put forward the most rigorous analysis, the most coher­ent demonstration of this. This problem was there in the reality of the epoch, and it was in this same reality that the first germs of an answer began to come to the sur­face with the appearance and struggle of a new historic class: the proletariat. How­ever great Marx’s own contribution and merits, he simply made theoretically coherent the movement of the proletariat that was unfolding in reality.

At the same time as he fought against Hegel’s idealism and apology for the state, Marx equally rejected all the ‘rationalist’ theories which sought to base the state on ‘critical reason’ or those theories which rejected it in the name of a moral principle like Stirner and Bakunin.

A historical product of the development of the productive forces and of the division of labor -- which led to the break-up of prim­itive communist society -- the new society based on private property and the division between antagonistic classes necessarily gave rise to this superstructural institu­tion, the state.

The expression of a historic situation in which society has entered into an irreduc­ible state of contradiction and antagonisms1, the state is at the same time the indis­pensable institution for maintaining a cer­tain cohesion, a social order; an institution for preventing society from destroying itself completely in sterile struggles, and for im­posing this social order (by force) on the exploited classes. This order is the econ­omic domination of an exploiting class in society; the state is the guardian of this class and it is through the state that the economically dominant exploiting class acc­edes to the political domination of society. The state therefore is always the emanation of exploiting classes and, as a general rule, of the immediately predominant class. The state originates from this class, a fraction of which specializes in state functions.

From what we have just said it follows that the fundamental role of the state is to be the guardian of the established economic order.

When new exploiting classes arise, represent­ing the new productive forces which have developed within society to the point where they have entered into contradiction with the existing relations of production and so demand a change in them, they come up against the state, which represents the last bastion of the old society. The revolutionary dynamic is always situated in civil society, in the newly rising classes, never in the state as such. It is thus essentially an instrument of social conservation. To say that the state is conservative or revolutionary acc­ording to the state of the class which dom­inates it, to put these two moments on the same level, to make a parallel between them, is to gloss over the problem of the fundamental character of the state, its essential function. Even when the revolutionary class has conquered the state by force, reconstr­ucting it in order to adapt it to its needs and interests, it doesn’t change the essen­tially conservative nature of the state, or give it a new revolutionary nature. And this for two reasons:

-- first, that the new state is simply the result, the culmination of a transforma­tion which has already taken place else­where, in the economic structure of society. The new state simply registers and conse­crates an existing fact.

-- secondly, the fundamental task of the new state is not to rid itself of the vestiges of the old, already defeated classes, but above all to defend the new social order against the threat of new exploited classes, to ensure their subjugation. It’s impor­tant not to confuse the appearance of the state with its underlying reality.

Some people, basing themselves on this or that event which has taken place at moments of social crisis and revolution, think that you can ascribe a dual nature to the state, conservative and revolutionary at the same time. They cite, for example, the acts of the Convention and the Terror directed ag­ainst the feudal aristocracy, the internal and external war during the French revolu­tion, the support given at certain moments to the bourgeoisie by the monarchy in France, the policies of Peter the Great in Russia, etc. Against this, we would like to point out that:

1. The exception only proves the rule.

2. You can’t see and understand the course of history and its fundamental laws through purely circumstantial spectacles -- like you can’t measure the distance be­tween galaxies with a ruler.

3. It’s not our task to study and explain in a detailed way every separate event (that would be phenomenology) but to explain their general pattern, to draw from them a general set of laws.

4. We are studying the state in history, not the history of the state. We’re not stud­ying each moment, each day of its existence, but the existence of the state itself, which corresponds to a definite, limited historical era; the era of the division of society into classes. Throughout this historic era, the fundamental function of the state has been to maintain an existing social order. Maintain, keep up, guard -- all these are ways of saying con­serving as against creating. It’s the passive as opposed to the active, the static as opposed to the dynamic.

5. Against whom does the state ensure the defense of the existing order? Which social forces threaten the social order2? One possible reply; the old ruling classes.

These old classes have been defeated and overcome above all in the economic sphere. The revolution simply consecrates this defeat, it doesn’t determine it. That’s why Marxists could speak of such political revolutions as ‘palace revolutions’; the real transformation having already taken place in the entrails of society, in its underlying reality, the economic struct­ure.

Another important observation; the revo­lutionary movement never breaks out from inside the existing state; even the pol­itical revolution breaks out in civil so­ciety against the state. And this is be­cause it’s not the state which revolution­izes society, but revolutionary society which modifies and adapts the state. The new state arises after the event of the revolution; it may undertake some spectacular measures against members of the old ruling class, but this never goes very far or lasts for very long. The old ruling class continues to exist and its members continue to occupy an important place in the state apparatus, often a preponderant place. This is proof that the old ruling class is not the great threat it’s claimed to be, that the strengthening of the state is not mainly dir­ected against this class (which is the supposed evidence for the state’s revolu­tionary nature). This is an enormous over-estimation of the state, which by and large is not borne out by history. The basic threat to the existing order comes not from the defeated classes but from the oppressed classes and new rising historic classes -- the first in a constant manner, the second potentially -- who pres­ent this mortal danger, against which the existing order has need of the state, this concentrated force of coercion and repre­ssion.

The state is not so much a barricade against the past as one against the fut­ure. It is this which makes its defense of the present (conservatism) a function closer to the past (reactionary) than to the future (revolutionary). In this sense one can say that while classes rep­resent productive forces in development, the state is the defender of the relations of production. The historical dynamic always comes from the first the fetters from the second.

6. As for the examples of the supposedly progressive or revolutionary role played by the French monarchy, Peter the Great, etc., it is clear that the state was led to carry out progressive acts not because this was inherent to its progressive na­ture but in spite of its conservative na­ture, under the pressure of new progress­ive forces. The state can’t completely avoid the pressures coming from civil society.

It is a fact that the suppression of serfdom and the development of capitalist industrialization in Russia was carried out under the Tzars, just as industrial­ization in Germany was carried out by the Prussian Junkers, and in France under Bonapartism. This doesn’t make these regimes and states revolutionary forces; the latter two, Germany and France, were born directly out of the counter-revolu­tion of 1848-51.

7. As for the argument about the dual nature of the state -- counter-revolutionary and revolutionary at the same time -- it is no more serious than the argument put forward in defense of the unions, which sees them as having a working-class na­ture as well as a bourgeois nature, be­cause here and there they defend this or that worker. You could equally well talk about the dual nature of the CRS (French riot police) because from time to time they save people from drowning. In fact every time someone doesn’t know how to argue they naturally resort to this ‘dual nature’ idea.

These few remarks don’t add anything substan­tial, but are necessary to show up the inan­ity of the objections, and to make our under­standing of the conservative function of the state more precise.

We must be extremely careful not to fall into the confusion and eclecticism which holds that the state is both conservative and rev­olutionary. This would turn reality on its head and open the door to Hegel’s error which makes the state the subject of the movement of society.

The thesis of the conservative nature of the state, which is above all concerned with its own conservation, is closely and dialectic­ally linked to the notion that the emancipa­tion of humanity can be identified with the withering away of the state. The one high­lights the other. By glossing over the for­mer you obscure both the theory and the real­ization of the necessary withering away of the state.

A failure to understand the conservative na­ture of the state inevitably has as its cor­ollary a failure to insist on the fundamental Marxist idea of the withering away of the state. The implications of this are extreme­ly dangerous.

What is even more important, and concerns us first of all, is to show that the state -- old and new -- has never been and can never be, by definition, the bearer of the move­ment towards the abolition of the state. Now, we have seen that Marx’s theory of the state identifies the movement towards the elimination of the state with the movement towards the emancipation of humanity; and, since the state can’t be the subject of its own elimination, it follows that by its very nature it can’t be the motor or even the instrument of human emancipation.

Marx’s theory of the state also shows the inherent tendency of the state and “that fraction of the ruling class which makes it up and which forms itself into a separate body” to “free” themselves from civil soc­iety, to separate themselves, to “raise (themselves) above society” (Engels). With­out ever achieving this completely and while continuing to defend the general interests of the ruling class, this tendency is never­theless a reality and opens the way to new contradictions, antagonisms and alienations, which Hegel already saw and noted and which Marx took up; above all the growing opposi­tion between the state and civil society, with all its implications. This tendency in turn explains the numerous social convul­sions in the riding class itself, the diff­erent varieties of state forms existing in a given society, and their particular rela­tionship with society as a whole. This ten­dency to make itself independent of society means that self-conservation is a major pre­occupation of the state, and further reinforces its conservative nature.

With the development of class society in its succeeding forms, the state develops and strengthens itself, pushing its tentacles into every sphere of social life. Its num­erical mass grows proportionally. The up­keep of this enormous parasitical mass is maintained through a growing levy on social production. By raising taxes directly and indirectly, which it does not only from the incomes of the working masses but also from the profits of the capitalists, the state even enters into conflict with its own class, which wants a state that is strong but also cheap. For the men of the state apparatus, this external hostility and their common interests give rise to a response of defense and solidarity, an esprit de corps which solidifies them into a caste of their own.

Of all the state’s fields of action, coer­cion and oppression are its most character­istic functions. For this purpose it has an absolute exclusive monopoly of armed force. Coercion and oppression are the raison d’être of the state, its very being. It is the specific product of them, endlessly reproducing, amplifying and perfecting them. Complicity in massacres and terror is the most solid cement for the unity of the state.

With capitalism we reach the culminating point of the entire history of class society. Although this long historical march, traced in blood and suffering, has been the inevit­able tribute humanity has had to pay for the development of the productive forces, the latter today have reached the point where this kind of society is no longer necessary.

In fact its survival has become the greatest fetter to the further development of the productive forces, even endangering the very existence of humanity.

With capitalism, exploitation and oppression have reached a paroxysm, because capitalism is the condensed product of all previous societies of exploitation of man by man.

The state in capitalism has achieved its des­tiny, becoming the hideous and bloody monster we know today. With state capitalism it has realized the absorption of civil society, it has become the manager of the economy, the boss of production, the absolute and undis­puted master of all members of society, of their lives and activities; it has unleashed terror and death and presided over a generalized barbarism.

The proletarian revolution

The proletarian revolution differs radically from all previous revolutions. While all revolutions have in common the fact that they are determined by and express the revolt of the productive forces against the rela­tions of production of the existing order, the proletarian revolution expresses not simply a quantitative development but poses the necessity for a qualitative, fundamental change in the course of history. All the previous modifications which took place in the development of the productive forces were contained within the historic epoch of scarcity, which made the exploitation of la­bor power an inescapable necessity. The changes they brought about did not diminish exploitation but made it more intense, more rational, extending it to greater and great­er masses of the population. They assured a more advanced expropriation of the instru­ments and the products of labor.

In the dialectical movement of human history they make up one and the same period, that of the negation of the human community, that of the Antithesis. This fundamental unity means that the different societies which have succeeded each other in this period appear, whatever their differences, as a progressive continuity. Without this con­tinuity it would be impossible to explain events as contradictory and incomprehensible at first sight as:

-- the long survival of the political domin­ation of classes who have long since lost their economic domination; the ability of these classes to accommodate themselves to the needs of the new exploiting class.

-- the long social survival of old classes and the active role they continue to play in the new society.

-- the possibility of the new victorious class collaborating with or incorporating the old defeated class.

-- the possibility for new ruling classes to maintain or reintroduce modes of exploit­ation which they had long ago fought ag­ainst and defeated. For example the slave traffic carried on and defended by capit­alist Brtainn until the second half of the 19th Century.

-- the alliances of factions of the bourgeois­ie with the nobility, and against their own class.

-- the military support bourgeois Britain gave to the feudal Vendee against the bourgeois revolution in France. The mil­itary alliance of bourgeois Britain with all the feudal countries against the rul­ing bourgeoisie in France. The long all­iance between this same Britain and the ultra-reactionary regime of Tzarism. The support given by this first, most developed capitalist nation to the slave-hold­ing South against the industrial, progress­ive bourgeoisie of the North during the American Civil War.

This explains why the revolutions of this era have been mere transfers of the state machine from one exploiting class to another and very often social transformations which take place even without a political revolu­tion.

It is quite different with the proletarian revolution because it is not in continuity with the problems posed by scarcity, but is the end of scarcity of the productive forces; its problem is not how to make exploitation more effective but how to suppress it; not how to reinforce oppression but how to des­troy it for good. It is not the continuity of the Negation, but the Negation of the Negation, the restoration of the human comm­unity on a higher level. The proletarian revolution can’t reproduce the characteris­tics of the previous revolutions we’ve just mentioned, because it is in radical opposi­tion to them, both in content, form and means.

One of the fundamental characteristics of the proletarian revolution is -- as opposed to previous revolutions, and bearing in mind the level of development of the productive forces -- that the necessary transformations can’t take place with long gaps from country to country. The whole world is straight away its theatre of operations. The prolet­arian revolution is international or it is nothing. Having begun in one country it must extend itself to all countries or quick­ly succumb. Other revolutions were the work of minority, exploiting classes against the majority of the toiling masses; the prolet­arian revolution is that of the immense maj­ority of the exploited against a minority. Being the emancipation of the immense major­ity in the interests of the immense majority, it can only be realized by the active and constant participation of the immense major­ity. It can in no way take previous revolu­tions as its model because it is opposed to them on every point.

It has the task of overturning all the exist­ing structures and relations, beginning with the total destruction of the superstructures of the state. In contrast to previous revo­lutions which simply completed the economic domination of the new class, the revolution of the proletariat -- a class which has no economy of its own -- is in its first act a political revolution which, through revolu­tionary violence, opens up and ensures the process of total social transformation.

The dictatorship of the proletariat

As the Communist Manifesto showed, the bour­geoisie has not only created the material conditions for the revolution, it has also produced the class that will be its grave­digger, the subject of the revolution; the proletariat. The proletariat is the bearer of this radical revolution, because it is a “class with radical chains”, a class which is the “negation of society”, which in Marx’s terms embodies all the sufferings of society, against which “no particular wrong, but wrong generally is perpetrated”, a class which has nothing to lose but its chains and which can’t emancipate itself without emancipating the whole of humanity. This is the producer class, the class of associated labor par excellence. This is why the proletariat is the only class which can solve the hitherto insurmountable and unbearable contradictions of class society. The proletariat’s hist­orical solution is communism. The depth of this historic change and the impossibility of any measures in this direction being ta­ken within capitalism -- which means that the revolution is the pre-condition for it -- demands the replacement of capitalist class rule by the rule of the proletariat. The proletarian dictatorship is undoubtedly linked to this rule, but there’s more to it than that. “Dictatorship”, wrote Lenin, “means an unlimited power, based not on law but on force”3. The idea of force linked to the dictatorship is not new; what interests us is the first part of this phrase, which contains the idea of an “unlimited power”. Lenin stressed this a great deal; “...this power recognizes no other power, law or norm no matter where they come from”4. Part­icularly interesting is this other passage where he talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat as something more than just force:

“This question is always posed by those coming across the word dictatorship for the first time in a new context. People are only used to seeing it in the sense of police power and police dictatorship. To them it’s strange that there could be a power without any police, a dictatorship which isn’t a police dictatorship”5.

This was the power of the Soviets which Lenin exalted so much and which created “...new organs of revolutionary power; workers’, sol­diers’ and peasants’ soviets, new authorities in the town and countryside” and which were based neither on the “force of bayonets” nor on “the commissariat of police” and which “had nothing in common with the old instru­ments of force”6. Wasn’t this dictator­ship also founded on force and coercion? Yes, of course, but what’s important is to distinguish its novel quality. Whereas the dictatorship of former classes was essen­tially directed against the future, against human emancipation, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the dictatorship “of the peo­ple against the oppression of the police or­gans of the old power”. This is why it must be based on something more than just force.

“The new power, this dictatorship of the immense majority, can only maintain it­self with the aid of the broad masses, only by inviting in the freest possible way the masses as a whole to participate in this power. Nothing hidden, nothing secret, no formal rules and regulations ...it is a power which is open to every­one’s view, which does everything under the eyes of the masses, which is access­ible to the masses, which emanates direct­ly from the masses; it is the direct or­gan of the popular masses, without any intermediary”7.

We have here not a description of communism, where the problem of power doesn’t exist, but of the revolutionary period in which power occupies a central place. It’s the question of the power of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In Lenin’s writings we see what the dictatorship of the prolet­ariat has to be, and we also find the essence of the Marxist idea of the withering away of the state. In the same vein Engels could write:

“Gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

The dictatorship of the proletariat is the unlimited power of a class freely and fully exercising its creative powers; it’s the taking over -- without intermediaries -- of its own destiny and the destiny of society as a whole, bringing in its wake the other labor­ing classes and strata. The proletariat cannot delegate this power to any particular formation without abdicating its own emanci­pation, because the “emancipation of the proletariat can only be the work of the proletariat itself.”

The capitalist class, like other exploiting classes in history, united in the goal of exploitation, is itself divided into mutua­lly hostile factions with divergent inter­ests, and it can only achieve unity in the rule of a particular faction, the faction which runs the state. The proletariat has no hostile, divergent interests within it­self. It finds its unity in its goal, com­munism, and in its unitary class organs, the workers’ councils. It is in itself and from itself that it derives its unity and strength. Its consciousness is dictated by its exis­tence. The process whereby it becomes cons­cious is expressed by the appearance within it of currents of thought and of political organizations. These can sometimes be the bearers of alien class ideologies, or they can be extremely important and precious expressions of a real awareness of the pro­letariat’s historic class interests. The communist party represents the clearest frac­tion of the class, but it can never claim to be the class itself or to replace it in the accomplishment of its historic tasks. No party, not even the communist party, can claim a ‘right’ to neither lead nor a particular power of decision within the class. The power of decision is the exclusive attribute of the unitary organizations of the class and their elected and revocable organs; this power cannot be alienated to any other orga­nism without the risk of gravely altering the functioning of the class’s organizations and the accomplishment of their tasks. This is why it’s inconceivable that the directing organs of the unitary organizations be en­trusted, even by a vote, to this or that grouping. This would be to introduce into the proletariat the practices and modes of operation of non-proletarian classes.

All political formations who recognize the autonomy of the working class in relation to other classes, and its unlimited hegemony over society, must have full freedom of action and propaganda in the class and in society, since “one of the preconditions for the development of consciousness in the class is the free circulation and confronta­tion of ideas within it” (Marx).

Some people might see this conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat as an expression of ‘democratism’. Just as they take the bourgeois revolution as a model for the proletarian revolution, they take the dic­tatorship of the bourgeoisie as a model for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Because the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is the state and nothing but the state, they take the state which inevitably arises in the period of transition, after the victory of the proletarian revolution, for the dictator­ship of the proletariat, making no distinc­tion between the one and the other. They pay no attention to the fact that the bour­geoisie has no other unitary class organ except the state, whereas the proletariat creates unitary organs which regroup the whole class: the workers’ councils. It is through the councils that it makes the revo­lution and defends it afterwards, without dissolving them into the state. The unlimited power of the councils: this is the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is exerted over the whole of society, inclu­ding the semi-state of the transition per­iod. The Marxist notion of the semi-state or Commune-state escapes them completely and all they retain of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the generic word ‘dicta­torship’, which they identify with the strong state, with state terror. What’s more they identify the dictatorship of the class with the dictatorship of the party, the latter dictating its laws by force on the class. This view can be summed up as: a single party seizes the state, uses terror to subordinate the unitary organs of the class -- the councils -- and the whole soviet system of transitional society. Such a dictatorship of the proletariat resembles, like two drops of water resemble each other, the fully formed totalitarian capitalist state -- the Stalinist or fascist state.

The so-called arguments about the need to reject any reference to majorities and minori­ties, reduced to a ridiculous question of 49% and 51%, are just sophisticated juggl­ings, an empty phraseology, a superficial radicalism which glosses over the real problem. The point isn’t that the majority is always right. The point is that the proletarian revolution cannot be the work of a minority of the class. This isn’t a question of formalism, but of the very essence and content of the revolution, i.e. that the class “organizes its own forces as social forces” (Marx) and doesn’t separate them as external, independent forces. The accomplishment of the revolution is thus inseparable from the effective and unlimited participation of the immense majority of the class, from their self-activity and self-organization. This above all is the dicta­torship of the proletariat. This doesn’t go along with the strengthening of an all-powerful state, but with the weakening of the state; this is a state amputated at birth by the unlimited power and will of the proletariat.

The dictatorship of the proletariat goes together with the concept of the withering away of the state, as Marxism from Marx to the Lenin of State and Revolution has always affirmed. It’s not the state which makes the dictatorship, but the dictatorship of the proletariat which tolerates the inevit­able existence of the state and guarantees the process of the withering away of the state.

The state in the period of transition

The difference between Marxists and anarch­ists isn’t that the former conceive of socialism with the state and the latter a society without a state. On this point there is complete agreement. It’s rather with the pseudo-Marxists of social democracy, the heirs of Lassalle who yoked socialism with the state, that this difference exists, and it’s a fundamental one (cf Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program and Lenin’s State and Revolution). The debate with the anarchists centered round their total misun­derstanding of the need for a transition period: as good idealists they foresaw an immediate, direct leap from capitalism to communist society8.

It is absolutely impossible to deal with the problem of the state after the revolu­tion if you haven’t already understood that “between capitalist society and communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the one into the other” (Critique of the Gotha Program); if you haven’t understood why this period takes place not before but after the victory of the revolution, or why it is radically dif­ferent from previous transition periods; if you haven’t understood the fact that after destroying the rule of the capitalist class, there will still exist huge masses of the laboring population who are profoun­dly anti-capitalist but not pro-communist, and that there can be no question of exclu­ding them from political life and active participation in the organization of society.

Only if you begin from these objective, historical realities, not from the state in itself, can you understand: 1. the inevit­able emergence of the state; 2. its funda­mental difference from other types of state; 3. the necessity for the proletariat to have an active attitude towards it, in order to progressively limit its functions and ensure that it withers away. Let us look at these points more closely.

1. The inevitable emergence of the state

a. More than in other revolutions, the prole­tariat will encounter ferocious resistance from the defeated capitalist class. It should be stressed that in the act of revo­lution, i.e. chasing the capitalist class from its ruling position and destroying its state apparatus, the proletariat will rely solely on its class power, i.e. its own organs, without needing any kind of state. The living breath of the revolution will demoralize and disorganize the permanent army, which is mainly made up of workers and peasants, the majority of whom will go over to the revolution. But once it has been defeated, the bourgeoisie, mad for revenge, will begin to resist, regroup its forces, reconstitute a selected army of volunteers and mercenaries, and will unleash a pitiless counter-revolutionary war and terror. Faced with a war organized with all the military arts and techniques created by the bourgeoi­sie, the proletariat cannot simply put for­ward its own armed masses, but will be for­ced to build a regular army, which incorpor­ates not only workers but the whole popula­tion. War, reprisals, systematic coercion against the threats of the counter-revolution -- these are the first necessities giving rise to a state institution.

But however important are the requirements of the military struggle, the need for coer­cion against the counter-revolution -- which during the civil war may well take preced­ence over all other tasks -- it would be a simplistic error to think that this was the only or essential reason for the emergence of a state. The simple fact that the state will survive well after the period of civil war is ample proof of this.

For the same reason it is important to remember the difference between this state and previous states, which directed their coercion mainly against the rising classes, whilst accommodating themselves to the old ruling classes. It is exactly the opposite with the state in the period of transition: coercion is not used against rising classes -- for none exist -- but against the former ruling class with whom there can be no collaboration.

b. Society in the period of transition is still a society divided into classes. Marx­ism and history teach us that no class society can exist without a state, not as a mediator, but as an indispensable institu­tion for maintaining a necessary cohesion which prevents society from tearing itself apart.

Moreover, if it’s both possible and indis­pensable for the proletariat to deprive the old ruling class -- a small minority -- of its political rights, it would be a pure nonsense, highly prejudicial, and totally impossible, to exclude the great mass of non-proletarian, non-exploiting strata from political and social life. These masses will be intensely interested in all the economic, political and cultural problems of the immediate life of society. The proletariat cannot ignore their existence or exert systematic coercion against them during the revolutionary trans­formation. It has to have a policy of ref­orms towards them, a policy of propaganda, of incorporating them into social life, without dissolving itself into them or abdicating its mission and its hegemony -- the essentials of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The necessary incorporation of these masses takes the form of that particular institu­tion, the Commune-state, which is still a state. It is essentially the existence of these classes, their slow dissolution and the imperious necessity to incorporate them, which makes the emergence of a state inevit­able in the period of transition to socialism.

c. In addition to the above two reasons there is the need for the centralization and organization of production and distribution, relations with the outside world etc: in a word the administration of a public life completely overturned by the revolution -- the administration of things which society has not yet separated from the government of men.

These three factors act together to deter­mine the emergence of the state after the revolution.

2. The fundamental difference between this state and previous states

Analyzing the Commune, Engels said that this was no longer really a state. Trying to show the profound differences with the classical state, Marx, Engels and Lenin gave it various names: Commune-state, semi-state, popular state, democratic dictatorship, revolutionary dictatorship, etc. All these names highlight what distinguishes it from previous states.

Above all this state is distinguished by the fact that for the first time it is the state of exploited classes, not exploiting classes. It is the state of the majority in the inte­rests of the majority against a minority.

It is not there to defend new privileges but to destroy privileges. It uses violence not for the purposes of oppression but to prevent oppression. It is not a body rais­ing itself above society but is at the ser­vice of society. Its members and functio­naries are not nominated but elected and revocable, its permanent army is replaced by the general arming of the people, it replaces oppression with a maximum of demo­cracy, i.e. freedom of opinion, criticism, and expression, and most important of all it is a state which is withering away. But it is still a state, the government of men, because it is an institution of a society still divided into classes, even though the last one.

According to Lenin, this transitional state won’t be like the states: “the bourgeoisie has created everywhere, from constitutional monarchies to the most democratic republics”, but it will conform “to the lessons of the Paris Commune and the analysis Marx and Engels made of it” ... “This is the kind of state we need ... this is the road we must follow so that it is impossible to establish a police or an army separated from the people.”

Lenin did not confuse the state with the dictatorship of the proletariat because this state was simply “the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat anal poor peasants.” Certainly, Lenin said, “democracy is also a form of state which will have to disappear when the state itself disappears, but this will only happen with the definitive victory of socialism, with the establishment of full communism.”

And Lenin defined the role of the proletariat after it had “demolished” the bourgeois state: “the proletariat must organize all the exploited elements of the population so that they themselves can directly take in hand the organs of state power, themselves form the institutions of this power.”

These lines were written at the beginning of March 1917, hardly a month after the February Revolution. This theme, the taking over of the state by “all exploited elements of the population” was developed by Lenin in dozens of articles, particularly in State and Revolution. And we can say again “this is the kind of state we need” and which the revolution will give rise to.

3. The necessity for the proletariat to have an active attitude towards the state in order to ensure that it withers away

We’ve looked at the tremendous gulf which separates the transitional state -- which as Engels said is no longer a state in the old sense -- from all others; but Engels still called it “a scourge” inherited by the prole­tariat; he warned the proletariat of the need to be on guard against this “scourge”. What does this mean?

Marx and Engels highlighted the measures which the Paris Commune immediately felt the need to take against the semi-state, notably the revocability of delegates and the limitation bf functionaries’ wages to the average workers’ wage, in order to limit its more pernicious tendencies. Lenin never ceased to recall these measures, show­ing how important for him was the danger of bureaucratization even in a Commune-state. The Paris Commune, limited to one town and only lasting two months, didn’t have much chance to show the dangerous sides of the semi-state. We can only admire the amazing political perspicacity of Engels, who managed despite this to show the need to be on guard against the “scourge” aspects of the post-­revolutionary state.

The October Revolution, which took place in an immense country with a population of over 100 million and lasted a number of years, was to be a quite different experience. This experience was a tragic confirmation of what Engels said about the state as a scourge -- in fact it went beyond what he could have imagined in his worst nightmares.

When, following Marx, Engels and Lenin, we list the distinctive characteristics of this state, we are talking about what it should be rather than what it actually, is. In it­self it carries a heavy burden of evils inherited from previous states. It is up to the proletariat to be extremely vigilant towards it. The proletariat can’t prevent it from emerging, nor avoid the necessity to use it, but in order to do so it must, as soon as it appears, amputate its most pernicious aspects, in order to be able to subordinate it to its own ends.

The state is neither the bearer nor the active agent of communism. Rather, it is a fetter against it. It reflects the present state of society and like any state it tends to maintain, to conserve the status quo. The proletariat, the subject of the social transformation, forces the state to act in the direction it wants to go. It can only do this by controlling it from within and dominating it from outside, by depriving it of as many of its functions as possible, thus actively ensuring the process of its withering away.

The state always tends to grow dispropor­tionately. It is the ideal target of career­ists and other parasites and easily recruits the residual elements of the old decomposing ruling class. This is what Lenin meant when he talked about the state as the reconstitu­tion of the old Tsarist apparatus. This state machine, as Lenin said, “tends to escape our control and go in the opposite direction from the one we want it to go.” Lenin could not find words strong enough to protest against the enormous abuses committed by the representatives of the state against the population. This was not only done by the old crowd of Tsarism who infested the state, but also by the personnel recruited from among the communists, for whom Lenin invented the phrase komtchvanstva (communist riff-raff).

You cannot fight against such developments if you think they are accidental. In order to fight them effectively, you have to go to the heart of the matter, recognize that they have their root in this scourge, this inevitable survival, this superstructure, the state. It is not a question of lamenting, of throwing your hands up in the air and kneeling powerlessly in front of a fatality. Determinism is not a philosophy of fatalism. But nor is it a question that by will alone society will escape the need for a state. This would be idealism. But, while we must recognize that the state is imposed on us as an “exigency of the situation” (Lenin), as a necessity, it is important not to make a virtue out of this necessity, to make an apology for the state and sing eulogies to it. Marxism recognizes the state as a neces­sity but also as a scourge, and poses to the proletariat the problem of taking mea­sures to ensure that it will wither away.

Nothing can be gained by coupling the word state with word proletariat or worker. You cannot resolve the problem by changing the name -- you only gloss over it by aggravating the confusion. The proletarian state is a myth. Lenin rejected it, recalling that it was “a workers’ and peasants’ government with bureaucratic deformations.” It’s a contradiction in terms and a contradiction in reality. The great experience of the Russian Revolution is there to prove it. Every sign of fatigue, failure or error on the part of the proletariat has the immediate consequence of strengthening the state; con­versely each victory, each reinforcement of the state weakens the proletariat a little bit more. The state feeds on the weakening of the proletariat and its class dictator­ship. Victory for one is defeat for the other.

Neither can anything be gained by wanting the unitary organs of the class, the workers’ councils, to be the state. To proclaim the central committee of the workers’ councils as the state shows the craftiness of the promoters of this idea, but also their ignor­ance of the real problems posed by reality. Why burden the name council with the name state, if they are synonymous and describe the same thing? Is it out of love for the pretty word ‘state’? Have these radical phrasemongerers ever heard of the workers’ councils being called a scourge, or of the need for them to wither away? By proclaiming the councils as the state they exclude and forbid any participation by the non-proleta­rian toiling classes in the life of society, a participation which, as we have seen, is the principle reason for the emergence of the state. This is both an impossibility and an absurdity9. And if, in order to escape this absurdity, you try to get these classes and strata to participate in the workers’ councils, it will be the latter that will be altered and lose their nature as the autonomous, unitary organs of the proletariat.

We also have to reject the idea of structur­ing the state on the basis of different social categories (workers, peasants, liberal professions, artisans etc) organized separately. This would be to institutiona­lize their existence and take Mussolini’s corporate state as a model. It would be to lose sight of the fact that we are not talk­ing about a society with a fixed mode of existence, but of a period of transition. It is not a question of organizing classes but of organizing their dissolution. The non-exploiting population will participate in social life as members of society, through the territorial soviets, and only the proletariat, as the bearer of communism, as well as ensuring its hegemonic participa­tion in and direction of social life will be organized as a class through its workers’ councils.

Without entering into details, we can put forward the following principles for the structure of the transitional society:

1. The whole non-exploiting population is organized on the basis of territorial soviets or communes, centralized from the bottom up, and giving rise to the Commune-state.

2. The workers participate in this soviet organization, individually like all mem­bers of society, and collectively through their autonomous class organs, at all levels of the soviet organization.

3. The proletariat ensures that it has a preponderant representation at all levels, but especially the higher levels.

4. The proletariat retains and maintains complete freedom in relation to the state. On no pretext will the proletariat subor­dinate the decision-making power of its own organs, the workers’ councils, to that of the state; it must see that the opposite is the case.

5. In particular it won’t tolerate the inter­ference of the state in the life and activity of the organized class; it will deprive the state of any right or possi­bility of repressing the working class.

6. The proletariat retains its arms outside of any control by the state.

It only remains for us to affirm that the political party of the class is not a state organ. For a long time revolutionaries did not hold this view, but this was a sign of the immaturity of the objective situation and their own lack of experience. The experience of the Russian Revolution has shown that this view is obsolete. The structure of a state based on political par­ties is typical of bourgeois democracy, of the bourgeois state. Society in the transi­tion period cannot delegate its power to political parties, i.e. specialized bodies. The semi-state will be based on the soviet system, on the direct and constant partici­pation of the masses in the life and functio­ning of society. This implies that the masses can at any time recall their represen­tatives, replace them, exert a constant and direct control over them. The delegation of power to parties, of whatever kind, reintro­duces the division between power and society, and is thus a major barrier to its emancipa­tion.

Moreover, the assumption of or participation in state power by the proletarian party will, as the Russian experience shows, profoundly alter its functions. Without entering into a discussion on the function of the party and its relation to the class -- which raises another debate -- it is enough here to say that the contingent demands of the state would end up prevailing over the party, mak­ing it identify with the state and separate itself from the class, to the point of opposing the class.

To conclude, one thing must be clear once and for all -- when we talk about autonomy, we mean the autonomy of the class in rela­tion to the state, not the autonomy of the state. The state must be subordinate to the class. The task of the proletariat is to preside over the withering away of the state. The precondition for this is that the class does not identify with the state.

MC

The Spanish collectives of 1936 have been presented by the anarchists as the perfect model for revolution. According to them they allowed worker self—management of the economy, meant the abolition of bureaucracy, increased the efficiency of work and — wonder of wonders — they were “the work of the workers themselves ... led and oriented at all times by libertarians” (in the words of Gaston Leval, a bitter defender of anarchism and the CNT).

But not only the anarchists offer us the ‘paradise’ of collectives. Heribert Barrera — in 1936 a Catalan Republican, now a deputy in the Cortes - praises them as “an example of the mixed economy respectful of both liberty and human initiative” (!!!) while the Trotskyists of the POUM teach us that “the work of the collectives gave a deeper character to the Spanish revolution than to the Russian revolution”. In addition, G. Munis and the comrades of the FOR invent illusions about the “revolution­ary” and “profound” character of the collectives.

For our part, we find ourselves obliged, once again, to be spoilsports; the 1936 collectives were not a means for the prol­etarian revolution, but an instrument of the bourgeois counter-revolution; they were not the “organization of the new society”, but the last resort of the old which defend­ed itself with all its savagery.

In saying this, we are not trying to demor­alize our class. On the contrary; the best way to demoralize them is to make them struggle using false models of revolution. The very condition for the victory of their revolutionary aspirations is to free them completely from all false models, from all false paradises

What were the collectives?

In 1936, Spain, completely overtaken by the economic crisis which since 1929 had shaken world capitalism, went through particularly serious convulsions.

Every national capital suffered three types of social upheavals;

• that coming from the fundamental contra­diction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat;
• that stemming from the intense conflicts between distinct fractions of the same bourgeoisie;
• that which produced the confrontation between imperialist blocs which each country had as the background to their share of political influence and markets.

In the Spain of 1936 those three convulsions came together with a bestial intensity, bringing Spanish capital to an extreme situation.

In the first place, the Spanish proletariat - still not defeated, unlike what had happened to their European brothers — posed an energetic struggle against exploitation, marked by extraordinary escalation in general strikes, revolts and insurrections which caused great alarm among the dominant class.

In the second place, the internal conflicts among the latter were growing daily. A backward economy, torn by formidable disequi­librium and as a result consumed with grea­ter intensity by the world crisis, is the best soil for the outbreak of conflicts bet­ween the bourgeoisie of the right (landowners, financiers, the military, church, all under Franco) and the bourgeoisie of the left (industrialists, urban middle classes, trade unions etc, directed by the Republic and the Popular Front).

Finally, the instability of Spanish capita­lism, made it easy prey for the imperialist appetites of the moment, which, stimulated by the crisis, needed new markets and new strategic positions on the road to domination. Germany and Italy found their pawn in Franco and hid behind the masks of ‘tradition’ and the ‘crusade against communism’ while Russia and the western powers — then brothers — found their bastion in the Republic and the Popular Front protected behind the screens of ‘anti— fascism’ and the ‘fight for the revolution’.

It is in this context that Franco’s revolt broke out on the famous 18 July 1936, which signified for the working class the culmina­tion of the super—exploitation and repression initiated by the Republic since 1931. The response of the working class was immediate and tremendous: the general strike; insurrec­tion; the arming of the masses and the expropriation and occupation of enterprises.

From the very first moment, all the bourgeoi­sie’s forces of the left, from the Republican parties to the CNT, tried to trap the workers into the snare of the ‘anti-fascist struggle’ and within that snare, to convert the expro­priation of enterprises into an end in it­self, in order to make the workers return to work with the illusion that the enterprises were theirs, that they were ‘collectivized’.

But the insurrectionary days of July demon­strated to society that the workers’ struggle was not just against Franco, but at the same against the Republican state; the wor­kers went on strike, expropriated factories, armed themselves as an autonomous class to initiate an offensive against the whole capitalist state both Francoist and Republi­can. In order, therefore, to successfully pursue the insurrectional strike, the wor­kers could not simply expropriate the enter­prises and form militias and leave it at that but they had to simultaneously destroy the Francoist army as well as all the Repub­lican political forces (Azana, Companys, CP, CNT etc). Secondly, the class had to totally destroy the capitalist state raising over its ruins the power of the workers’ councils.

However, the key to the proletarian collapse and its recruitment into the barbarism of the civil war was in the Republican forces - above all the CNT and the POUM - who were able to stop the workers from taking the decisive step - THE DESTRUCTION OF THE CAPITALIST STATE — and who imprisoned the workers in the ‘collectivization of the economy’ and the ‘anti-fascist struggle’.

Catalanists, Popular Front, the POUM and above all the CNT managed to lock up the workers in the simple expropriation of enterprises, labelling these actions as ‘Revolutionary Collectives’. By remaining within the capitalist state, by leaving it intact, these actions not only became use­less to the workers but they became the means for their super—exploitation and control by capital: “As the power of the state remained in­tact, the Generalitat of Catalonia could calmly legalize the workers’ expropria­tions and join the chorus of all the ‘workers’ currents’ who had deceived the workers with the mystifications of expro­priation, workers’ control, land reform, depurations, maintaining however a crimi­nal silence about the terribly effective reality which was not so apparent, the existence of the capitalist state. That is why the workers’ expropriations were integrated within the framework of state capitalism.” (Bilan)

And thus we see that the CNT, which had never called for the spontaneous workers’ strike of 19 July, nor had ever called for the taking up of arms, immediately called for a return to work, and end to the strike, in other words to obstruct the workers’ assault on the capitalist state with the excuse that the factories were ‘’collectivized’. Gaston Leval in his book Libertarian Collec­tives in Spain reasons for us thus: “At the beginning of the fascist attack, the struggle and the state of alert mobi­lized the population for five or six days, at the end of which the CNT gave the order for the resumption of work. To prolong the strike would have been against the interests of those same workers who took responsibility for the situation.”

Those beautiful ‘libertarian’ collectives which were a “revolution more profound than the Russian Revolution” - as the POUM always said — justified the return to work, the end of revolutionary will, the subjection of the workers to war production. In the conditions then of convulsion and extreme breakdown of the capitalist edifice, the radical facade of the collectives was the last resort to make the workers work and to save the exploitative order, as Osorio Gallardo (a royalist and rightist politician) has frankly recognized: “Let’s make an impartial judgement. The collectives were a necessity. Capitalism had lost all its moral authority and the owners could not give orders nor did the workers want to obey. In such a distres­sing situation either industry would lie abandoned or the Generalitat would seize it, establishing a soviet form of communism.”

At the service of the capitalist economy

When we are told that the collectives were a model of ‘communism’ of ‘workers’ power’, that they were ‘a revolution more profound than the Russian’ we have to laugh; the quantity of information, facts and testimo­nials which speak to the contrary is over-whelming. Let’s see:

1. A large number of collectivisations were made with the agreement of their own bosses. Referring to the collectivization of the chocolate industry of Torrente (in Valencia) Gaston Leval, in the book cited above, tells us: “Motivated by the wish to modernize pro­duction (?) as much as to overcome the exploitation of man by man (sic), the CNT called an assembly on the first day of September 1936. The management were invited to participate in the collective as well as the workers. And they all agreed to come together to organise production, and life, on completely new bases.”

The ‘completely new bases’ of life held up the pillars of the capitalist regime, as for example if we look at the Barcelona tramways collective: “Not only did (the collective) accept payment to the creditors of the company of debts which had been contracted, but also they dealt with the shareholders who were summoned to a general assembly.” (Leval, ibid)

Was this the profound revolution, which res­pected outstanding debts and the interests of shareholders? A strange way to organize production and life on completely new bases!

2. The collectives played into the hands of the unions and bourgeois politicians in the reconstruction of the capitalist economy:

• they served to concentrate firms: “We have taken charge of very small companies with an insignificant number of workers, without a trace of union acti­vity, whose inactivity threatened the economy.” (Newsheet of the Wood Industry Union, CNT, Barcelona 1936)
• they rationalized the economy: “As a first step we have established industry’s financial stability by organi­zing a General Council for the Economy, where each branch has two delegates. Excess resources will serve to help the industries in deficit so that they receive primary materials and other elements of production.” (CNT, Barcelona 1936)
• they centralized surplus value and credit in order to channel them according to the necessities of the war economy: “In every collectivized company, 50 per cent of profits will be earmarked for the conservation of their own resources and the other 50 per cent will pass to the control of the regional or local Economic Council to which they correspond.” (State­ment of the CNT on Collectives, Dec. 1936)

As can be seen, not one cent of the profits to the workers. But that’s all right! Gaston Leval justifies it with the greatest cynicism: “We can rightly ask why the profits are not divided among the workers, to whose efforts they are owed. We reply: because they are reserved for the aims of social solidarity.” ‘Social solidarity’ with exploitation, with the war economy, with the most terrible misery!

3. Collectives held themselves back from foreign capital in Spain; according to the POUM, “in order not to worry friendly coun­tries”. We translate that as: to subordinate themselves to the imperial powers which supported the Republican side. Marvellous and profound revolution!

4. The organs which gave birth to and direc­ted the collectives (trade unions, political parties, committees) were fully integrated into the capitalist state: “The factory committees and the control committees of the expropriated factories are transforming themselves into organs for the activation of production, and because of that, their class significance becomes blurred. We are not dealing here with organs created in the course of an insurrectional strike in order to destroy the state, but organs oriented towards the organization of war, an essential condition to allow the survival and rein­forcement of the said state.” (Bilan)

As for parties and unions, not only were the forces of the Popular Front integrated into the state, but the more ‘workerist’ and ‘radical’ organizations were too; the CNT participated in the Economic Council of Catalonia with four delegates, in the govern­ment of the Generalitat with three ministries and in the central government at Madrid with another three. But not only did they participate to the full at the top of the state, but also at the base itself, town by town, factory by factory, neighbourhood by neigh­bourhood. Republican Spain saw hundreds of mayors, councillors, administrators, police chiefs, military officials, who were ‘liber­tarians’...

But these forces were not only an integral part of the state through their direct par­ticipation in it. It was the entire body of politics which they defended that made them flesh and blood of the capitalist order. That philosophy which secured the action of the collectives at all times was ANTI—FASCIST UNITY, which justified the sacrifice of wor­kers at the war front and super—exploitation in the rearguard. Gaston Leval explains to us clearly this policy which, among others, the CNT supported: “We have to defend those liberties — so relative but so worthy as they were — represented by the Republic.”

Gaston Leval ‘forgets’ the ‘worthy’, workers’ ‘liberty’ which was represented by the Republican repression against workers’ strikes (remember Casas Viejas, Alto Llobregat, Asturias etc). “It was not a question of making a social revolution, nor of implanting libertarian communism, nor of making an offensive against capitalism, the state or political parties; it was an attempt to stop the triumph of fascism.” (Gaston Leval)

But then why the devil do the CNT, anarchists and co. criticize the Spanish CP? Because they defend the same programme! Their pro­gramme is in fact the same: it is the defence of capitalism behind the humbug of anti—fascism!

5. The ‘revolutionary, ‘anti-capitalist’, ‘libertarian’ etc. nature of the collectives was conveniently endorsed by the capitalist state, who recognized them through the Collectivizations Decree (24 October 1936) and co-ordinated them by the constitution of the Economic Council. And guess who signed both decrees? It was Senor Tarradellas, today the brand new president of the Generalitat of Catalonia!

It is unavoidable to conclude that the collectives didn’t mean even the minimal attack on bourgeois order, but that they were a form which the latter adopted in order to reorganize the economy and to main­tain exploitation at a moment of extreme social tension and enormous radicalization which did not allow them to use the traditio­nal methods: “Faced with a class conflagration capita­lism cannot even as much as think of hav­ing recourse to the classic methods of legality. What menaces it is the INDEPENDENCE of the proletarian struggle which is a condition for the next revolu­tionary epoch leading to the abolition of bourgeois domination. As a consequence capitalism must reknit the web of its control over the exploited. The threads of this web, which before were the magis­tracy, the police, the prisons, are changed in the extreme situation of Barce­lona, into Militia Committees, socialized industries, workers unions, vigilante patrols, etc.” (Bilan)

The implantation of the war economy

Having once seen the collectives’ nature as capitalist instruments we begin to see the role which they play, which was to implant within the workers a draconian war economy that would facilitate the enormous expense and drain on resources which the imperialist war, unleashed in Spain between 1936—9, involved.

Briefly, the war economy meant three things:

• militarization of labour
• rationing
• channelling all production towards one exclusive, totalitarian and monolithic end: WAR

The cover provided by the collectives allowed the bourgeoisie to impose upon the workers a military work discipline, the extension of the working day, the creation of free extra hours of work...

A bourgeois journalist sings delightedly of the ‘atmosphere’ prevailing in the Barcelona Ford factory: “We did not hear any discus­sions, nor even controversies. The war came first, and for that they were working and worked incessantly ... optimistic and satis­fied, it did not matter to them that their Committee — made up of worker comrades like themselves - might establish rigid targets and determine more hours of work. What was important was to vanquish fascism.”

The collectives’ statutes clearly defined the implantation of the militarization of labour: “Article 24: all are obliged to work without time limit according to what is needed for the good of the collective; Article 25: every collectivist is obliged, apart from the work he normally may be assigned, to help where his help is needed in all urgent or unexpected work.” (Jativa Collective, Valencia)

In the collectives’ ‘assemblies’ more and more the methods of the barracks were imposed ‘democratica1ly’. It was agreed to organize a workshop to which the women would go to work instead of wasting their time gossiping in the streets... “It has just been decided that in each workshop there would be a woman delegate who is to take charge of controlling the girl apprentices, who, if they fall short twice without a reason will be expelled without any appeal” (Tamarite Collective, Huesca).

Regarding rationing, a Catalan periodical of the period explains to us shamelessly the ‘democratic’ method of imposing it upon the proletariat: “In all countries citizens are obliged to save everything from precious metals to potato skins. Public authority demands this rigorous regime ... But here in Catalonia the government is quiet because it has no need to ask, it is the people who completely spontaneously carry out voluntar­ily and consciously a rigorous rationing.”

The first law of the ‘ultra—revolutionary’ Council of Aragon (Durruti and other satraps) was “For purposes of supplying the collectivists there will be established a rationing system.” These rationings, imposed by “revolutionary means” and “consciously accep­ted by the citizens” meant indescribable misery for the workers and for all the popu­lation. Gaston Leval without shame acknowledges: “In the majority of collectives there was almost always a lack of meat, and frequently even of potatoes” (op_cit).

Finally, the barracks discipline, the ratio­ning which the bourgeoisie imposed using the collectives as a front, had only one end: to sacrifice all economic and human resources to the bloody god of imperialist war:

• in the Mas de las Matas Collective (Barce­lona) and following a proposal by the CNT we read: “The wine warehouse installations were adapted to make 96% proof alcohol, indispensable for medical use at the Fronts. The purchase of clothes, cars, etc destined for consumption by the collectivists was also limited, but these resources would not be used as luxuries, but for the Front.”
• in the Alicante collectives: “The govern­ment, recognizing the progress made by the collectives in the province gave responsi­bility for armaments production to the unionized factories of Alcoy, for cloth to the socialized textile industry and for shoes to the Elda industry, also in liberta­rian hands, with the aim of arming, clothing and shoeing the troops” (Gaston Leval, ibid).

The collectives as instruments of super-exploitation

The most palpable demonstration of the anti—worker character of the sinister anar­chist ‘collectives’ is that through them the Republican bourgeoisie reduced to unbearable limits the working and human conditions of the workers:

• Wages — these were reduced between July 1936 and December 1938 by a face value of 30%, while the reduction in their purchasing power was much more: more than 200%;
• Prices - went from 168.8 in January 1936 (1913 being 100) to some 564 in November 1937 and 687.8 in February 1938.
• Unemployment — despite the enormous squandering of people at the Fronts which reduced the total amounts of unemployed, the rate went up some 39% between January 1936 and November 1937.
• The working week - climbed to 48 hours (in 1931 it was around 44, in July 1936 the Generalitat, in order to calm the class struggle decreed a 40—hour week, but after a few weeks it disappeared off the map with the excuse of the war effort and ‘collectivization’). The number of free extra hours increased the working day by another 30%.

It was precisely the so—called ‘workers’ forces’ (CP, UGT, POUM and especially the CNT) who clamoured with more earnestness for the super—exploitation and the impoverish­ment of the workers’ situation.

Peiro, hack of the CNT, wrote in August 1936 “For the needs of the nation a 40—hour week is not enough, in fact it could not be more inopportune.” The CNT slogans were among the more ‘favourable’ to the workers: “War, produce, sell. Nothing of wage demands or of demands of any other type. Everything has to be subordinate to the war. In all production which may have direct or indirect relation to the anti—fascist war it is not possible to demand that the bases of work, salary or working day be respected. Workers cannot ask special remunerations for the extra hours necessary for the anti—fascist war, and must increase production to a level above that of the period before the 19 July.”

The PCE screamed: “No to strikes in democra­tic Spain; not one idle worker in the rear—guard.”

Naturally, the collectives, as an instrument of ‘workers’ power’ and ‘socialization’ in the hands of the state were the excuse which made the workers swallow this brutal reduc­tion in their living conditions.

Thus in the Graus collective (Huesca): ”girls will not be paid a wage for their work, given that their needs are already covered by the family wage.”

In the Hospitalet collective (Barcelona): “Understanding the need for an exceptional effort we will reject the increase of 5 per cent in wages and the reduction of the work­ing day decreed by the government.” More popish than their own government!

Conclusions

Looking back at this sad historical exper­ience which the Spanish proletariat suffered, denouncing the great myth of the collectives with which the bourgeoisie was able to deceive them, it is not a question of intel­lectualism or erudition. It is a vital necessity to avoid falling again into the same trap. To defeat us, and to make us swallow measures of super—exploitation, of unemployment, of sacrifice, the bourgeoisie uses deception: it will disguise itself as ‘worker’ and ‘popular’ (in 1936 the bourgeoi­sie made calluses on their hands and dressed as workers); the factories were proclaimed ‘socialised’ and ‘self-managed’; it calls for every type of interclassist solidarity such as the banner of ‘anti—fascism’, the ‘defence of democracy’, ‘anti—terrorist struggle’... it gives to the workers the false impression of their being ‘free’, of their controlling the economy, etc. But behind so much democracy, ‘participation’, and ‘self—management’, there hides intact, more powerful and strengthened than ever, the apparatus of the bourgeois state around which the capitalist relations of production maintain themselves and worsen in all their savagery.

Today, when the fatal laws of a senile capitalism are leading it towards war, it is the ‘smile’ , the ‘confidence in the citizens’, the ‘most profound democracy’, self—management: this is the great theatre through which capitalism asks for more and more sacrifices, more and more unemployment, more and more misery, more and more blood on the battle fields. From the punished are born the wise. The ‘collectives’ of 1936 were one more of the fraudulent models, one more of the para­dises, one more of the beautiful illusions through which capitalism dragged workers to defeat and slaughter. The lesson of those events must serve the proletarians of today to avoid the traps which capital will hold out to them, and in so’ doing enable them to advance towards their definitive liberation.

EF

(Translated from Accion Proletaria, no.20, 1978)

In the previous issue of the International Review we published a text on terrorism, terror and class violence, which attempted to trace the basic orientation for the ICC’s intervention on this issue in its various publications. The text was a general res­ponse on the one hand to the ideological and police offensive of the bourgeoisie and on the other hand to the various conceptions currently defended in the revolutionary move­ment as a whole in the face of recent terror­ist actions. The text we are publishing here in the form of a resolution underlines and deepens the different points developed in the previous text, with the constant preoccupation of more precisely defining the nature of the liberating, emancipatory violence of the proletariat.

The resolution doesn’t seek to give precise and detailed answers to all the concrete problems that are and will continue to be posed to the working class in the course of its revolutionary activity -- an activity that goes from the first reawakening of the class struggle to the period of revolutionary transformation, via the insurrection and the seizure of power. Neither does the resolu­tion deal with the way the bourgeoisie directly uses terrorism. Its aim is to provide a framework, a general conception which will allow us to approach these prob­lems from a proletarian standpoint which gets away from simplistic statements such as “violence is violence”, “violence is terror”, “to say that violence isn’t terror is pacifism”, etc -- the whole casuistry about “the end justifying the means” as the previ­ous text points out. The aim of this resolu­tion is to show:

-- that pacifism has no real existence, and can only be an ideology. At best it is the expression of intermediate social strata theorizing their own impotence, their inabi­lity to offer a real opposition to the bourgeoisie and its state; but it is always used by the bourgeoisie in the exercise of its domination over the working class and society as a whole;

-- that terror is the expression of ruling, exploiting classes; when the material basis of their rule begins to founder, their class violence becomes the crux of social life;

-- that terrorism is typical of the impotent revolt of intermediate social strata, never a method or detonator of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat;

-- that the form and content of the emancipa­tory violence of the working class can never be assimilated with ‘terror’;

-- finally, to show where the real strength of the working class resides: in the cons­cious, collective, organized strength of the immense majority of the class, in its capacity to undertake the revolutionary transformation of social relations.

Moreover, the text shows that if there is one area where the mutual relationship bet­ween ‘means and ends’ is particularly vital, it’s the area of the revolutionary violence of the proletariat. This implies that what is underlying the present discussion on terrorism, terror and class violence is the very nature of the proletarian revolution.

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

1. It is absolutely false to present this problem in terms of a dilemma between terror or pacifism: pacifism has never had any real existence in a society divided into classes and antagonistic interests.

In such a society, the relations between classes can only be regulated by struggle. Pacifism has never been anything except an ideology; in the best of cases, a mirage coming from the feeble, impotent ranks of a class with no future, the petty bourgeois­ie; in the worst of cases, a mystification, a shameful lie put about by the ruling classes in order to divert the struggle of the exploited classes and make them accept the yoke of oppression. To reason in terms of terror or pacifism, to say that the alternative is between one or the other, is to fall into a trap and give substance to this false dilemma. It is the same with another trap built on an equally false dilemma: war or peace.

It is vital that our discussions avoid this false dilemma; by replacing reality with fantasy we would be turning our backs on the real problem that confronts us: the class nature of terror, terrorism and class violence.

2. Just as putting forward the false dilemma between terror and pacifism avoids the real problem, equating these different terms also glosses over the issue. In the first case the problem is evaded by re­placing it with a false dilemma; in the second case the problem itself is denied and so appears to dwindle away. But it would be astonishing for Marxists to think that classes so different in nature as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat -- one the bearer of exploitation, the other the bearer of emancipation, one the bearer of repression, the other of liberation, one which stands for the maintenance and per­petuation of the divisions in humanity, the other for its unification in a human community, one representing the reign of necess­ity, scarcity and poverty, the other the reign of freedom, abundance, the flowering of man – that these two classes could have the same way of behaving, the same methods of acting.

By establishing this identification you can avoid everything that distinguishes and opposes these two classes, not in the clouds of abstract speculation, but in the reality of their practice. By equating their practices you end up establishing an identity between the subjects themselves, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It would be an aberration to say on the one hand that we are dealing with two classes by essence diametrically opposed to each other, while on the other hand maintaining that these two classes have in reality an identical practice.

3. To get to the heart of the question of terror, we have to leave aside quarrels about words, in order to uncover what lies behind the words. In other words, the content and practice of terror and what it means. We must begin by rejecting the idea that there can be any separation between content and practice. Marxism rejects both the idealist vision of an ethereal content existing outside material reality, and the pragmatic vision of a practice devoid of content. Content and practice, ends and means, without being identical, are never­theless moments in an indissoluble unity. There can be no practice distinct from or opposed to its content, and you can’t question a content without ipso facto questioning its practice. Practice necess­arily reveals its content, while the latter can only express itself in practice. This is particularly evident at the level of social life.

4. Capitalism is the last society in history to be divided into classes. The capitalist class bases its rule on the economic exploitation of the working class. In order to ensure this exploitation and intensify it as far as it can, the capit­alist class, like all exploiting classes in history, resorts to all the means of coercion, oppression and repression at its disposal. It does not hesitate to use the most inhuman, savage and bloody methods to guarantee and perpetuate exploitation. The more it is confronted with internal diff­iculties, the more the workers resist exploitation, the more bloodily the bourg­eoisie exerts its repression. It has developed a whole arsenal of repressive methods: prisons, deportations, murder, concentration camps, genocidal wars, and the most refined forms of torture. It has also, of necessity, created various bodies specialized in carrying all this out: police; gendarmes, armies, juridical bodies, qualified torturers, commandos and para­military gangs. The capitalist class devotes an ever-growing part of the surplus value extracted from the exploitation of the working class in order to maintain this repressive apparatus; this has reached the point where this sector has become the most important and flourishing field of social activity. In order to defend its class rule, the capitalist class is in the process of leading society to ruin and threatening the whole of humanity with suffering and death.

We are not trying to paint an emotional picture of capitalist barbarism; it is a prosaic description of its actual practice.

This practice, which impregnates the whole of social life and all relations between human beings, which penetrates into the pores of society, this practice, this system of domination, we call -- terror. Terror is not this or that episodic, circumstantial act of violence. Terror is a particular mode of violence, inherent to exploiting classes. It is concentrated, organized, specialized violence, planned, developed and perfected with the aim of perpetuating exploitation.

Its principal characteristics are:

a. being the violence of a minority class against the great majority of society;

b. perpetuating and perfecting itself to the point of becoming its own raison d’être;

c. requiring a specialized body which always becomes more specialized, more detached from society, closed in upon itself, escaping all control, brutally imposing its iron grip on the whole population and stifling any hint of criticism with the silence of death.

5. The proletariat is not the only class to feel the rigors of state terror. Terror is also imposed upon all the petty bourgeois classes and strata: peasants, artisans, small producers and shopkeepers, intellect­uals and the liberal professions, scientists and students; it even extends itself into the ranks of the bourgeois class itself. These strata and classes do not put forward any historical alternative to capitalism; worn out and exasperated by the barbarism of the system and its terror, they can only oppose it with acts of despair: terrorism.

Although it can also be used by certain sectors of the bourgeoisie, terrorism is essentially the mode of action, the practice of desperate classes and strata who have no future. This is why this practice, which tries to be ‘heroic and exemplary’, is in fact nothing but an act of suicide. It offers no way forward and only has the result of supplying victims to the terror of the state. It has no positive effect on the class struggle of the proletariat and often acts as an obstacle to it, inasmuch as it gives rise to illusions among the workers that there can be some other way forward than the class struggle. This is why terrorism, the practice of the petty bourg­eoisie, can be and often is exploited judiciously by the state as a way of derail­ing the workers from the terrain of the class struggle and as a pretext for streng­thening the terror of the state.

What characterizes terrorism as a practice of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that it is the action of small, isolated minorities which never raises itself to the level of mass action. It is conducted in the shadows of little conspiracies, thus providing a favorite hunting ground for the underhand activities of agents of the police and the state and for all sorts of manipulations and intrigues. Terrorism begins as the emanat­ion of individualistic wills, not as the generalized action of a revolutionary class; and it ends up on a purely individualistic level as well. Its actions are not directed against capitalist society and its instit­utions, but only against individuals who represent this society. It inevitably takes on the aspect of a settling of scores, of vengeance, of a vendetta, of person against person and not a revolutionary confront­ation of class against class.

On a general level, terrorism turns its back on the revolution, which can only be the work of a definite class, which draws in the broad masses in an open and frontal struggle against the existing order and for the trans­formation of society. What’s more it is fundamentally substitutionist, placing its confidence only in the voluntarist action of small active minorities.

In this sense we have to reject the idea of a ‘workers’ terrorism’ which is presented as the work of detachments of the proletariat, ‘specialists’ in armed action, or which is supposed to prepare the ground for future battles by giving an example of violent struggle to the rest of the class, or by ‘weakening’ the capitalist state by ‘prelim­inary attacks’. The proletariat can delegate certain detachments for this or that immed­iate action (pickets, patrols, etc) but these are under the control of the movement as a whole; within the framework of this movement the resolute actions of the most advanced elements can serve to catalyze the struggle of the broad masses, but this can never be done through the conspiratorial and individualistic methods that characterize terrorism. Terrorism even when practiced by workers or groups of workers, cannot take on a proletarian character, just as the fact that the unions are made up of workers does not make them organs of the working class. However, terrorism should not be mixed up with acts of sabotage or individual violence perpetrated by workers at the point of production. Such acts are fundamentally expressions of discontent and despair, above all in periods of reflux, during which they can in no way act as det­onators to the struggle; rather, in a period of resurgence, they tend to be integrated and transcended in a collective, more conscious movement.

For all these reasons, terrorism in the best sense of the term (in the worst it can be openly directed against the workers) can never be the mode of action of the prolet­ariat; but the proletariat never puts it on the same level as terror, since it does not forget that terrorism, however futile its actions are, is a reaction, a consequence provoked by the terror of its mortal enemy, the capitalist state, and that it is also the victim of this terror.

Terrorism, as a practice, is a perfect ref­lection of its content: the petty bourgeois classes from which it emanates. It is the sterile practice of impotent classes who have no future.

6. The last exploited class in history, the proletariat carries within itself the sol­ution to all the divisions, contradictions and impasses with which this society is burdened. This solution is not only a response to its own exploitation but applies to the whole of society, because the prolet­ariat cannot liberate itself without liber­ating the whole of humanity from the divis­ion of society into classes and the exploit­ation of man by man. This solution, a freely associated and unified human comm­unity, is communism. From its birth the proletariat has carried within itself the germs of this community, it has personified certain characteristics of this reborn humanity: as a class deprived of all private property, as the most exploited class in society, it is opposed to all exploitation; as a class unified by capital in associated productive labor, it is the most homogen­eous, unified class in society -- solidarity is one of its foremost qualities and is felt as the deepest of its needs; the most oppressed class, it fights against all oppressions; the most alienated class, it bears within itself the movement to end alienation, because its consciousness of reality is not subject to the self-mystif­ication dictated by the interests of exploiting classes. Other classes are subject to the blind laws of the economy, whereas the proletariat, through its conscious action, will make itself master of production, suppress commodity exchange and consciously organize social life.

Although it will still bear the marks of the society it has emerged from, the proletariat will have to act with a view to the future. It can’t take the activity of previous ruling classes as a model for its own activ­ity, because it is the categorical antithes­is to these classes both in its being and in its practice. The rule of previous classes was motivated by the defense of their privileges; but the proletariat has no privilege to defend and it rules in order to suppress all privileges. For the same reasons, previous ruling classes shut them­selves behind insuperable caste barriers, whereas the proletariat is open to the incorporation of all other members of soc­iety into itself, in order to create a single human community.

The struggle of the proletariat, like any social struggle, is necessarily violent, but the practice of its violence is as dis­tinct from that of other classes as are its projects and its goals. Its practice, including the use of violence, is the action of huge masses, not of a minority; it is liberating, the midwife of a new harmonious society, not the perpetuation of a perman­ent state of war of one against all and all against one. Its practice does not aim to perfect and perpetuate violence, but to banish the crimes of the capitalist class and immobilize it. This is why the revol­utionary violence of the proletariat can never take on the monstrous form of terror, which characterizes the rule of capital, or the form of the impotent terrorism of the petty bourgeoisie. Its invincible force resides not so much in its physical and military force, still less in repression, but in its capacity to mobilize the whole mass of the class and to integrate the maj­ority of the non-proletarian laboring classes and strata into the struggle against capitalist barbarism. It resides in the development of its consciousness and its capacity to organize itself in a unified autonomous way, in the firmness of its convictions and the vigor of its decisions.

These are the fundamental weapons of the practice, the class violence of the prolet­ariat.

Marxist literature sometimes uses the term terror instead of class violence. But when we look at the whole of the Marxist trad­ition we can see that this is more a matter of an imprecise formulation than a real identification of ideas. Moreover, this imprecision derives from the profound impression made by the great bourgeois revolution of 1789. But in any case it is high time to erase these ambiguities which lead certain groups, like the Bordigists, to make an extreme caricature of the exalt­ation of the Terror, turning this monstros­ity into a new ideal for the proletariat.

The greatest firmness and the strictest vigilance don’t mean the setting up of a police regime. Although physical repression against the counter-revolutionary attempts of the bourgeoisie may prove indispensable, and even though there is a danger of the proletariat being too lenient or weak in the exertion of violence, it will have the same preoccupation as the Bolsheviks in the first years of the revolution, that is to guard against any excesses and abuses, which run the risk of distorting its own struggle and making it lose sight of its final goal. It is the more and more active participation of the broad masses, the development of their creative initiative, which alone can guarantee the power of the proletariat and the final triumph of socialism.

The text we are publishing here on 17 June 1953 is not attempting to satisfy a taste for funereal commemorations. For a long time now the bourgeoisie has been trying to exorcise the phantoms which have appeared to haunt its period of decline. These phan­toms are the proletarian revolutions, the revolutionary movements which it has crushed and whose fateful return it fears so deeply, if not in the immediate future, then in the fitful dreams of a ruling class. It tries therefore to conjure away its superstitious terror of ‘fateful dates’ by commemorating past events in its own way, by giving them a second burial. The first time round it unleashes all its military and ideological forces against the working class when it threatens the basis of its rule; the second time round it falsifies the class content of the workers’ struggle, transforming it into a vulgar struggle for the ‘fatherland’, ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’.

This is what the bourgeoisie east and west has been trying to do with the 1953 uprising: the former portraying the struggle of the East German workers as a struggle against ‘Stalinist excesses’; the latter portraying it as a struggle for ‘pluralist, parliamen­tary democracy’. Each faction of the world bourgeoisie is trying once again to assassi­nate the proletariat of East Berlin and Saxony, by disfiguring, or slandering its struggle, transforming it into its opposite, or purely and simply denying it.

Revolutionaries don’t turn the struggle of the proletariat into a cult-object or some­thing for purely academic study. For them, the struggles of the past are always present. That is why the struggle of the past is not something to be commemorated, but a weapon for future struggle, an incitement to revo­lutionary action. The events of 1953 are part of us, because they are a moment in the historic struggle of the proletariat for its emancipation. They are striking proof of the capitalist nature of the eastern bloc countries, which the Trotskyists pre­sent as ‘socialist’. They demonstrate that the most ruthless dictatorship of capital, wielded through a totalitarian state, does not put an end to the class struggle. That struggle will continue as long as society is still divided into classes, as long as exploitation exists. In 1953 the proleta­riat was reacting to an intensification of its exploitation and thus gave a clear answer to the Trotskyist and Stalinist lies about the ‘workers’ socialist state’. The workers of East Germany, even before the Hungarian workers in 1956 and the Polish workers in 1970 showed that the machine guns of the police and the army were of the same brand as the ones which cut them down in 1918-20 in Berlin and Budapest. After the insurrection of the East German workers, the myth of the ‘socialist states’ began to founder in the consciousness of the world proletariat.

But more than anything else, the workers of East Germany, despite being crushed, showed that they are only force capable of over­throwing capitalist exploitation. Despite their illusions in the ‘democratic’ west -- the mystifying corollary to the iron dicta­torship of the capitalist state in the east -- they demonstrated the possibility of a future proletarian revolution in the Russian bloc. Within days, the country was covered in strike committees and factory committees. Only the weight of a triumphant counter-revolution permitted the interven­tion of the Russian army and the isolation of the East German proletariat from the workers of West Germany and other European countries.

Today, the period of counter-revolution which isolated, weakened and derailed the proletarian struggle is over. May ‘68 proved that the proletariat of Western Europe was not ‘integrated’; the workers’ riots in Poland in December 1970 and January 1971 proved that the class struggle continues and that the events of 1953 weren’t accidental or the mere product of the ‘Stalinization’ of these countries. It is the world crisis of capitalism which, both in the east and the west, is pushing the workers to resist exploitation.

Despite all the sirens in Poland (KOR, comm­ittee for the defense of imprisoned workers) or in Czechoslovakia (Charter 77) who try to show the workers that they should struggle for a ‘free nation’ alongside the rest of the ‘people’, the workers of the eastern bloc countries can only integrate themselves into the international struggle of the prole­tariat. Isolated yesterday, tomorrow the workers of all countries, united in revolu­tionary struggle in spite of all capital’s ‘iron curtains’, will storm the heavens.

At the end of the second imperialist world war, the governments of all countries promised the workers peace and lasting prosperity. Today, more than thirty years later, we find ourselves once more in the middle of an international economic crisis, which, east and west, is massively attack­ing the living standards of the working class. In the face of a growing dearth of markets, soaring inflation, mass unemploy­ment and impending bankruptcy, capitalism is forced to follow the path traced by its internal contradictions; this path leads to generalized inter-imperialist struggle, to a third mass slaughter in our century.

In West Germany, the bourgeoisie and espec­ially its extreme factions (such as the Maoists, the Trotskyists and the neo-­Fascists) are putting forward the goal of an united, independent, democratic and even ‘socialist’ Germany as a solution to the ‘German’ part of the world crisis. We will understand the meaning of this ‘national independence and unity’ when we remember that the Bonn Government has made 17 June and the defeat of the East German workers, the day to celebrate the goal of German unity. In reality there is no solution, to the crisis of decadent capitalism, which proceeds in a vicious cycle of crisis -- war-reconstruction-new crisis, and will continue in this manner until humanity has finally been destroyed. Precisely because the only way out of this barbarism is the world proletarian revolution, the vital task of revolutionaries is to examine the past experiences and struggles of our class, so that the defeats of yesterday may become the victory of tomorrow.

The so-called ‘socialist’ countries of Eastern Europe arose as a result of the imperialist re-division of the world brought about by World War II. The slogan of the holy war against fascism was nothing but the lie which the western and Russian bourgeois­ies ended up using to mobilize their workers in the fight for more profits, markets and raw materials for their capitalist masters. The Allies love of democracy did not prevent Stalin, for example, from doing a deal with Hitler at the beginning of the war, through which Russia was able to seize large areas of Eastern Europe1.

As it became increasingly clear that the Allies were going to win the war, the conflict of interests within the ‘democrat­ic camp’ itself, and especially between Russia on the one hand and Britain and America on the other, became greater. The Russians received only the minimum of military supplies from the west, and Brit­ain even wanted to open up the Second Front against Germany in the Balkans instead of in France, in order to prevent the Russians occupying Eastern Europe.

What kept this united front of gangsters together was the fear that the war, partic­ularly in the defeated countries, might, as in World War I, be ended by an outbreak of class struggle. The brutal bombing raids of the Allies on German cities were aimed at crushing the resistance of the working class. In most cities the workers’ cities were obliterated, whereas only 10 per cent of industrial equipment was destroyed2.

The growing resistance of the workers, which in some cases led to uprisings in concentration camps and factories, and the dissatisfaction of the soldiers(such as the desertions on the Eastern Front, which were countered by mass hangings), were swiftly crushed by the occupying powers. This pattern was followed everywhere. In the east, the Russian army stood by while the German forces put down the sixty three day long Warsaw Rising, leaving 240,000 dead. Similarly, the Russian army was responsible for restoring order and social peace in Bulgaria and elsewhere in the Balkans. In the west, the CPs joined the post-war governments in France and Italy, in order to break the flickering strike movements and social unrest there. The Italian CP in power was supporting the same: democratic allies who mercilessly bombarded the Italian workers who were occupying the factories towards the end of the war.

The ‘Soviet’ occupiers began to exercise an organized plunder of the East European territory under their control. In the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ) of East Germany, the dismantling of industrial equipment for transportation back to the Soviet Union amounted to 40 per cent of the industrial capacity of the SBZ. The Sowjetinen en Aktiengesellschaften (SAGs, Soviet stockholding companies) were found­ed in 1946 and two hundred firms in key industries, including for example the massive Leuna Works, were taken over by the Russians. In some areas, at the end of the war, the workers themselves repaired and began operating the factories and such factories were especially eagerly taken over. In 1950 the SAGs constituted the following proportion of the East German economy: “more than half of chemicals, a third of metallurgical products, and about a quarter of machine production.”(Staritz, Sozialismus In Einer Halben Land, p.103).

A large proportion of these profits went to the Russians directly as reparation payments. The GDR was committed to reparation payments to the USSR up until 1953-4, until it became clear that the reparations were damaging the Russian economy itself3. The decimated East German economy paid the bill through a brutally rising exploitation of the working class. The proletariat was forced in this way to help finance the reconstruction and expansion of the Soviet war economy. Stalin never explained why the working class and the ‘Workers’ State’ in Germany should have to pay for the crimes of its exploiters.

This consolidation of Russian imperialism’s economic power in East Germany and Eastern Europe was accompanied by the coming to power of pro-Russian factions of the bourgeoisie. In the SBZ, the Stalinists of the KPD came together with the Social Democratic murderers of the German Revol­ution, to form the Sozialistische Einheits Partei (SED). Its immediate post-war goals had already been expressed clearly shortly before the war began: “The new democratic Republic will deprive Fascism of its material basis through the exprop­riation of fascist trust capital, and will place reliable defenders of democratic freedoms and the rights of the people in the army, the police forces and the bureau­cracy” (Staritz, p.49).

Strengthening and ‘democratization’ of the army, the police, the bureaucracy... such were the lessons which these good bourgeois ‘Marxists’ had drawn from Marx, from Lenin, from the Paris Commune.

Then, three years after the war had ended, came the announcement that the building of ‘socialism’ had now begun. A miraculous ‘socialism’ this, which could be construct­ed upon the corpses of a totally crushed and defeated proletariat. It is interesting to note that between 1945-8 not even the SED pretended that the state capitalist measures they were putting through had anything to do with socialism. And today, leftists of all descriptions who propagate the idea that nationalization equals socialism, prefer to ‘forget’ the high degree of statification present in the East European countries even before the war, and especially in those countries most renowned for their ‘react­ionary’ governments, such as Poland and Yugoslavia. This centralization of the economy under the direction of the state had proceeded during the German occupation4.

In fact, the famous declaration of the ‘building of socialism’, along with the economic, political and military tightening ups which took place in Eastern Europe after 1948, was the direct result of a hardening of the global conflict between the American and the Russian blocs.

“The Two-Year Plan, (measured on the 1949 standing) foresaw a rise in production of 35 per cent until 1950, reckoned with a rise in labor productivity of 30 per cent, a 15 per cent growth in the total wage mass, and a 7 per cent sinking of the costs of Public firms. The aim of the SED was thereby to raise work productivity twice as fast as wages. The means to these ends were seen by the planners above all in the improvement in the organization of work, the intro­duction of ‘correct norms’ and in the struggle against absenteeism and carelessness at the workplaces.”5

The rise in wages after 1948, insofar as they took place at all, were merely the result of piece rate norms and ‘productivity achievements’, or in other words they were the result of higher levels of exploitation. This was the period of the Hennecke move­ment (the East German equivalent of Stakhanovism) and of an iron discipline in the factories imposed by the unions. But even so these small wage rises became more and more an intolerable burden for the economy and had somehow to be cut. The economically weaker Eastern Bloc, less and less able to compete with its American-led rivals, was forced, in order to survive, to squeeze super profits out of the proletariat and to invest in the heavy industries (or more precisely, in those industries conn­ected to the war economy), to the detriment of the infrastructure, the consumer goods sector, etc. This situation, which required the immediate and centralized control of the economy by the state, pushed the bourgeoisie into making a frontal attack on the living standards of the working class.

The response of the proletariat came in a wave of class struggle which shook Eastern Europe between the years 1953-6. The movement began in early June 1953 with demonstrations by workers in Pilzen, Czechoslovakia which led to clashes with the army. These were immediately followed by the rising in the GDR and by the revolt in the massive Vorkutz labor camps in Russia in July of the same year. This movement reached its climax in 1956 with the events in Poland, and then in Hungary, where workers’ councils were formed.

It has been estimated that the real wages in East Germany in 1950 were half the 1936 level. (C. Harman, Bureaucracy and Revolution, p. 80). In July 1952 the SED announced the opening of a new period of ‘the accelerated construction of socialism’, by which was meant a further increase in investment in heavy industry, a greater increase: in productivity and a greater increase in production norms. It was clearly intended to speed up the post-war reconstruction. In the spring of 1953 at a time when the unions in West Berlin were having difficulty in controlling the combativity of the building workers, the government in East Berlin was stepping up a full-scale campaign to increase the production norms generally, and particularly on the building sites. On 28 May it was announced that 60 per cent of the workers on the huge building sites in Stalinallee had ‘volunt­arily’ raised their norms (this is the language of ‘socialist’ realism). The effects of the nationwide production campaign on the working class were already beginning to show. That same month strikes took place in Magdeburg and Karl Marx Stadt. In response the government pro­claimed a general norm rise of 10 per cent for 5 June.

Becoming frightened by the mood among the workers, an anti-Ulbricht grouping within the SED leadership6, and apparently with Kremlin backing, pushed through a reform package aimed at gaining the support of the middle classes. This group even began to suggest an easing-up policy as regards the question of the production norms.

But such maneuvers came too late to prevent a proletarian eruption. On 16 June the building workers took to the streets and marched calling out other workers. Finally the demonstration made for the government buildings. The general strike called for the following day paralyzed East Berlin and was followed in all other important cities. The struggle was organized by strike comm­ittees elected in open assemblies and under their control -- independent of the unions and the party. Indeed the dissolut­ion of the party cells in the factories was often the first demand of the workers. In Halle, Bitterfeld and Merseburg, the industrial heartland of East Germany, strike committees for the entire cities were elected, which together attempted to coordinate and lead the struggle. These committees assumed the task of centralizing the struggle and also temporarily organizing the running of the cities.

“In Bitterfeld, the central strike committee demanded that the fire brigade clear the walls of all official slogans. The police continued to make arrests; whereupon the committee formed fighting units and organized the systematic occupation of the city districts. The political prisoners of the Bitterfeld jail were released in the name of the strike committee. In contrast the strike committee ordered the arrest of the town mayor.” (Sarel, Arbeiter gegen den Komrunismus)

All over the country the party headquarters were occupied or burnt down, jails broken into and prisoners freed. The repressive apparatus of the state was paralyzed. The only help for the government was Russian tanks. In East Berlin 25,000 Russian troops and 300 tanks crushed the resistance of workers armed only with sticks and bottles. In Leipzig, Magdeburg and Dresden order was restored within a few hours. In other areas it took longer. In East Berlin strikes were still taking place three weeks later.

Because of the speed with which the workers took to the streets, generalizing the struggle and taking it straight to the political level, above all because the need to openly confront the state was understood, the proletariat was able to paralyze the repressive apparatus of the East German bourgeoisie. However, just as the rapid spread of the strike across the country was able to prevent the effective use of the police against the workers, in the same way, an international extension of the civil war would have been necessary in order to counter the threat of the ‘Red Army’. In this sense we can say that, taking place as it did in the depths of the worldwide counter-revolution following the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, the East German workers were defeated because of their isolation from their class brothers abroad, east and west. In fact, the weight of the counter­revolution placed political barriers more terrible than the bayonets of Russian imperialism against the extension of the movement from a revolt to a revolution. The links binding the class to its own past, its experiences and struggles, had long been smashed by Noske, Hitler and Stalin -- the bloody heroes of reaction -- by concent­ration camps and mass bombings, by demoralization and by the destruction of its revolutionary parties (the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, the political decimation, of the KAPD). Having suffered for so long under the Fascist and Stalinist one party states, the workers believed that parliamentary democracy might protect them against naked exploitation. They called for parliament and free elections. They sent delegations to West Berlin, asking for help and solidarity from the state and the unions there, but in vain. The West Berlin police and the French and British troops were posted along the borders of the city with East Berlin to prevent any movements of solidarity between workers of east and west. The unions in the west turned down the suggestion to call a solidarity strike, and warned the East European workers against illegal actions and adventurism. The workers called on the Russian army to remain neutral (not to interfere in internal German affairs -- according to the strike committee of Halle and Bitterfeld). They learned a hard lesson: in the class war there is no neutrality. The workers wanted to get rid of Ulbricht and Co, not realizing that one Ulbricht would simply be replaced by another, and that it’s not a question of overthrowing this or that government but of destroying the world capitalist system which hangs like a stone around our neck. They didn’t understand the need to central­ize the struggle politically at the level of workers’ councils which would smash the bourgeois state.

The Stalinist DKP and the West German Maoists are of the opinion that 17 June was a fascist rising organized from Bonn and Washington. They thereby demonstrate once again their anti-proletarian nature. The working class will have to fling such currents (or others such as that of ‘Comrade’ Bahro, who is so eager to demo­cratize East German state capitalism and his beloved ‘Workers’ State’ in order to preserve law and order) onto the scrapheap of history.

The logic of such currents is illustrated by a leaflet which the Maoist KBW brought out for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the events in the GDR. These self-appointed watchdogs of Stalinist purity argue thus: the ‘fact’ that the rising was ‘supported’ by the West German government proves that it could have been nothing else but an attempted fascist putsch. In fact the western bourgeoisie supported this uprising in exactly the same way as for example the unions support strike movements: in order to lead them into dead-ends and defeat.

“The facts show that the people who were perpetrating their dirty work on 17 June were in fact powerless, precisely because they were not ‘brave workers’ but rather provocateurs, imperialist slaves without the backing of the working class, who began to run like hares when the Red Army, at that time an army of the working class, opposed this attempted counter-revolutionary coup.” (KBW leaflet, 15 June 1978)

Well there you are, it’s all as easy to explain as that: but even so, these parrots of the counter-revolution still find it necessary to mumble about the mistakes of Uncle Walter (Ulbricht) and the confusions of the workers. But how did it come about that three years after this first fascist adventure, the Hungarian working; masses would fight Stalin’s tanks with home-made mollies? And why do the workers attack their ‘own’ army so often and so fiercely? And why did these ‘brave workers’ not lift so much as a finger to rescue ‘their state’ and ‘their revolution’ during the famous bloodless Kruschchev counter-revolution so talked of in Maoist circles?

The conditions of class struggle under decadent capitalism determined that the workers in East Germany in 1953 and in Hungary in 1956 would in their conflicts with the system be immediately confronted by the might and hostility of the world bourgeoisie. The fraudulent goals of ‘democracy’ and German ‘unity’ held up by western propaganda complemented the action of the ‘Red Army’ in defeating the prolet­ariat. In its manipulation of lies the bourgeoisie of the older capitals proved once again to be the true masters. Their strategy consisted of: 1. bringing the workers’ struggles to an end as fast as possible and especially by preventing the movement from spreading across the border to the west; 2. by diverting the movement onto the bourgeois terrain (a struggle for democracy, freedom, etc) the west hoped to extend their influence inside the Russian bloc. However, the ideology of the western bourgeoisie was directed first and foremost against its own proletariat. All this talk about the low living standards and lack of freedom of ‘the people’ in the east is being employed, and especially today, in an attempt to use democracy to break the res­istance of the workers to austerity and a total war economy. The ideological inter­vention of the western bloc in 1953 was especially important; for by contributing to the political disarming of the prolet­ariat it even helped the Stalinists to stay in power.

In 1956 in Poland and Hungary, nationalism was the most powerful weapon slowing down and dissolving the resistance of the workers. Only some months after the slaughter of the workers in Poznan, the Polish CP was actually in the position of being able to arm the population of Warsaw in order to defend the fatherland against the Russians. By contrast the government in East Berlin felt itself partly threat­ened by German nationalism, since this nationalism embodied the threat from the west; the great fear of being devoured by Bonn. Precisely for this reason, the unification of all classes in order to defend the national capital against the Russians was excluded from the beginning, the very existence of the GDR being depend­ant on the power of the Russians. Incap­able of utilizing any means of mystification, the SED allowed itself to be rescued by foreign tanks and democratic blab-blab.

The working class never abandons the class struggle, it never was and never could be a class for capital. Confronted with the lies of the bourgeoisie and its left fractions -- which incessantly reproach the class with militarism, aristocracism, racism, etc -- confronted with a conception which only sees the class as cowardly, resigned and defeated, revolutionaries defend the under­standing that the heart of class society today is the contradiction between wage labor and capital, which confront each other in a situation of permanent hostility determined by the material conditions of their existence. Because the proletariat possesses no economic power within the society the destruction of capitalism can therefore only be a political action, an exercise of revolutionary consciousness anal will by the army of labor. It was preci­sely due to a lack of experience and con­sciousness on the part of the class and its revolutionary minorities that the October Revolution failed. In the same way, all the attempts of the forties and fifties to resist capitalism failed because of the deep confusion and demoralization which followed the defeat of the October Revolut­ion.

The Council Communists, for example Daad and Gedachte in Holland, reached the pinn­acle of idealism when they assert that the events of 17 June 1953 proved once more the boundless power of the mass spontaneity of the proletariat, a concept which they oppose to the necessity for a class party. However, just as foreign to Marxism is the typical notion of the Bordigists who are determined to explain each and every defeat by the absence of the revolutionary party. Because the proletariat’s very nature is that of an exploited and revolutionary class, it enters the struggle spontaneously. However, in order to be able to defend itself and to confront capital, it is essential that the proletariat organize and lead its struggles as consciously as possible. The class forges its weapons, its organs in the very flames of the class struggle itself. With these organs it turns its immediate struggle onto the terrain of its own class interests, ie the fight for communism. In revolutionary confrontations the mass of workers organize themselves in councils which coordinate and launch its offensives and temporary retreats, and which prepare for the day of the uprising. In this way the class goes beyond its own spontaneity and becomes a single, united, indivisible revolutionary power.

In fact, the Council Communists and the Bordigists are posing the question in the wrong way. It is neither the Councils nor the Party ‘alone’, but rather, that which is indispensable for the victory of the Revolution is the conscious self-organization of the class! The formation of the party and the Councils are two separate and fundamental moments in this process of the self-organiz­ation of the class. No single struggle of the workers, and even less one taking place in the depths of the counter-revolution, will be victorious simply because someone has ‘founded the world party’. The world party is not simply a collection of principles; even less is it the work of some diseased sect taking its own dreams for reality. The world party of tomorrow signifies the militant and disciplined self-organization of the most combative and conscious elements of the class who, during the struggles of the proletariat play a vital and dynamic role in the endeavors of the class to organize itself and to grasp the tasks which face it as a class. The party, a product of the class struggle, does not emerge spontan­eously from it, but rather its existence is prepared by long years of organized theoret­ical and practical work. We are now engaged in this preparatory work.

Although the absence of revolutionary minorities in the struggles of 1953-6 is a symptom of the weakness of the class during this period, the appearance and strength­ening of such minorities since 1968 shows us that a new period of class struggle has now opened before us. The strikes in East Berlin and Karl Marx Stadt and likewise the riots in Wittenberge and Erfurt which took place recently are announcing the fact that a new era of class struggle and social crisis has arrived in the GDR. In Eastern Europe, we have seen the first brave efforts of the workers to resist the crisis (Poland, Rumania). If they did not attain a highly politicized level, these revolts did leave an essential heritage to the world proleta­riat: giving the lie to the theories which proclaimed the integration of the proletariat into state capitalism in the east which calls itself a workers’ paradise; proving the international unity of the workers’ class struggle against capital in all its forms. Today the world bourgeoisie is becoming more and more aware of the need to subordinate its own internal conflicts to the general goal of defeating the proletariat and is strengthening itself to this end.

Because of the necessity for the imperialist powers to work towards war, the bourgeoisie is preparing itself especially for civil war, because only defeated workers make good soldiers.

This new offensive of the bourgeoisie to crush us and then send us off to war must be answered by the working class of east and west. 25 years after the revolt of the workers in East Germany we oppose to the swindling unity of the bourgeoisie the unity and solidarity of the workers and revolutionaries of all countries.

Krespel

The following text ‘Third Worldism and Cardanism’ was originally written for publi­cation in the Scandinavian revolutionary milieu. Comrades in Oslo had informed us of their intention to publish the Solidarity text ‘Third Worldism or Socialism’ and had asked us to write a critique of the text which would be published along with it. As far as we know, the Oslo comrades’ project has not reached fruition, but we still think that it is worthwhile to publish the text in our Review. The revolutionary elements in Scandinavia -- like other newly emerging currents in America, India, or Hong Kong -- have been strongly influenced by the coun­cilist and libertarian ideas which the British group Solidarity typifies. The issues dealt with in this critique -- the meaning of capitalist decadence, the func­tion of ‘national liberation struggles’, the class nature of the Russian Revolution -- are all questions which today’s young revo­lutionary tendencies find particularly hard to comprehend, cut off as they are from the theoretical advances already made by the communist fractions of the past. Again and again the same questions are posed, by com­rades who know nothing of the existence of others who have posed exactly the same questions. “True Cuba or China is capita­list -- but surely there is something progres­sive in the economic development that has taken place in these countries?” Or else “Russia is capitalist today -- surely this means that 1917 was a bourgeois revolution?” And although these questions often form part of a process leading towards clarifica­tion, this process often gets blocked by the intervention of more established political currents who eagerly seek to incorporate these confused questions into a more elabo­rate -- and even more confused -- theoretical framework. Such is the role of Solidarity with its theory of the ‘new bureaucratic capitalism’, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, of the Bordigists with their fantasies about the ‘young capitalisms’ of the third world, and the ‘double revolution’ (ie bourgeois and proletarian) of October 1917. In this text we are confronting these theoretical aberrations with the clear, historical, universal vision defended by Luxemburg at the time of World War I, or by Bilan during the 1930s: that in the epoch of capitalism’s decay there can be no more bourgeois revolutions anywhere in the world; that the proletarian revolution is on the historical agenda in all countries.

The text deals briefly with the origins of Solidarity and of Cardan’s ideas, which are typified in works like Modern Capitalism and Revolution and The Crisis of Modern Society. Beginning as a positive break from Trotskyism, both Solidarity and Cardan’s group Socialisme ou Barbarie, burdened still with many conceptions inherited from Trot­skyism, have been unable to withstand the test of time and events. Socialisme ou Barbarie had the good sense to disappear before the re-emergence of the world capita­list crisis could expose its theory of a ‘crisis-free’ capitalism for the empirical and impressionistic contrivance it always was, and before the group had completely abandoned any pretense of defending a class outlook on the world. But Solidarity’s continued existence in today’s period has simply highlighted the contradictions and absurdities of the group’s ideas. Written before Solidarity’s fusion with another libertarian group (Social Revolution, a split from the fossilized Socialist Party of Great Britain), our text already points out a tendency in Solidarity which seems to have accelerated since the fusion: the progressive abandonment of class politics and the adoption of the standpoint of the ‘autonomous individual’. And as our article ‘Solidarity/Social Revolution: A Marriage of Confusion’ (in World Revolution, no.19) explains, this move towards individualism and the politics of alternative life styles is accompanied by a rapid evolution towards the positions of leftism pure and simple on crucial questions like the unions and anti-fascism. Theoretical incoherence always leads towards opportunism in practice, towards the betrayal of fundamental principles.

In publishing this text we hope to make a contribution to the theoretical and politi­cal evolution of the revolutionary currents which are now springing up from California to Bombay, from Oslo to Hong Kong. In contrast to Socialisme ou Barbarie and Solidarity, the majority of these currents has not come out of the counter-revolutio­nary swamp of Trotskyism and has arisen in period which is far more favorable to the development of communist groups than were the somber years of the 1950s and early 1960s. Thus there is every hope that they can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past -- and, in doing so, become part of the revolutionary future.

* * * * * * * *

A critique of Solidarity’s views on the ‘third world’ and the Russian revolution

The Solidarity pamphlet Ceylon: the JVP Uprising of Apri 1971, contains an appendix entitled ‘Third Worldism or Socialism?’, which has also appeared in Solidarity’s Vietnam: Whose Victory? pamphlet. Solidar­ity’s views on so-called national liberation struggles appear in that appendix in what is perhaps their most coherent treatment. The appendix also contains some brief comments on the Russian Revolution. We will attempt to deal here with Solidarity’s opinions on these two vitally important issues in the hope that this will stimulate further discus­sion in the revolutionary movement today.

I. The question of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ in the backward areas of world capitalism

The appendix states that “any bureaucracy, given favorable conditions can ‘solve’ the bourgeois tasks in the Third World.” It also points to the “new ruling classes in the process of formation” in the Third World which have set in motion the drive towards the ‘primitive accumulation’ of capital within their own national frontiers. These “belated bourgeois revolutions” Soli­darity also contends, allow for “higher consumption levels and welfare programs” for the masses.

In 1919 the Communist International asserted that capitalism had entered into its epoch of decadence, the era of world proletarian revolution or inter-imperialist war. But for Solidarity this is the epoch of ‘modern capitalism’ where everything is possible including “belated bourgeois revolutions” and endless economic progress for capitalism as a whole. The International Communist Current upholds the orientation of the IIIrd International today1. In the light of the last fifty years of counter-revolution and inter-imperialist war, it should be plain that internationally the capitalist class became a completely reactionary class as the period of capitalist decadence came into being with World War I. The epoch of bourgeois revolutions, the epoch of the ascendancy of capitalism as a progressive system of human reproduction, ends with the first imperialist war. Wars of ‘national liberation’ in this century have therefore become the arenas of world imperialist confrontation, testing-grounds for further global imperialist war, and the open grave for countless workers and peasants. Today, bourgeois revolutions are impossible. Only the communist revolution can lift humanity to an era of new progress and development.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the bourgeois revolution was an historical possibility. Such revolutions, as Marx was able to see, were progressive political movements helping to unleash the enormous productive forces of ascendant capitalism. These revolutions irresistibly tore asunder old pre-capitalist and feudal fetters on social progress. From local, regional, and national markets, the bourgeoisie expanded its system in leaps and bounds to create the world market and the world proletariat. Indeed, the most progressive function fulfilled by the young bourgeois order was its creation and consolidation of the world market. But by 1914 this market had become saturated in relation to the growing produc­tive capacity of the global system. From then on the system entered its age of decline, a period of permanent crisis and cyclical imperialist war, a period characterized by the unceasing growth of waste production and preparations for further war.

It is also wrong to talk of ‘primitive accumulation’ in the backward areas of capi­talism today. Such a stage in the develop­ment of capitalism was a progressive moment in the destruction of feudalism and the creation of the proletariat on a world scale. Primitive accumulation is thus a historical component of ascendant capitalism. It can­not take place again during the epoch of capitalism’s decadence. It is nonsense to speak of imperialism and primitive accumu­lation taking place at one and the same time in a system which has created a global capi­talist market. The objective conditions for socialism not only exist already on a world scale, but they have been in existence for over fifty years. Only the defeat of the proletarian wave of struggle of 1917-23 allowed for the bestial counter-revolution of Stalinism and its many other state capi­talist variants such as Maoism and Castroism. These counter-revolutionary movements did not unleash the productive forces nationally or internationally. They did not open up new horizons for humanity as the American and French Revolutions of 1776 and 1789, or even the European Revolutions of 1848 did. Rather they have appeared as expressions of the victory of the counter-revolution over the proletariat. Stalin’s Five-Year Plans and Mao’s collectivizations were not historically progressive; they were inevit­able once the proletarian alternative to decadent capitalism -- world revolution -- was crushed by the bourgeoisie including its left-wing forces, the Stalinists. Only the proletarian revolution is progressive for humanity today. Any other ‘revolution’ is basically the convulsion of a faction of the bourgeoisie reacting to the crisis, imperia­list war, and the reed to statify the economy. And since the entire world economy is bound today within completely putrid relations of production, any statification of the national economy (or what Solidarity calls ‘primitive accumulation’) is simply the strengthening of such outmoded relations of production at a national level. For all these reasons, the Weimar Republic, for example, was not the ‘belated’ German bourgeois revolution. On the contrary, it represented the destruc­tion of the proletarian revolution in Germany, the massacre of more than 20,000 proletarian militants in the period between 1918 and 1919. The victory of the world counter­revolution can never be confused by revolu­tionaries with a period, gone forever, in the ascendancy of capitalism.

Despite the banalities of economic ‘experts’, material progress is not measured by increa­ses in output, by the creation of more fac­tories, full employment nor even by an apparent growth in the size or education of the working class. Today, such technocratic myths serve only to hide the gangrenous bloating of the waste-production sector. In other words, the development of the means of destruction doesn’t increase the amount of use values which can be productively consumed in the process of capitalist accumulation. For global capital, including the backward sectors of the world economy, waste production and military expenditure constitutes a sterilization of surplus value. A brief examination of the ‘economic pro­gress’ achieved by Solidarity’s ‘belated bourgeois revolutions’ will show that there has been no such material progress in those countries. Economic decay has continued in such places and if anything the contradic­tions in their societies have become more brutal, more intolerable. China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc have huge state expenditures geared towards waste production and a war economy; China spends more than 30 per cent of its national produce in armaments. These countries cannot escape the laws of the sys­tem anymore than a European country or Russia and America can. Everywhere the proletariat faces austerity, hidden or open unemployment, increased exploitation, greater police repres­sion, inflation and savage wage cuts. Every­where the proletariat is being forced to obey the dictates of a system veering more and more towards imperialist war, towards full-blown barbarism. So much for Solida­rity’s ‘higher consumption levels’ and ‘welfare programs’.

The Ist International could support Lincoln in the North’s struggle against the slave-holding South during the American Civil War; similarly the workers’ movement of the last century supported Elements of the ‘Jacobin’ petty bourgeoisie in Italy, Poland and Ireland in their struggles against feudalism and absolutist reaction. Why was this the case? The reason is completely overlooked by Solidarity in its appendix. At that time, the proletariat was still struggling within the social context of an economically progressive system. As such the working class could support specific capitalist tendencies without losing its own class autonomy. Capital as a whole was not pitted solely against the proletariat. The struggle against feudalism waged by the bourgeoisie and supported by the proletariat liberated capitalist relations of production and in so doing strengthened the proletariat in preparation for its own revolution in the future when capitalism had outlived its historically progressive role. In present-day conditions, this strategy only leads the working class to massacre, since the bourgeoisie everywhere is pitted foremost against the proletariat. Capitalism is a world system today. Feudalism was vanqui­shed by the rise of capitalism in its ascen­dant period. In an epoch of world imperia­lism there can be no bourgeois revolution against feudalism. National liberation in the Third World today does not signify the struggle of rising capitalism against pre-capitalist or feudal modes of production, but inter-imperialist struggle waged at the level of a particular national capital. To claim, as Solidarity does, that ‘bourgeois revolution’ can happen today but that the proletariat should not support the bourgeoi­sie in its ‘struggle’ is totally absurd. When bourgeois revolutions against feudalism were possible, the proletariat could and did support them. Today, the reason why the proletariat cannot support any faction of the bourgeoisie is because capitalism has completed its historic mission. What’s on the historic agenda now is the communist revolution.

However, since Solidarity argues that ‘bourgeois revolutions’ are possible today in underdeveloped countries, what is the basis of its opposition to the regimes which emerge from such ‘revolutions’? After all Solidarity agrees with the claims made by these governments that economic development has taken place as a result of the ‘revolu­tion’. Solidarity is even willing to flatter such governments by calling them ‘Jacobin’ or bourgeois revolutionaries. But by forsaking a materialist analysis of the develop­ment historically of capitalism, Solidarity is left only with moralism when it sets about to oppose such regimes. Its opposition is purely idealist and utopian. Hence Solidarity pours scorn on the ‘belated bour­geois revolutionaries’ when it writes about Ceylon or Vietnam or China, while at the same time admitting that they are fulfilling a progressive and inevitable historical task in developing further the productive forces of capitalism. But if this were true, then there would be nothing ‘belated’ about the rise of Mao, Castro, or Allende. In fact their rise would be quite timely for capital. Furthermore, this whole epoch could justi­fiably be characterized as one of the ‘per­manent bourgeois revolution’, promising an eternal development of capitalist society until such time as the last Patagonian vill­age engages in ‘expanded reproduction’, having finished its ‘own’ primitive accumulation.

In Solidarity’s view there is therefore a strange separation between economic reality and class struggle. For Marxists, capita­lism must become a decadent social system before the world proletariat can struggle directly for communism. If capitalism can continue to develop economically, if ‘bela­ted bourgeois revolutions’ can occur today, then the communist revolution is not only objectively impossible but subjectively impossible in the minds of the whole prole­tariat, until such time as capital ended this progressive evolution. But for Solidarity it is quite irrelevant whether or not capitalism is or is not decadent as a system of economic reproduction. The sub­jective awareness of the ‘order-takers’ is all that is important. If the ‘order-takers’ want revolution, then revolution there will be even if that means that the proletarian revolution is taking place simultaneously with the bourgeois revolution in some other part of the globe! If they were logical, then Solidarity should take up the position that proletarian revolution was possible anytime, even in the nineteenth century. If the objective conditions of capitalist decadence today do not matter then why should the objective conditions of capitalist development in its ascendant phase matter either?

In the eyes of the Marxist movement, however, the proletarian revolution obeys historical necessity. The proletarian revolution is on the historical agenda only when capita­lism world-wide has entered into its era of decline and decay.

In Solidarity’s view, capitalism has a comp­letely autonomous political superstructure independent of its economic foundations. Cuba, China, Russia, have all developed ‘economically’ but ‘politically’ the reper­cussions of these ‘belated bourgeois revo­lutions’ are considered negative and reactionary. But the truth is that there’s a real interconnection between the economic decay of the world capitalist system and its political decay. The ‘economic progress’ of the many ‘liberated’ backward countries like China, North Korea or Vietnam impresses scribes like Myrdal and Cajo Brendel, but revolutionaries must understand the real content of such ‘progress’. We have already mentioned the chronic waste production of these economies, and the fact that they are police states. The need of the bourgeoisie in this epoch, especially in these regimes, to brutally repress the proletariat expres­ses the deep weaknesses of such regimes, both on the economic and political level. Such regimes have to compete militarily in order to survive on the world market. With the exception of Russia (itself a dominant imperialist power, if weaker than the US), such regimes can have only a fragile and precarious existence, bandied from one imperialist bloc to the other. It is com­pletely impossible for these regimes to gain any national independence. Whenever such areas have been used as arenas of inter-imperialist struggle (as in ‘heroic’ Vietnam), they have only served to strengthen the imperialist might of one or other of the two imperialist blocs. National liberation struggles (sic) never ‘weaken’ imperialism as the leftists (and Solidarity in its Vietnam pamphlet) claim. The American bourgeoisie is as secure an imperialist power today as it was prior to the Vietnam War. It is equally absurd to talk about the ‘bourgeois revolutions’ in the Third World developing the productive forces pro­gressively in such countries. None of these ‘liberated’ national capitals have reached even near the level of labor productivity of the advanced countries. Instead of the arbitrary and local comparisons that the apologists for such regimes go in for, a real comparison would be between the economic productivity of the advanced countries in relation to that achieved by the ‘national liberation’ regimes today. Rather than mea­suring Mao’s China up against the Kuomin­tang’s, a real comparison would be to mea­sure it up against the economic levels of the advanced sectors of capitalism. The constrictions of the capitalist relations of production on the advanced western econo­mies (with their 22 million unemployed, idle plant and raging inflation) is the same restriction which is strangling the Chinese economy today. It is the very fetter which will keep the productivity of labor extremely low in China in comparison to the developed countries, just as Stali­nist Russia has never managed in the last fifty years to reach the level of labor productivity of the advanced capitalist countries in the west. From this concrete standpoint, one sees that the gap between the more developed sectors and the backward ones of world capital increases inexorably every year, on a geometric scale. And the advanced countries faced with the decadence of the whole system, head toward another global imperialist war, and drag all the ‘liberated’ nations with them, towards barbarism.

The question of the backward areas of capi­talism can only be posed on the global scale. Solidarity, like the Mensheviks and similar Social Democratic tendencies before it, bases its whole perspective on the iso­lated example of a national economy. Accor­ding to Luxemburg’s analysis made at the beginnings of this epoch, the future of the backward areas of capitalism was insolubly linked to the decadence of the whole system. Today, after two world wars, after the establishment of a permanent war economy, after more than fifty years of protracted economic and social decay in the wake of a defeated international revolution, it is impossible to take seriously the bizarre fantasies of Paul Cardan and his ‘Modern Capitalism’, the proclamation of the eternal development of capitalism. For the prole­tariat the question of whether the system is ascendant or decadent has been forever answered by the barbaric cycles of crises-wars and reconstructions of this century. And as the international proletariat re­emerges into the political arena, after having suffered the worst counter-revolutio­nary period in its history, only the blind will continue to speak of the ‘belated bourgeois revolution’ when faced with the first stirrings of the second revolutionary wave of this century.

II. The Russian Revolution

The other main confusion within the appendix published by Solidarity lies in the remarks the group makes about the Russian Revolution. These remarks reveal Solidarity’s profound confusions about this vital episode in the history of the workers’ movement. We read: “ ... the ‘permanent revolution’ in Russia ... both began and ended as a bourgeois revolution (in spite of the proletariat’s alleged ‘leading role’ in the unfolding of the process).” Amazingly, this old Menshe­vik confusion is presented by Solidarity as a great discovery. But unfortunately for Solidarity, this great ‘innovation’ had no basis in reality when the Mensheviks first said it, and neither has it today.

Many anarchist tendencies, along with the Social Democrats, have rejected the Russian Revolution. This is not surprising in view of their rejection of Marxism. Indeed, in the case of Solidarity, although it never had defended Marxism, it felt nevertheless obliged to reject the experience of the proletariat’s October Revolution in order to join in the libertarian chorus. The main litany in this chorus has been the assertion that Stalinism equaled Leninism which equaled Marxism. By means of this formula, the libertarians start with the counter-revolution and equate it with the thought and action of the working class. By looking at the counter-revolution and rejecting what they understand of it, Soli­darity then goes on to reject both the practical experience and theoretical weapon of the class struggle. They reject not only the workers’ experiences in the Russian Revolution, but also the entire revolutio­nary period of struggle between 1917 and 1923: workers’ uprisings, the movement of the workers’ councils, the regroupment of revolutionaries in the IIIrd International and the clarification which came out of its first Congresses, and the understanding which flowed from the struggles waged by the left-wing of the Communist International against its degeneration when the world revolution entered into reflux. Was all this so much adventurism, merely the conse­quence of the Russian ‘bourgeois revolution’ as the Mensheviks proclaimed? Was the Russian ‘bourgeois revolution’ on the hist­orical agenda during this epoch of imperia­list decay, during the epoch of wars and revolutions, during the epoch of the deadly struggle between world capitalism and the international proletariat? Had the revolu­tionaries who regrouped around the cry “Turn the imperialist war into a civil war against capitalism” been misguided utopians or even cunning Machiavellians out to gain power for themselves at the expense of the imper­ialist war effort? Was the entire Russian experiment in the dictatorship of the proletariat -- tentative as it was -- of workers’ councils, and autonomous proletarian activity, simply a delusion, something best forgotten by today’s working class?

Is the final failure of the Russian Revolu­tion identical to the evolution of the proletariat’s consciousness in 1917, when it became conscious of the need to destroy the bourgeois state of Kerensky, an event which made the dictatorship of the proleta­riat a living reality in a revolutionary epoch? That the working class was not able to extend its power internationally is evi­dent. And it is equally evident from any reading of the documents of the early years of the Communist International and the writings of the Russian revolutionaries of that period that it was recognized in the workers’ camp that continued isolation of the Russian Revolution would end in defeat for the proletarian bastion. In a subjec­tive sense, the confusions of the proletariat, reflected in its political minorities inclu­ding the Bolshevik Party, ultimately doomed the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary wave as a whole to failure. But it seems a sterile hindsight and a curious fatalism to say that both February and October 1917 very concretely doomed the proletarian revolution (in Russia and internationally) from the beginning. And this is what Soli­darity claims in its appendix on the Russian Revolution. One can see death already in a newborn baby, and perhaps on this Kierkegaard is more appealing than Marx. But historical processes depend upon the active and conscious intervention of class forces which cannot be understood like a medieval mystery play. What the proleta­riat lacked in 1917-23 was sufficient exper­ience and clarity as to the needs thrust upon it by the advent of the new epoch. It was being catapulted onto a new historical plane just as it emerged from the carnage of the first imperialist war. It attempted to destroy capitalism, but it failed on that occasion. But no revolutionaries would have asserted at the time that all was lost from the start! Those who claimed then that only a ‘bourgeois revolution’ was on the agenda, like Plekhanov did in Russia and Ebert and Noske did in Germany, either sought to excuse the execution of the revolutionary proletariat or became its butchers themselves.

It is from the experience of the working class in that period with all its negative as well as positive lessons, that revolutio­naries are able to draw fundamental lessons for our class today. For example, the lessons about the reactionary role of the trade unions, of reformism, of parliamenta­rism, frontism, anti-fascism, national liberation struggles etc. Therefore, the Russian Revolution constitutes for revolu­tionaries and for the whole revolutionary class, the most important event of that enormous revolutionary wave which engulfed the capitalist world from 1917 to 1927. To dismiss this experience of the proletariat, as Solidarity so naively does, is indeed to cut oneself off from the history of the proletariat. For us, this would be to deny our very substance as a historic part of the struggle of the working class. For Solida­rity, which more and more claims to repre­sent the viewpoint of the ‘individual’, this heavy historical responsibility towards understanding the experience of the prole­tariat is of less and less interest.

Solidarity will sooner or later reach the end of its long negative evolution and dis­appear as many similar confused groups have. Solidarity’s incoherent positions are a result of their incapacity to break fully with their leftist past. Like the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, which held similar ideas and dissolved in 1967, Soli­darity came from a split in post-war Trotskyism. Believing themselves to be ‘innova­tors’, these tendencies never attempted to establish a continuity with the traditions and lessons defended by the left communist fractions (Italian, German and Dutch Lefts). Thus they never completely broke with the counter-revolution. They could not see, for example, that their ‘innovations’ were out­worn conceptions or misunderstandings long since refuted by the revolutionary movement. Their whole arrogant outlook was based on a fragmentary, individualist critique of the counter-revolution. Hence Socialisme ou Barbarie could still defend the idea of a Leninist party, and defend national libera­tion struggles and ‘union work’. Gradually anarchist conceptions akin to those of Stirner, of Proudhon, began to permeate their activities. Solidarity and similar groups began to defend what they called ‘self-management’, and more and more it was unclear whether the proletariat was the communist class in our epoch. These confu­sions were rationalized by the strong influ­ence of bourgeois sociology, and soon the ‘innovators’ of Socialisme ou Barbarie and Solidarity began to defend the ideas of renegades like Burnham, Rizzi and other bourgeois academics like Marcuse and Bell who proclaimed that the proletariat was dead, and that the ‘bureaucracy’ was a new social class which disproved Marxism.

Although Solidarity’s initial break with Trotskyism revealed a healthy effort of clarification, it showed also the near impossibility of a healthy development of a whole tendency arising from the capitalist political apparatus. Today, when the prole­tariat is re-emerging on a world-wide scale, the ideas of Solidarity will appear more and more cynical and anachronistic. Side by side with that re-emergence, the present, revolutionary movement will also contribute to the demise of Solidarity’s ideas. Indeed, the present movement is forced to mercilessly criticize all confusions which stem from the counter-revolution. And it is forced to do so by the very demands of the communist revolution, which require the greatest clarity and coherence as a precondition for revolutionary practice. The incapacity to say what is and what is not, the inability to learn lessons from the past, a political spinelessness and impotence, all these are characteristics of a dying political tendency. Solidarity shares all these crippling defects. If the present revolu­tionary movement were to benefit from any lasting contribution by Solidarity, that would be the fast cessation of Solidarity’s sterile existence.

J.McIver