To go beyond capitalism: Abolish the wages system

Critique of Bukharin (Part 2)

 

(On N.Bukharin's critique of the theses of R. Luxemburg)

"To know what communism will be like, we must start by knowing what is wrong with the present society." In the previous article[1], we showed how, from a marxist viewpoint, one's conception of socialism depends on one's anal­ysis of capitalism's internal contradictions. Behind the criticisms of Rosa Luxemburg's analyses of capitalist contradictions formulat­ed by Bukharin, Bolshevik and ‘theoretician' of the Communist International[2], there appear the outlines of the theory of the possibility of socialism in one country, and the identif­ication of state capitalism with socialism.

To demonstrate this, we have begun by rejecting some of Bukharin's main objections. We have thus replied to the argument that the basic problem Luxemburg poses - capitalism's inability to create its own outlets -- does not exist. We have recalled how and why crises of overproduction have been and remain an essential and inevitable fact of capitalism, and we have demonstrated the emptiness of the argument that the workers' consumption can constitute a large enough outlet to absorb capitalist overproduct­ion.

In this second part, we aim to reply to one of the arguments most frequently used against Luxemburg. Bukharin expresses it in this way: "Rosa Luxemburg makes her analysis too easy. She singles out one contradiction -- that betw­een the conditions of production of surplus-value and the conditions of its realization, the contradiction between production and cons­umption under capitalist conditions." (Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, Chap. 5).

Is there one contradiction within capitalism that is more decisive than others?

Like any living organism, the capitalist system of production has always been traversed by mul­tiple contradictions, that is to say, mutually exclusive and opposing needs. Its life, its development, its impetuous march through hist­ory, overthrowing thousands of years of history in a few centuries and molding a world in its own image, were the product not of an idealist will to domination in itself, but of a perman­ent struggle to overcome its internal contra­dictions.

The great virtue of Marx's work was to show how and why these contradictions must one day lead capitalism, like previous societies (ancient slavery, feudalism), to go through a phase of decomposition, opening the way to the install­ation of new social relations, the arrival of a new society which can only be communism.

Marx shone a light on many of these contradict­ions. Bukharin, reproaching Rosa Luxemburg for "singling out one contradiction", cites several that Luxemburg neglects, according to him: "The contradiction between branches of product­ion; the contradiction between industry and agriculture limited by land rent; the anarchy of the market and competition; war as a means of competition" (ibid),

Amongst the more important, we should add:

-- the contradiction between on the one hand, the ever more social character of production (technically speaking, the world tends to prod­uce as one factory, each product containing labor from the four corners of the globe), and on the other the divided, limited, private  nature of the appropriation of this production;

-- the contradiction in the fact that capital can only extract profit from the exploitation of living labor (the capitalist cannot "exploit" the machine), while at the same time, in the process of production, the share of living lab­or in relation to dead (machines) tends to fall as techniques progress (a contradiction express­ed in the ‘tendency of the falling rate of profit');

-- lastly, and above all, the living contradic­tion that is exploitation itself -- the ever-sharper antagonism between the producers and capital.

All these contradictions as a whole, which for centuries worked as a stimulant to its expansion, are now driving capitalism to its decad­ence, suffocation, paralysis, and historic bankruptcy.

The object of the debate is not to decide whet­her or not these contradictions exist. It is first and foremost to know why, and at what given moment of their development these internal contradictions transform themselves from stim­ulants to hindrances on the productive process.

Rosa Luxemburg does indeed reply by "singling out" one contradiction: that between the cond­itions of production of surplus-value and the conditions of its realization on the world market; this is itself a product of the contra­diction between use-value and exchange-value within the capitalist commodity.

The contradiction between the conditions of production and the conditions of realization of surplus-value stand above all capitalism's other contradictions

For Rosa Luxemburg, it is when capitalism can no longer enlarge its markets "in relation to the needs of expansion of existing capitalist enterprises" that all its internal contradict­ions tend to break out with the greatest clarity. The contradiction discovered by Marx, between the conditions of production of surplus-value (profit) and the conditions of its realization (realization in money form, sale of the surplus-value extracted) stands above all the others.

If the contradiction between the need to prod­uce on an ever larger scale, and the need to reduce the share of production that returns to the mass of wage-laborers can be overcome, then all the other contradictions are attenuated, or even transformed into stimulants.

As long as capitalism can find markets, outlets on the same scale as the requirements of its expansion, then all its internal difficulties are smoothed over.

This is why crises break out when the market has become too restrictive, and are overcome once new outlets are discovered. All the mode of production's internal contradictions burst out, or are smoothed over at the level of the world market and its crises, This is Marx's meaning when he writes: "The crises of the world market must be seen as the real synthesis and the violent leveling out of all the con­tradictions of this economy, whose every sphere manifests the various aspects that are reunited in these crises." (Matriaux pour 1'Economie Ed La Pleiade T II p 476)

The nature of this contradiction, which deter­mines all the others, appears clearly when we analyze the concrete conditions that exacer­bate or attenuate other important contradictions. Let us examine the two contradictions most often highlighted by Rosa Luxemburg's critics: competition between capitalists, and the tend­ency for the rate of profit to fall.

Competition is a stimulant as long as there are adequate markets

All those who, like Bukharin, have tried in one way or another to theorize the existence of a ‘non-capitalist' system of production in the USSR have always given ‘inter-capitalist competition' pride of place among capitalism's internal contradictions.

The USSR said to be non-capitalist because it is supposed to have eliminated competition, and with it, anarchy in the productive process. And yet, we only have to analyze the reality of this competition to understand that its extent and character as a contradiction are strictly determined by the abundance of exist­ing solvent markets.

Markets are the prize of inter-capitalist competition.

In the struggles between primitive cannibal tribes the prize was human bodies to devour; the city-states in ancient slave times fought for slaves, and to plunder the wealth of other populations; the feudal lords fought for land, serfs and cattle. But capitalists fight for something far more abstract and universal - markets. To be sure, they, like their ancestors, don't deprive themselves of plunder when they can get it, but is what is more specific to them is their ruthless confrontation, no holds barred, for control over markets.

Because of this, the sharpening of inter-capitalist competition and the intensity of its effects are strictly dependent on the size of the markets that are the objects of this comp­etition. In periods where capital can dispose of adequate solvent outlets, competition plays a stimulating role in enlarging the productive process. With unlimited markets, ‘free comp­etition' could appear as a mere sporting rival­ry between capitalists. But as soon as those outlets are restricted, the capitalists tear each other apart in bloody confrontations, the survivors feeding on the corpses of the victims of the lack of markets. Competition then becomes a barrier to the development of capital and of society's productive forces in general. For more than half a century, capitalist compet­ition has in this way thrown society into ever more destructive world wars, while in time of ‘peace' it has developed a growing burden of expenditure, not to increase or maintain pro­duction, but to "face up to the competition" -- the developing state bureaucracy, armaments, advertising, etc.

It is not competition that makes markets scarce, it is the lack of markets that exacerbates competition and makes it a destructive force.

It is capitalism's ability to push out the limits of the world market that determines the degree of exacerbation and ‘harmfulness' of capitalist competition.

The tendency of the rate of profit to decline takes effect when the market is inadequate

The same is true of the permanent tendency for the rate of profit to fall. This tendency, which Marx was the first to point out, is caused by:

1) Capitalism's permanent need to ‘modernize' production, constantly increasing the role of machines in the productive process, in relation to living labor;

2) The impossibility for capitalists to extract surplus labor from any source other than living labor itself.

But if this law is said to be a ‘tendency', this is precisely because it is constantly counteracted, restrained or compensated by other tendencies within the system.

Marx also clearly pointed out the factors that counteract it and those that compensate for its effects.

The tendency towards a fall in the rate of profit is itself restricted largely by the fall in the real cost of production (wages, machines, raw materials) provoked by the growth in labor productivity. Less labor time is needed to reproduce and maintain a worker, a machine, or a particular raw material.

The effects of the falling rate of profit itself tend to be compensated by a growth in the mass of profit. A rate of profit of 20% is less than 22%, but a profit of 20% on $2 million is far more than 22% on $1 million. But the capital­ists ability to increase his productivity, and similarly to increase his mass of profit, are strictly dependent on his ability to produce on a larger scale, which in turn depends on his ability to ‘sell more' (this question is treated at greater length in the article already cited: ‘Crisis theory from Marx to the Communist International').

The tendency for the rate of profit to fall becomes real and destructive when the forces that ‘normally' counteract or compensate it are weakened. This happens essentially when it has become impossible to enlarge the productive process due to a lack of solvent markets where surplus-value can be realized. Like competi­tion, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall is a contradiction which itself depends on the contradiction existing in the condi­tions for the realization of surplus-value.

Rosa Luxemburg does not single out one contra­diction at random amongst the others. She emphasizes the one where the rest are concen­trated, the one that translates the pressure and tensions of all capitalism's internal contradictions. And this allows us to see when those contradictions as a whole are transformed into a break on its development.

Bukharin, having affirmed that, in seeking to understand its crises, it is wrong to single out any one contradiction of capital, none­theless finds himself confronted with the question: when do these contradictions become definitive limits? And the only answer he can gave is: "these limits are set by a definite degree of tension in capitalist contradictions". (Idem)

‘A definite degree?' But what degree?

What degree of ‘competition' must be reached? What is the minimum rate of profit? Bukharin does not answer those questions, because they cannot be answered without referring specifi­cally to capitalism's ability to find outlets.

Luxemburg's analysis by contrast, makes it possible to determine in what way ‘these limits' are those of the world market, and in particular those of the extra-capitalist market

Is the contradiction highlighted by Rosa Luxemburg "external" to the process of capitalist production?

How -- according to Luxemburg -- has capitalism been able to overcome the contradiction between the need constantly to increase its outlets and constantly to reduce the exploited classes share of what is produced? By finding buyers outside the capitalist process of production. For the worldwide enterprise of capitalism, it is meaningless to buy products that it sells to itself. It must have ‘clients' outside the enterprise, to whom it can sell this surplus, this share of surplus that cannot be acquired either by the worker or the capitalist. As Luxemburg explains, capital at first found these clients, or ‘third buyers' essentially among the feudal lords.

During the period of the industrial revolution, it found them mainly in the agricultural and artisan sectors remaining outside its control and especially in the colonial territories that the great powers ended up fighting over in two world wars.

During its decadent phase, capitalism finds a momentary compensation for its lack of external outlets in the reconstruction of the indust­rial centers destroyed by war. And since the end of the ‘60's, that is to say, since the end of the reconstruction following World War II, capitalism has resorted to a headlong flight, through ever more massive credits, to under-developed countries and to the cap­italist metropoles.

The introduction of this element -- the extra capitalist sectors -- into the analysis of capitalist contradictions and the widening of analysis' framework to embrace its fullest reality -- the world market -- is seen by Luxemburg's critics as a ‘heresy' against Marx, and a search for capitalism's contradictions outside the sphere of capitalist production. Thus for Bukharin, for example, the lack of clients unconnected with capit­alist companies, of ‘third buyers' is supposedly not an ‘internal' contradiction. "Cap­italism" he says, against Luxemburg "develops its internal contradictions. It is these, and not a lack of ‘third buyers' that finally bring about its demise." (Idem).

In other words, to understand capitalism's contradictions, we must limit ourselves to capitalist reality within the factory and ignore what goes on the world market: the world market is somehow supposed to be ‘exter­nal' to capitalism's deepest reality!

This critique of Luxemburg is given a part­icularly clear expression by Raya Dunayer­skaya (who formerly collaborated with Trotsky) in an article written at the end of the Second World War on the analysis contained in Accumulation of Capital:

"For Marx, the fundamental conflict in a capitalist society is that between capital and labor: every other element is subord­inated to it. If this is how it is in real life, the first necessity for theory, even more than in society, is to pose the pro­blem as one between worker and capitalist, purely and simply. Hence the exclusion of ‘third buyers', and as he himself says on several occasions, the exclusion of the world market as having nothing to do with the conflict between workers and capitalists". (Raga Dunayerskaya: Analysis of R. Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital published in 1967 as an appendix to the pamphlet State Capitalism and Marx's Humanism).

It is true that, to explain how the capitalist exploits the workers, it is not necessary to refer to the world market and to the extra-capitalist sectors in particular. But to understand the conditions that allow this exploitation to be prolonged and developed, or eventually to be blocked, a view of the overall process of capitalist reproduction and accumulation is indispensable. This can only be done on the same scale as capital's real existence -- on the scale of the world market.

The market constituted by the extra-capit­alist sectors is not, in itself, the product of the exploitation of the worker by capital, but without it, this exploitation cannot be reproduced on an enlarged scale.

If capital has a vital need of this kind of markets to survive, it is because the rel­ationship between worker and capital is such that neither the worker nor the capitalist can constitute a solvent demand capable of realizing that part of the profit that is destined for reinvestment. If the masses' consumption were not limited by their wages, if there were no exploitation of the worker by the capitalist, if the workers could directly or indirectly consume everything they produced, in short, if wage labor did not exist, then the problem of external markets would disappear; but then, so would capitalism.

The extension of the world market is only a limit for capitalism, to the extent that it is indispensable to the existence of capit­alist reproduction in contradictory condit­ions.

In this sense, there is no contradiction between the supposedly ‘internal contra­dictions' of capitalism and its need for external outlets is not, any more than capitalism's inability to enlarge them to the point of integrating all humanity direct­ly into the capitalist productive process, a phenomenon determined by forces or laws external to capitalism but by the contradictory nature of its internal laws.

To clarify further this aspect of the question, let us consider the convulsions at the end of the feudal mode of production.

For many bourgeois historians, the catast­rophes that engulfed feudal society, during the 14th century in particular, are to be explained by the lack of culti­vable land. The famines, epidemics and wars, the general stagnation or decline that covered Europe in the 14th century, are thus supposed to express a somehow ‘natural' limit.

It is true that feudalism in decline came up amongst other things, against the difficulty of extending the land-area under cultivation. But this was not due to ill will on the part of mother nature, but because the social relations of production did not permit the setting in motion of the human and technical methods necessary to undertake more difficult cultivation.

The feudal economy was too splintered into millions of fiefs, corporations and privileges to allow the concentration of productive forces that the situation demanded. The hist­orical collapse of feudalism is not explained by ‘nature' but by its own inadequacies, its own internal contradictions.

Nature here is neither an ‘external' nor an ‘internal' contradiction. It is the environ­ment within which and in face of which the system's contradictions are exacerbated.

The case of capitalism and the scarcity of extra-capitalist markets are somewhat similar. The life and expansion of capitalism is synonymous with the transformation of new men into proletarians and the replacement of the old productive forms by capitalist rela­tions of production. A developing capitalist business is one that takes on more proletari­ans. A given business may take workers from another. But overall, world capitalism can only take on extra-capitalist workers. In order to live, capitalism must feed off the absorption of the non-capitalist world (artisans, small shopkeepers, peasants). But it is not only to procure its labor-power that capital lives at the expense of the non-capitalist sector.. As we have seen, it is essentially because this sector provides it with clients, a solvent demand for that part of the surplus product that it cannot buy itself.

Sadly for itself, capital cannot do business with its non-capitalist clients without ruining them. Whether it sells them consumer goods or means of production, it automatically destroys the precarious equilibrium of any pre-capitalist (and therefore less productive) economy. Introducing cheap clothes, building a railway, installing a factory, are enough to destroy the whole of pre-capitalist economic organization.

Capital likes its pre-capitalist clients just as the ogre ‘likes' children: it eats them.

The workers of a pre-capitalist economy who has had ‘the misfortune to have had dealings with the capitalists' knows that sooner or later, he will end up, at best proletarian­ized and at worst -- and this has become more and more frequent since capitalism's slide into decadence -- reduced to misery and bank­ruptcy in the now sterilized fields, or marginalized in the vast slums of urban cong­lomerations.

Capital is thus confronted with the following situation: on the one hand, it needs more and more outside clients to dispose of a part of its production; on the other hand, in condu­cting business with them, it ruins them. Imp­erialism, the decadence of capitalism, the cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction, are signs of the fact that for more than half a century non-capitalist outlets have been inadequate in relation to world capitals need to expand.

But, like nature in relation to feudal relat­ions of production, the non-capitalist sector is neither an ‘internal' nor an ‘external' contradiction. It is part of the environment within and against which capital exists.

When he pronounces his critique of Luxemburg -- that it is capitalism's internal contradictions and not any lack of ‘third buyers' that will finally kill capitalism -- Bukharin is tilting at windmills. Luxemburg has no more claimed that pre-capitalist economies ‘killed' capitalism than that the pebbles of the European soil were behind the death of feudalism.

What she has done is to resituate capitalism's internal contradictions -- discovered not by her, but by Marx -- in their living environ­ment: the world market.

Capital's environment is the world market

Like Raya Dunayerskaya, Bukharin claims to be able to understand capitalism's most fundamental mechanisms, those which lead it into crisis, without taking any notice of the environment the system lives in. One might as well try to understand the functioning of a fish, without taking into account the fact that it lives in water, or of a bird, without analyzing its relation­ship with the air. Not to understand the importance of the world market in analyzing capitalist crises comes down to not under­standing the very nature of capitalism itself.

This is to forget that before being a producer, the capitalist is first and fore­most a merchant, a trader.

In bourgeois mythology, the capitalist is always presented as a small producer who has become a large one thanks to his own indust­riousness. The small craftsmen of the middle ages are supposed to have become the great industrialists or State employees of our own days. The historical reality is quite other­wise.

In decomposing feudalism, it is not so much the craftsmen of the towns who develop into the capitalist class, but rather the merchants. Moreover, the first proletarians were often none other than the craftsmen forced to submit to capital's ‘formal domination'.

The capitalist is a merchant who trades mainly in labor-power. He buys labor in the form of labor-power as a commodity, and sells it in the form of products and services. His profit -- surplus value -- is the difference between the price of the commodity, labor-power, and the price of the goods it produces. The capitalist is obliged to concern himself with the productive process of which he is master, but he nonetheless remains a merchant. The world of a merchant is the market, and in the case of the capitalist, the world market.

The non-capitalist sector is part of the world market

Those who reject Rosa Luxemburg's analysis generally have a totally false vision of the world market -- when they finally admit its existence. It is considered simply as the sum of capitalists and the capitalists' wage laborers. This, however, makes it impossible to understand the reality of capitalist crises of the world market.

The sum of capitalists and wage-laborers makes up the market for the major part of capitalist production -- this is capitalism's ‘internal' market. But there are also the ­non-capitalist sectors -- the ‘external' market.

Here is how Rosa Luxemburg defines these two parts of the world market:

"The internal and external markets certain­ly occupy important and very different places in the pursuit of capitalist deve­lopment; but these are notions, not of geography, but of social economy. From the standpoint of capitalist production, the internal market is the capitalist market, it is capitalist production in the sense that it buys its own products and supplies its own elements of production. The market external to capital is the non-capitalist social milieu that surrounds it, absorbs its products and supplies it with the elements of production and labor power".

The world market is this whole, and must be integrated as such into any analysis of its crisis.

Rosa Luxemburg's analysis allows a better understanding of why commodity production and therefore wage labor, are the bottom of all capitalism's contradictions

In Capital, Marx often leaves the world market out of consideration, since in this part of his work, he aimed essentially to analyze the internal relationships of the system's functioning. Certain epigones have seen here an argument against Rosa Luxemburg's analyses. In integrating this analysis into its more general and more concrete framework of the world market, Rosa Luxemburg was doing no more than developing Marx's uncompleted work, following the meth­odological path that he had set himself: "Rising from the abstract to the concrete."

Whether singled out or not, the contradiction between the condition of the production of surplus-value and of its realization, this ‘internal' antagonism discovered by Marx, cannot really be understood without knowing all the "conditions of its realization". Now, the realization of surplus-value implies the sale of a part of it to clients other than capitalists and their wage-laborers, ie. to the non-capitalist sector. By introducing the latter into the analysis of capitalism's contradictions, Rosa Luxemburg does not deny the capitalist mode of production's internal contradictions; on the contrary, she supplies the means for understanding them in all their concrete and historical reality.

But by singling out the contradiction between the production and the realization of surplus-value, she ‘singles out' the basic contra­diction of capitalism: that between the use and exchange values of commodities in general and of the principal commodity in particular -­- labor-power and its money price, wages. The very existence of wage-labor appears at the basis of the breakdown of capital.

The realization of surplus value, the meta­morphosis into money of the commodities pro­duced by the workers' surplus labor, is contradictory because wage-labor inevitably limits the consumption of the workers them­selves.

In Theories of Surplus Value Marx wrote:

"...It is the metamorphosis of the commodity itself which encloses, as a developed movement, the contradiction -- implied in the unity of the commodity - between exchange value and use value, and then between money and commodity."

The contradiction between the use value of labor power and its exchange value, wages, is none other than that of the workers' exploitation by capital.

So it is only within the framework of Rosa Luxemburg's analysis that the elimination of wage-labor appears in a coherent way as the primary characteristic of the supersession of capitalism.

The question takes on its full political impo­rtance when it comes to a problem such as the evaluation of the class nature of the USSR ‘socialist' or ‘on the road to socialism' for the ‘Socialist' or ‘Communist' parties and all the parties of the centre and right; ‘degen­erated workers' State' according to Trotsky and the Trotskyists. It was left to the ‘German Left' of the 1920's to produce a first analysis from the marxist standpoint of the USSR as state-capitalist. It is not an accid­ent that this was one of the only currents in the workers' movement to know and share Rosa Luxemburg's analysis of crises.

In his pamphlet criticizing The Accumulation of Capital, Bukharin clearly affirms the non-capitalist nature of the USSR:

"To all the contradictions of the world capitalist system, there is added one cardinal contradiction: the contradiction between the capitalist world and the new economic system of the Soviet Union". (Idem, p.136)

Nor is this an accident. Whoever, in analyzing capitalism's crises, ‘singles out' contradic­tions such as "competition and capitalist anarchy", tends to see nationalizations, the development of state power and planning, as proofs of a break with capitalism. By ignoring the reality of the world market and its importance in the life of capitalism, this leaves the door wide open to the idea of a possible ‘socialism in one country'.

Through his theoretical criticism of Rosa Luxemburg's analysis, Bukharin laid the foundations for the theories which were to be used under Stalinism to present, in marxist verbiage, a regime of capitalist exploitation as social­ism.

Understanding the economic problems of the transition period from capitalism to communism is strictly dependent on the analysis of capit­alist crises. Tomorrow, we shall have to draw all the lessons from the practical experience of the Russian Revolution in this domain. This also means overcoming all the theoretical aberrations born of the revolution's degener­ation.

R. V.

Already appeared on crisis theory in the IR:

‘Marxism and Crisis Theory': no.13

‘Economic Theories and the Struggle for Socialism': no 16

‘On Imperialism': no.19

‘Crisis Theory, from.Marx to the CI': no.22

---

[1] IR 29. See also ‘Crisis Theories from Marx to the Communist International', in IR 22.

[2] N. Bukharin, ‘Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital'.

Harper's conclusions about the Russian revolution and the aspects of the Marxist dialectic which he preferred to ignore...

There are three ways of looking at the Russian Revolution:

A. The first is the way it's looked at by ‘socialists' of all description: left, right and centre; ‘Revolutionary Socialists' (in Russia), ‘independent' socialists elsewhere, and so on.

Before the revolution their perspective had been: the Russian Revolution will be a bourgeois demo­cratic revolution, within which the working class will have to struggle ‘democratically' for its ‘rights and liberties'.

All these gentlemen, as well as being ‘sincere revolutionary democrats', were fervent defenders of the ‘right of nations to self-determination'. They ended up defending the nation by making a detour from internationalism which led them from pacificism to the struggle against aggressors and oppressors. These people were moralists in the pure sense, defenders of Rights with a big R, Liberty with a big L, champions of the poor and the oppressed.

When the first revolution, the one in February, broke out, they gave vent to a torrent of joyful tears: this was at last the confirmation of their sacred perspective.

Unfortunately they failed to realize that the February insurrection was just a flea's bite, merely opening the door to the real battle between the classes at hand. The Tsar had fallen, but already the bourgeois revolution had virtu­ally been carried out in the context of the old autocracy. This whole apparatus was now rotten and had to be replaced. February opened the door to the struggle for power.

Within Russia itself, there were four main forces at hand:

1. The autocracy, the feudal bureaucracy which had been governing a country in which big capital was in the process of installing itself.

2. The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie; big capital, directors of industry, the intellectual elite, medium-sized landowners, etc.

3. The huge mass of poor peasants, only just out of serfdom.

4. The intellectuals and petty bourgeois prole­tarianized by the crisis of the regime and of the country; and the industrial proletariat itself.

The ‘reactionary' elements (supporters of the Tsarist regime) had been convinced that the introduction of large-scale industrial capitalism into Russia was inevitable and necessary. Their only aspiration was to be the managers and gen­darmes of foreign finance capital, while main­taining a social status quo favorable to them: the maintenance of the imperial bureaucratic sys­tem, a ‘liberation' of the serfs (needed to supply labor to industry) which ensured that the bureaucracy and the nobles would keep a high degree of control over the middle peasantry, which was seen as a class of tenant farmers.

This was, obviously, already the ‘bourgeois revolution'. But the social forces that were entering the historical arena didn't take the desiderata of the bureaucracy into account. Once capital had been introduced into Russia, that meant, on the one hand, the proletariat, and on the other hand, the capitalist class, composed not so much of possessors of capital, but of the whole social class which effec­tively directed industry and administered the circulation of capital.

The import of capital had the consequence of showing the Russian ruling classes, in the broadest sense, the enormous possibilities of capitalist development in Russia.

Within these classes, two ambivalent tendencies emerged: the first out of the need to use foreign finance capital for the development of capitalism in Russia; the second, a tendency towards national independence, and thus, towards breaking free of the grip of foreign capital.

When the revolution first broke out, the coun­tries which had invested capital in Russia, such as France, Britain and others, saw the danger mainly from the perspective of ‘their' capi­tal. Now, the main reaction of a property-holder when his property is threatened is fear, dirty-dealing, and the unleashing of whatever forces he has to hand.

These countries knew very well that a democratic government would safeguard their interests.

But, like any capitalist, they saw a reactionary putsch as a way of dictating their policies and having effective control over an extremely rich territory. The foreign countries thus played every possible card, supporting everyone -- Kerensky, Deniken, the reactionary bands, the provisional government, etc... Some got money, weapons and military advisors; others got ‘disinterested advice' from ambassadors or con­suls. And through this squabble for power, imperialist rivalries were also played out: united one day, the imperialist powers would be plotting against their allies and stabbing them in the back the next.

The most adequate term for the political geo­graphy of the period between the first revolu­tion (February) and the second (October) is a morass, a chaos which contemporary historical study is only just beginning to find out about, thanks to the Bolshevik government's publication of all the secret official agreements.

B. The imperialist war itself was at an impasse. The cadavers were rotting in the no-man's land between the trenches in a front which ran along the whole of eastern Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the south of these countries as well. There seemed to be no way out of the war.

In this general chaos, a small political group had stood for revolutionary internationalism at the conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, and had insisted on the necessity for a new revolu­tionary workers' movement on the ruins of the IInd International. It argued that the prole­tariat had to above all proclaim its inter­nationalism by entering into struggle, whatever the consequences, against its own bourgeoisie, while having it clearly in mind that such a struggle was part of an international prole­tarian movement which, if it was to carry out the socialist revolution, would have to extend to the main capitalist powers.

The real divergence between the social demo­crats and the nucleus of the future Communist International was on this point: the social dem­ocrats thought you could arrive at socialism through a gradual expansion of democracy within each country. What's more, they saw the war as an ‘accident' in the movement of history, and argued that the class struggle should be set aside during the course of the war, while wait­ing for victory over the wicked enemy who was preventing this ‘struggle' from being carried on in a ‘peaceful' manner. (If we had more space we would include the manifestos from the differ­ent ‘socialist' parties in the period from 1914 to 1917, and extracts from the newspapers these parties put out towards Russian troops in France, in which ‘socialism' was defended with a truly heroic ardor.)

The left which began to regroup after the two conferences in Switzerland had its most solid political foundations built around the persona­lity of Lenin, who at the time was almost totally isolated, not only from ex-partisans of the Bolshevik Party, but also from many in the left itself. Lenin's essential message was as follows:

"Preaching class collaboration, renouncing the social revolution and revolutionary methods, adapting to bourgeois nationalism, forgetting the changing character of national frontiers and countries, making a fetish of bourgeois leg­ality, reneging on the idea of class and class struggle for fear of scaring the ‘mass of the population' (ie the petty bourgeoisie) -- this, without doubt, is the theoretical basis of opportunism."

"... The bourgeoisie abuses the people by draping the imperialist brigandry with the old ideology of the ‘national war'. The proletariat unmasks this lie by proclaiming the transformation of this imperialist war into a civil war. This is the slogan indicated by the resolutions of Stuttgart and Basle, which anticipated not war in general, but this present war, and which didn't talk about the ‘defense of the father­land' but about ‘hastening the downfall of capitalism', about exploiting the crisis pro­duced by the war, by giving the example of the Commune. The Commune was the transformation of national war into civil war.

Such a transformation isn't easy and can't be ordered by this or that party. But this is precisely what corresponds to the objective state of capitalism in general, and of its final stage in particular. It's in this direction, and only this direction, that socialists must work. Not by voting for war credits, not by approving the chauvinism of your own country and its allies but, on the contrary, by combating above all else the chauvinism of your own bourgeoisie, and by refusing to be restricted to legal methods when the crisis is open and the bourgeoisie itself has annulled the legality it has created; this is the line of march which leads towards civil war, towards a conflagration which will spread throughout Europe ..."

".., . The war isn't an accident, a ‘sin' as the priests might say (they preach patriotism, humanity and peace at least as well as the opportunists). It's an inevitable phase of capitalism, a form of capitalist life just as legitimate as peace. The present war is a war of the peoples. But this doesn't mean that we must follow the ‘popular' tide of chauvinism. During the war, in all aspects of the war, the social antagonisms which divide the peoples still exist and will continue to exist..."

"... Down with all the sentimental drivel, the imbecilic sighs for ‘peace at any price'! Imperialism is playing with the fate of Europ­ean civilization. If this war isn't followed by a series of victorious revolutions, it will soon be followed by other wars. The fable about the ‘war to end all wars' is a crude, empty fairytale, a petty bourgeois myth (to use a very apt expression of Golos.)

Today or tomorrow, during the war or after it, now or during the next war, the proletarian ban­ner of civil war will rally behind it not only hundreds of millions of conscious workers, but also millions of the semi-proletarians and petty bourgeois who are presently being brutalized by chauvinism, and who may be horrified and depressed by the horrors of war, but who are above all being instructed, enlightened, awakened, organized, tested and prepared for the war against the bourgeoisie -- the bourgeoisie of ‘their' country and of the ‘ foreign' countries ..."

"... The IInd International is dead, vanquished by opportunism. Down with opportunism and long live the International, purged not only of the ‘turncoats' (as Golos wants) but also of opportunism. Long live the IIIrd International!

The IInd International has completed its useful functions ... It's now up to the IIIrd International to organize the proletarian forces for a revolutionary offensive against all the capi­talist governments, for a civil war against the bourgeoisie in all countries, for the conquest of power, for the victory of socialism..."

If we compare this to Marx, we can see that, contrary to what Harper wants us to believe, Lenin did understand marxism and knew how to apply it at the right moment:

"It is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at all, the working class must organize itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate arena of its struggle. In so far its class struggle is national, not tin substance, but as the Communist Manifesto says, ‘in form'. But the ‘framework of the present-day national state', for instance, the German Empire, is itself in its turn economically ‘within the framework' of the world market, politically ‘within the framework' of the system of states. Every businessman knows that German trade is at the same time foreign trade, and the greatness of Herr Bismarck consists, to be sure, precisely in his kind of international policy.

And to what does the German workers' party reduce its internationalism? To the consciousness that the result of its efforts will be ‘the international brotherhood of peoples' -- a phrase borrowed from the bourgeois League of Peace and Freedom, which is intended to pass as equivalent to the international brotherhood of the working classes in the joint struggle against the ruling classes and their governments." (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program)

What distinguished this left within social democracy from the rest of the workers' movement were its political positions.

1. On the question of the seizure of power (the quarrel between bourgeois democracy and workers' democracy as realized in the dictatorship of the proletariat).

2. On the nature of the war and the position of revolutionaries in this war.

On all the other points, notably the ‘economic' organization of socialism, they still adhered to the old formulae -- the nationalization of land and industry, etc, just as many still clung to the notion of the ‘insurrectionary general strike'. But it's worth pointing out that, even within the left, very few socialist militants understood Lenin's positions during the war; they rallied to them afterwards, when the Russian Revolution turned the theory into a fact.

So much was this the case, that in the quarrel between Kautsky and Lenin, Kautsky didn't say a word about it -- and yet, as Lenin pointed out, at the Basle Congress Kautsky had opted for an­alogous and extremely advanced positions on workers' power and on internationalism. However, it's not enough to sign resolutions: you also have to know how to apply them in practice. It's when theory has to be transposed into prac­tice that you see who the real marxists are. All the worth of a Plekhanov or a Kautsky, considerable figures in the socialist workers' movement at the end of the nineteenth century, collapsed like a sandcastle in the face of this small group of Bolsheviks who had to translate their theories into practice, first on the sei­zure of power, then on the question of the war, in opposition to the Left Social Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik fraction which was for ‘revolutionary war' over the Brest-Litovsk issue, (This question of war was posed to the Bolshe­viks both over the German offensive, and the internal civil war).

While waiting for the revolution to extend onto the international arena, in Russia itself the economy could only be organized in a bourgeois manner, even though on the model of the most advanced forms of capitalism; state capitalism. Only the unfolding of the international revo­lution (which took as its point of departure the examples of the Bolsheviks) would have per­mitted a transformation towards socialism. Only when this is made clear does it make sense to cite all the erroneous positions Lenin had, before and after the revolution.

In 1905, Trotsky gave Lenin a severe lesson in ‘Our Differences', and it was the synthe­sis of Trotsky's position in ‘Our Differences' and Lenin's position in What is to be Done which guided the seizure of power during the war. After the seizure of power, a formi­dable number of errors were made by Lenin, Trotsky and many others in the party... It's not a question of hiding from these errors. We will return to them in future, especially when it comes to dealing with the ‘pure Leninists'. But it's one thing to draw lessons thirty years later, when the economic conditions have changed, when the characteristics of the period have become clearer, and quite another thing to face up to immediate events that are unfolding in an anarchic and unforeseen manner. Today, it's much easier to say what the errors of the Bolsheviks were, since you can study the Russian Revolution as an historic event, you can see what political groups were involved, analyze and study their documents, their activities etc.

But, at that time, and despite all their back­ward positions, were the Bolsheviks, with Lenin and Trotsky at their head, engaged in a movement whose immediate aim was to be a movement towards socialism? Where did the paths the Bolsheviks took lead to? Or the ones taken by Kautsky, or by X, Y, or Z?

Our reply is that there was only one basis for leading the movement towards the socialist revo­lution, and the Bolsheviks (and even then, by no means all the Bolsheviks) were the only ones who defended it and applied it. The Bolsheviks were engaged in a class struggle whose aim was the overthrow of capitalism on an international scale, and their general political positions were a real contribution towards this aim.

There is so much to be said about the broad lines of the positions which animated the October Bolshevik movement. The discussion about them has hardly begun. But such a discussion must have as its minimum basis the revolutionary pro­gram of October -- a program whose essential aspects have remained valid for the whole workers' movement over the last thirty years.

The revolutionary movement which began in 1917 in Russia proved that it was an international movement, through the repercussions it had in Germany a year later.

But a few days later, the armistice was signed and a few months later, Noske had done his job of repression. By 1917, when the 1st Congress of the CI was held -- and although the great move­ment launched by the Russian-German revolution was to shake the proletariat for years after­wards -- the highpoint of the revolution had already been passed, The bourgeoisie had reco­vered its composure, the peace settlement gradually softened the class struggle, the proletariat retreated ideologically as the German revolution was broken bit by bit. The failure of the German revolution left Russia isolated, forcing it to carry on with its economic organization and to wait for a new revolutionary wave.

But history shows that a workers' movement can't be victorious in stages. The Russian revolution was only a partial victory: since the final result of the movement it unleashed was defeat on an international level, the so-called building of ‘socialism' in Russia could only be an image of this defeat of the international workers' movement.

The fact that the CI had to hold its congresses in Moscow already showed that the revolution was blocked. As the defeat became more definite, each new congress registered a further retreat for the international workers' movement: theoretically in Moscow, physically in Berlin.

Once again, the revolutionaries found themselves in a minority, then excluded. The IIIrd Inter­national went the way of the IInd International. Like so many ‘socialist' and ‘workers' parties before them, the ideology of the Communist Parties became more and more bourgeois.

But two notable phenomena accompanied this retreat of the workers' movement: a degenerated workers' party held onto state power, and capi­talism, having entered a new period in 1914, plunged into even more serious than ever before. The analysis of these two phenomena, which only the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left (which published Bilan between 1933 and 1938 -- the name alone being a whole program) was able to develop in a clear way, is the basis for the birth of a new revolutionary workers' movement.

C. Faced with the degeneration of the workers' movement, with the evolution of modern capita­lism, with the Russian Stalinist state, with the problems posed to the insurrections of the sov­iets, there is a third position which doesn't bother to make too profound a research into the historical, political whys and hows of the last thirty years, and instead looks around for a handy scapegoat. Some choose Stalin, and through their anti-Stalinism, end up participa­ting in the war effort of the ‘democratic' American camp; others look for ‘dadas' of var­ious kinds, depending on what's in fashion. In 1938-42, it was the fashion to blame fascism for the war and the degeneration of society, rather than seeing the maintenance of capitalism as a whole as the real problem. Today Stalinism is a more modish scapegoat. There's a marvelous blossoming of theories and theoreticians: Burnham, against the bureaucracy; Bettelheim, for it, etc. There's Sartre, and ‘freedom', and the whole clique of writers paid by the political parties of the bourgeoisie, and the rotten, careerist world of modern journalism. In all this, Harper's accusations against ‘Leninism' leading ‘inevitably' to Stalinism seems like just one more to add to the list.

At a time when ‘marxism' is going through its greatest ever crisis (let's hope it's only a crisis of growth), Harper adds a bit more con­fusion when there's too much around already. But when Harper writes:

"But nothing of the sort is found in Lenin; that ideas are determined by class is not mentioned; the theoretical differences hang in the air. Of course theoretical ideas must be criticized by theoretical arguments, then, however, the social consequences are emphasized with such vehemence, the social origins of the contested ideas should not have been left out of consider­ation. The most essential character of marxism does not seem to exist for Lenin." (Lenin As Philosopher, Merlin Ed. p.88)

-- he goes further than mere confusion. This isn't just a polemical question, an excess of language. Harper is one of those numerous mar­xists who see marxism as a philosophical and scientific method, a theory, and who remain in the astronomical heights of theory without ever applying it to the historical practice of the workers' movement. For these ‘marxists', ‘praxis' is yet another philosophical object, not an active subject.

Is there no philosophy to be drawn from the revolutionary period?

Yes of course. I would even say that, for a marxist, philosophy can only be drawn out of a historical movement -- by drawing lessons in the wake of such a movement. But what does Harper do? He philosophizes on the philosophy of Lenin by taking it out of its historical context. If that was all, he would simply have ended up by uttering a few half-truths. But he tries to apply his conclusions, his half-truths, to a historical period he hasn't taken the trouble to examine. Here he shows that he has done no better, and perhaps worse, than Lenin in Materialism and Empiriocriticism. He has spoken about marxism, and showed that he knows what it is in his writings about knowledge. A lot could be said about what Harper writes: especially on the main aspect of his approach to the problem of praxis. For a marxist, praxis can't be divorced from the immediate political context, which makes it truly revolutionary -- ie from the development of revolutionary thought and action. Now, Harper repeats over and over again, like a litany, that ‘Lenin wasn't a marxist ... he's understood nothing about the class struggle'. But in the development of his practical, revolutionary political thought. Lenin did follow the teachings of Marx.

The proof that Lenin understood and applied the teachings of marxism to the Russian Revolution is contained in Lenin's preface to Marx's Letters to Kugelmann, where he points out the lessons that Marx drew from the Paris Commune. There is a curious analogy between the texts by Lenin we quoted above and the extract from Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program.

Lenin and Trotsky are part of the tradition of revolutionary marxism. They followed its teachings step by step. Trotsky's theory of the ‘per­manent revolution' is quite simply a lesson drawn from the Communist Manifesto and marxism in general; the Russian Revolution was a faith­ful reproduction of this theory and is fully in line with the non-degenerated heritage of marxism. Harper, like so many other marxists, forgets one thing: is the perspective that was valid for the revolutions of the nineteenth century, during the ascendant period of capita­lism, which was just ending when the Russian Revolution took off, still valid in the degenerating phase of this society?

Lenin was able to draw out the new perspective when he talked of the new period of ‘wars and revolutions'. Rosa Luxemburg clearly put for­ward the idea that capitalism had entered into its epoch of degeneration. This didn't stop the CI, and later on the Trotskyist movement and other left oppositions, from remaining tied to the old perspective, or from going back to it, as Lenin himself did after the failure of the German Revolution. Harper certainly thinks that there is a new perspective, but his analy­sis of Lenin and the Russian Revolution proves that, like many others, he hasn't been able to develop it, and has fallen into a whole lot of vague or false positions.

It's no accident that it's the heirs of the theoretical acquisitions of Bilan who have responded to him, as they have done elsewhere to the ‘pure Leninists'.

Both the ‘pro'- and the ‘anti'- Lenins forget one thing: although the problems of today can only be understood in the light of the problems of the past, they are nonetheless different.

Philippe

This article was written by our Current during the hostilities in the South Atlantic and expresses our position on the real nature of the Falklands war. Today, in the way of all the bourgeoisie's ‘nine-day wonder' propaganda barrages, the Falklands are almost forgotten. The method of the bourgeoisie is to use the hyenas of the press to mount a full-blown production, as they did over E1 Salvador, and then ... on to something else, whereupon the whole world press shuts up about it. But for us, the Falklands affair has important lessons for the working class. Why weren't the minor differences between Argentina and Britain dealt with through negotiations like hundreds of other conflicts? Why was this blown out of all proportion? This is what the article tries to make clear.

Through the Falklands war the bourgeoisie par­aded the specter of a third world war before the eyes of the workers, but in fact the real worry of the bourgeoisie is not war but the possibility of class conflict in the major centers of capitalism. The historic course is still towards revolution, and this is what the bourgeoisie is trying to change so that the way to world war can be opened. To do this it must confront a proletariat which is not defeated, and so the incessant propaganda campaigns today have only one purpose: to weaken the proletariat's consciousness before this confrontation takes place. The Falklands propaganda campaign was therefore part of an international attack of the bourgeoisie against the proletarian danger.

More recently there has come the war in the Lebanon which, unlike the Falklands affair, is a true reflection of dangerous inter-imper­ialist, inter-bloc antagonisms. An operation to re-establish order against destabilizing forces in this crucial zone for the western alliance, the Lebanese war is aimed at elimin­ating these destabilizing forces and so make the Lebanon into a stronghold of the US bloc. This is a grave reminder that the threat of war is real.

These wars evidence the immensity of the mass­acre that decadent capitalism holds in store for humanity and thereby underline the danger for the working class if it lets itself be taken in by nationalist, jingoist campaigns. Already the proletariat in Britain is paying a price merely for its silence over the Falk­lands in a divisive and humiliating manipulation of its struggle by the bourgeoisie and the unions.

The class struggle in Poland in 1980 showed that the proletariat is not yet defeated, and that its reserves of combativity are enormous. The economic crisis is striking hard, pushing the proletariat towards revolution. It is in the face of this obstacle that the bourgeoisie has used the Falklands conflict to try to ‘distract' the proletariat from developing its own perspective and to hide the fact that the only way to put an end to war is to put an end to capitalism.

The causes of the Falklands conflict

The Falklands affair cost hundreds of dead and wounded from the beginning of hostilities on April 2nd, 1982. Set off by the invasion of Arg­entine troops, carried on at the slow pace of a naval blockade by the British, the war broke out in earnest under fire from the most sophisticated sea and air weapons of the NATO arsenal.

The whole history of the bourgeoisie and its wars is proof that humanist alibis are only lies. This conflict was no exception. The regime of torturers in Buenos Aries which pretended to be the defenders of anti-colonialism and of anti-American imperialism owes it entire existence to the political, economic and military aid of the US. The British bourgeoisie all of a sudden became the intransigent defender of democratic values -- a bourgeoisie whose entire history is marked by colonial massacres and imperialist war, a bourgeoisie whose specialty today is repression in Northern Ireland. All of this is just propaganda. But what then was the possible conflicting interests justifying such a war?

What economic interests?

Almost completely unheard of a few months ago, the Falklands were pushed on to the centre stage of world events: eighteen hundred inhabitants whose main source of revenue is 300,000 sheep and some fishing became prison­ers under a deluge of bombs. Such meager re­sources could hardly be at the root of such a showdown. Did the Falklands have some hidden secret? The press went on and on about the hidden resources of the sea: oil, planckton, minerals etc., to give a semblance of an explanation for the conflict. But with a world crisis of overproduction, who is going to invest in the South Atlantic with its horrible climate near the South Pole? The South Atlant­ic is not the North Sea, surrounded by highly industrialized countries where oil deposits can be exploited in what still remain very difficult conditions.

There are no major economic interests in the Falklands. Are these rocks lost in the middle of the ocean, swept by glacial winds, of some vital strategic military significance?

What strategic interests?

Up to now the Falklands were the furthest thing from the minds of military strategists. The old territorial claims of Argentina seemed to be just another aspect of Latin American folklore, and before the invasion, Britain's military presence was a symbolic one of a handful of soldiers. These islands are of no strategic value either for Argentina or for Britain.

Nor are they a strategic point for the Western Alliance as a whole, two of whose major allies was fighting each other. As for the rival bloc controlled by Russia, it is beyond their capacity to launch a military intervention in this part of the world. South America is the private reserve of the US. The Falklands are a thousand kilometers from the South American continent and thous­ands of kilometers from the nearest pro-Russian bases in Cuba or Angola. The much-vaunted Russian bases in the Antarctic, if they indeed exist, are reputed to be on the other side of the Pole. The most important Russian military presence in this region is the eye of its satellites.

Can the Russian danger come from Argentina itself? (No one can seriously imagine it coming from Britain, in any case). The main argument in support of this hypothesis revolves around Argentina's trade relations with the USSR, particularly the wheat deals with the Eastern bloc. After all, didn't Argentina oppose Carter's wheat embargo im­posed after the invasion of Afghanistan? This argument does not stand up to scrutiny: the US itself exports more wheat to Russia than Argentina. Giving credence to the "pro-Russian" danger in Argentina is to ignore the control that the US exercises over Argentina, whose government and military dance to the music of American advisors.[1] A conflict on the scale of the Falklands mobilization could not have been put into motion without the US being informed.

If there were no vital economic or military stakes that can justify such a massive troop engagement -- why then did this war take place? Why weren't the minor antagonisms between these two countries settled by diplomatic means as hundreds of others have before? Why all the dead?

By realizing what the Falklands conflict was not, we can see what it really was: a gigantic lie! Its purpose was two-fold: to test modern naval-air weapons and tactics and to feed an intense propaganda campaign aimed at inhibiting and deviating world working class consciousness, particularly by immobilizing the major battalions of the proletariat in the industrialized countries of Europe.

Deadly war games

In the Falklands, the US-controlled bloc took advantage of the opportunity to test its most sophisticated weapons in realistic con­ditions, far from any possibility of inter­ference from the USSR, in all "tranquility" in relation to the main rival, the Eastern bloc.

This war between two important and loyal allies of the US did not lead to weakening of the western bloc. On the contrary, it served as a testing ground to organize the bloc's naval air strategy and to orient the billion dollar investments necessary to mod­ernize its weapons arsenal.

In its time, the six-day war between Israel and Egypt revolutionized the strategy of death in modern tank battles. The hundreds of tanks destroyed in a few hours showed the import­ance of missiles and electronic equipment in modern land warfare. The Falklands conflict today clarified modern naval tactics in the same way.

In the middle of a storm, in frozen waters that kill within minutes, during nights that last 15 hours, the bourgeoisie maneuvered its troops and tested its most sophisticated weapons with all the scorn for human life that this implies. Atomic submarines, ultra­modern destroyers with pompous names, planes and missiles with names like toys, trans­atlantic "luxury" liners for troop carriers -- the bourgeoisie paraded the deadly perfection of its war machine just as in the past when the press of the Allies greeted the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as proof of "great scientific progress".

The French bourgeoisie betrayed the hypocrisy of the whole capitalist class when it couldn't resist applauding the effectiveness of the Mirage and Super-Etendard planes and the Exocet missiles used to kill the troops of its own ally, Britain.

A British captain revealed the real military concerns of the western bourgeoisie when he declared that the Exocet missile was able to sink the Sheffield only because the latter had no defense system against this weapon and that in any case the Russians had no equivalent of the Exocet. Behind the Falk­lands show, the western bourgeoisie was really preparing the rearmament of NATO's naval air forces against the USSR.

But this is not the only or even most essential point. The bourgeoisie had another even more important purpose in this conflict: creating a propaganda barrage to divert, disorient and control the proletariat.

The ideological campaign

The "spectacle" of the war between Argentina and Britain mobilized the media of the entire world. The Iran-Iraq war which has cost over 100,000 lives and is still going on, has never known such media "success". Such press campaigns on a world scale are not accidents, nor are they the result of humanist impulses or the simple desire to inform the public.

In the period of capitalist decadence, the bourgeoisie maintains its domination through terror and lies. Never before has mankind known such barbarism as in the 20th century: 100 million dead in wars, billions of victims of starvation and misery. Each day in its factories the bourgeoisie assassinates more workers in accidents due to disastrous work conditions than all the soldiers killed in 3 months of the Falklands, Each day the desperate living conditions imposed by capit­alism pushes thousands of new victims to suicide. This reality of the barbarism of the capitalist system tries to make people forget through its propaganda.

The ideological campaign on the Falklands was no exception to this rule, The way the Argentine bourgeoisie launched into this conflict to deflect growing social unrest and the way the British bourgeoisie reacted by developing a chauvinistic parade is almost a caricature of the ideological poison the bourgeoisie wants to disseminate: creating a wedge of nationalism to divide the world working class. Only the bourgeoisie comes out the winner in this syndrome; both national ‘unity'[2] and the false opposition between ‘pacifists' and ‘hawks' are traps whose whole point is to pre­vent the working class from even thinking of independent, autonomous action against the exploiters. The whole idea is to drag the workers in behind the bourgeoisie and its different factions.

Although the campaign was the most obvious in the two countries directly involved, Argentina and Britain, its full significance is its international dimension in the whole western bloc. The campaign was aimed at the proletar­iat of the entire bloc controlled by the US.

What does the bourgeoisie hope to gain from such ideological campaigns? First of all, to spread confusion among the workers. The crisis is pushing the bourgeoisie towards economic collapse. The capitalist class is increasingly obliged to attack the proletariat, to cut down its standard of living, to reduce it to conditions of misery. After the workers of the under-developed countries, now the workers of the advanced countries are being slowly reduced to pauperism.

In the 70's, against a limited attack of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat of the capitalist metropoles showed that it was not defeated, The crisis has swept away the last illusions. The strikes in Poland showed that the reserves of combativity are intact. In Europe, the historic centre of the proletariat, conditions are pushing the proletariat to a realization of the necessity and the possibility of a proletarian revolution. This awakening realization is what the bourgeoisie wants to stifle, weaken, and deviate through incessant campaigns. In the last two years we have seen media circuses on the hostages in Iran, on the invasion of Afghanistan, on Poland, on El Salvador, on pacifism, etc.[3]. The campaign on the Falklands is the direct continuation of this attack and only in this context is its full significance clear.

The bourgeoisie's propaganda serves one main purpose: to make the proletariat forget the terrain of the class struggle. With the local war of the Falklands, after Afghanistan, Iran, E1 Salvador, the bourgeoisie keeps the work­ers minds occupied with propaganda and tries to make them forget the essentials. It tries to get the workers used to the idea of war, to condition them to war ideology and thus disorient them completely. The bourgeoisie tries to hypnotize the workers with propaganda like a snake paralyzes its prey before the kill.

The necessary corollary of these campaigns is, of course, pacifism. Locking the proletariat into the false alternative "peace or war" has only one aim: to make the workers accept capitalist "peace", that is, misery. Capital­ist "peace" is an illusion, a preparation for further imperialist war in a system which for decades has lived only for and by war.

Before the casualties, the folklore of the Falklands operation prevented a full develop­ment of the campaign in all its glory. The bourgeoisie killed just enough people (sever­al hundred soldiers) to give credibility to the danger of war. Frighten the proletariat to make it forget the revolutionary perspect­ive on the horizon. Make the workers bury their heads in the sand of nationalism.

The bourgeoisie did the same thing with the anti-terrorist campaigns: create a feeling of insecurity and panic, feed it with bomb­ings, statistics, sensationalistic articles on hoodlums to justify the strengthening of the police machine, to divide the proletariat and accentuate atomization in the name of law and order.

The impact of the Falklands campaign cannot be measured by whether or not the proletariat in Argentina or Britain was really mobilized behind the flag (a very unlikely, or, in any case, short-lived phenomenon) but by the extent to which the fear of world war and isolationist reflexes were instilled. Behind these reflexes is the poison of nationalism.[4]

The campaign around the war in the Falklands was in continuity with the campaigns that preceded it in the attempt to use the fear of war as a way of paralyzing the proletariat by making it believe that any social conflict accelerates the tendency to war. This tactic was used during the Polish strikes when the bourgeoisie tried to make the workers believe that their struggles in Poland increased inter-imperialist tensions. In fact, just the opposite is true -- the mass strike in Poland in 1980 acted as a brake on the world bourge­oisies tendencies towards war. The military apparatus of the Warsaw Pact was paralyzed along with the Polish economy. The western bourgeoisies, frightened of the possible spread of unrest in Europe, were also obliged to put their military rivalry with the Eastern bloc into the background.

Nationalism is a vital weapon to weaken and isolate the workers in every country. Through pacifism, neutralism, war-mongering, anti-Americanism, anti-totalitarianism and all, the bourgeoisie is attempting to recreate a nati­onalistic and isolationist syndrome. With the Falklands campaign, the bourgeoisie's strat­egy is obvious -- divide the workers so as to deal with them piecemeal.

This manipulated conflict allowed the bour­geoisie to play off one part of the world working class against another through the "divisions" between the two camps:

The launching of a violent anti-American cam­paign in Latin America (after the El Salvador barrage) was aimed at exacerbating the anti gringo, anti-American sentiment still strong in Latin America, tried to get the workers of South America against the workers of North America. In the same way, Argentina's "anti colonial" propaganda against the alliance of advanced countries, Europe and the USA, attempted to turn the proletariat of the under-developed countries against the proletariat of the advanced countries. In Europe, the workers were called upon to supp­ort the war effort in the name of "western values", of "democracy", against militarism and dictatorship, the same theme used against the Russian bloc.

In the present period, the massive inter­national propaganda campaign of the bourge­oisie, whatever their specific pretexts, are aimed at accentuating the divisions with­in the world proletariat, isolating one part of the working class from the others. Divide and conquer is still the tried and true formula for the exploiters.

The victory that the bourgeoisie of all coun­tries hoped to gain from the Falklands war was not the victory of the battlefield but the victory of propaganda and lies. Its real goal was not the control over a pile of rocks in the South Atlantic but the control over the working class.

War or revolution

Contrary to what the ruling class tries to make people believe, the Falklands conflict was not a precursor to World War 3. It marks the continuation of the bourgeoisie's economic, ideological and military attack against the working class. The proletariat is the enemy they are all afraid of.

All the capitalists' palliatives have proven powerless against the crisis. The major ind­ustrial heartlands are sinking and the worst is yet to come. The steady decline of the centers of the world economic system is creating the conditions for a social outburst in the heart of the world proletariat, in Europe, where capitalism launched out to conquer the world, where two world wars were fought, where at the beginning of this century the question of revolution was concretely raised.

Poland was a warning for the world bourgeoisie. An accelerated decline in the living standards of the working class will push it to a qualit­atively new level of struggle and conscious­ness on a world scale. The "divide and rule" ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie are trying to hold back this process leading to the communist revolution.

The road to world war is for the time being barred by the dynamic of class struggle. The perspective of revolutionary confrontation is open and the bourgeoisie has not been able to actively mobilize the world proletariat to drag it into world war. Paradoxically, the very nature of the Falklands conflict shows that world war is not right now on the cards.

The bourgeoisie's number one problem today is the danger of a confrontation with the working class. The press and the theoreticians of the bourgeoisie themselves express this more and more clearly today:

"But the ‘hawks' and ‘doves' are starting to ask themselves: is a military effort in peacetime the best way to resolve the economic crisis? How far can austerity be taken before an internal balance is endangered?" (Le Monde Diplomatique, April 1982)

"The problem of European defense is serious but it is above all political and economic. The risk in Europe is not from an improbable invasion by the USSR but from a moral, economic collapse which could serve the USSR's interests." (Quote from the Assistant Director of the Political Science Institute in Washington, idem)

The extent of the media hype is a reflection of the extent of the bourgeoisie's fear.

But even though world war is not imminent, the danger of war is always present. Capit­alism cannot live without war; to a certain extent, the Falklands also proves this once again. If the working class does not want to be drawn into capitalist war, it will have to destroy capitalism. The weapons-testing experiment in the South Atlantic is only a prelude to what the bourgeoisie has in store. If the workers do not react, the bourgeoisie will inevitably be pushed by the contradict­ions of its system into bigger and bloodier battles.

To put an end to war, we have to put an end to capitalism. The two are inextricably bound together. That is what the bourgeoisie tries to make us forget. More than ever before, in our time, the alternative is either the division of the proletariat and world war, or the unity of the working class and revolution.

J.J.

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[1] This conflict was fought between Argentina and Britain, two countries which culturally (150,000 Argentines of British origin), economically (the city of London has enormous investments in Argentina) and militarily (Britain supplied a large part of arms which killed its own soldiers) are very closely linked. Japan is helping Argentina to deal with its war expenditures by agreeing to postpone the repayment of Argentina's debts. All these elements seriously undermine the idea of deep antagonisms in this war.

[2] In Argentina the torturers are supported by their former victims in opposition. Nationalism wipes out everything. The bourgeoisie's fondest dreams are realized: a world where victims accept their executioners and the exploited respect their exploiters!

[3] On Poland, see International Reviews, nos 27, 28 and 29. On El Salvador, no. 25 and on Iran, no 20 and 22.

[4] The bourgeoisie adores opinion polls, instruments of intoxication on the theme of "public opinion" which also serves as test for the impact of its ideological campaigns. Gallup din an international poll on "The defense of your country". In France, in an IFRES-Wickert poll 47% of the participants believed that the Falklands war could lead to world war, while 87% of West Germans felt that the risk of world war was heightened because of this conflict. Due to this fear, the age-old nationalist reflex returns by way of the healthy but illusory and recuperated desire to remain outside of the conflict: 61% of people in France were against supporting Britain if this would imply a military engagement; 75% of West Germans demanded strict neutrality. In part this statistics show the failure to gain the population's agreement to war.

 

IS WAR A FAVOURABLE CONDITION FOR THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION?

Between 1845 and 1847, the world, and Europe in particular, following on from a series of bad harvests, went through a grave economic crisis. In France the price of grain doubled, giving rise to hunger riots. The ruined peasants could no longer buy industrial products: unemployment  became general, wages fell,the number of bankruptcies soared. The working class embarked on a struggle for reforms: for the limitation of the working day, for a minimum wage, for jobs,for the right to form associations and to strike, for civil equality and thesuppression of privileges, etc. As a result, the explosive events in February1848 in France, so brilliantly condensed in Marx’s famous work The Class Struggle in France, bequeathed a major lesson to posterity: the necessity for the working class to demarcate itself from the bourgeoisie, to preserve it’s class independence. However, an essential aspect of this revolution is often forgotten: it was not provoked by a war. Those who forgot its causes tended to focus their attention on the crushing of the insurrection of June 1848 and on the problem of how to arm the workers more effectively, how to organise better street-fights, ignoring the lessons Marx and Engels drew about the historic period and the nature of the class struggle.

Later, the disaster at Sedan led to the collapse of the Empire in September 1870 and to the setting up of the ‘government of National Defence’ led by the bourgeois Thiers; this in turn failed in its attempt to disarm the Parisian population and provoked the setting up of the Commune in March 1871. This was without doubt the first victorious proletarian insurrection in history; but even so, as Marx recognised, it was an ‘accident’ in a period which was still that of capitalism’s ascendancy. Once again the bourgeoisie triumphed over the proletariat just as it was constituting itself into a class. Those who invoked the Commune while forgetting its accidental nature character sanctioned all sorts of confusions about the possibility of a proletarian revolution emerging successfully out of a war. Certainly, as Engels noted in an introduction to The Civil War in France: “from March 18 onwards the class character of the Paris movement, which had previously been pushed into the background by the fight against the foreign invaders, emerged sharply and clearly”.

But the objective conditions were lacking: the Communards were ahead of the march of history. Within this context, two factors contributed to the defeat: isolation (a city under siege) and the predominance of the military terrain, which is home ground of the bourgeoisie (as Engels put it “the continuing war against the Versailles army absorbed all its energies”. And of course we must not forget the total support that the Prussian forces gave to the French bourgeoisie. An incredible ‘irony’ of history: the Commune, while concretely demonstrating the possibility and necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, gave rise to the idea that any revolution could henceforth emerge out of a war. This gave rise to many false theorisations in the workers’movement. For example, Franz Mehring and Jules Guesde theorised about ‘revolutionary war': in Guesde’s case this thesis became mixed up with the nationalist position of subordinating yourself to your own bourgeoisie. Now,above all at the end of the century as capitalism entered its decadent phase,there were no longer any ‘revolutionary’ wars: what’s more, wars had never been revolutionary in the proletarian sense. In this text, we shall see why war in itself is not a ‘necessary evil’ for the revolution.

Obviously, like any original experience, the Commune, even though it was born out of a reaction of ‘national defence’, came up against a bourgeoisie that was surprised and inexperienced in the face of a proletarian threat in the middle of a war. It showed that a war will inevitably be stopped by the eruption of the proletariat, or at least that it can’t be waged as the bourgeoisie would like it as long as the smallest island of proletarian resistance remains.

The stopping of the war in such conditions allows the bourgeois forces to regroup themselves, to call a temporary halt to their imperialist antagonisms, and together to surround and strangle the proletariat. Despite the fact that such situations are more favourable to the bourgeoisie, for decades it was an accepted axiom in the workers’ movement that wars created or could create the conditions most favourable to the generalisation of struggles and thus to the outbreak of the revolution. There was little or no consideration about the insurmountable handicap posed by a situation of world war, which would limit or reduce to nothing a real extension of the revolution. It was only when capitalism entered its decadent phase and began the race towards the First World War that the issue became clearer: War or Revolution, and not War AND Revolution.

CLASS STRUGGLE UNDER WAR CONDITIONS

The Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 in the Course Towards World War

However displeasing it may be to those who glorify the past, the Russian and German revolutionary minorities within the IInd International hadn’t sufficiently considered the conditions imposed by capitalism’s change in period. It’s true that it was terribly difficult to break away from the process of degeneration that the IInd International was going through. The future founders of the Communist International were surprised by the outbreak of the war and had not carried out all the preparatory work that the proletariat needed.
For several years now, the ICC has attempted to show the importance of the notion of the historic course and to point out that conditions of war have been unfavourable for past revolutions (see in this regard the article on the conditions for the generalisation of the class struggle in IR 26).

In retrospect, one can see that it was the audacious, lucid Trotsky and his fraction at the beginning of the century who not only understood, before 1914 and better than the majority of the Bolsheviks, that the bourgeois revolution was no longer on the agenda in Russia, but who also managed to sweep away a number of false theorisations by examining the conditions of the 1905 revolution – a revolution that, to use his own terms, was “belated” and “off target”: “It is incontestable that the war has played an enormous role in our revolution: it has materially disorganised absolutism, it has dislocated the army, it has forced the mass of the population to act with audacity. But fortunately, it has not created the revolution, and that is lucky because a revolution born out of a war is impotent: it is the product of extraordinary circumstances, it is based on a strength outside itself and has definitively shown itself to be unable to maintain the positions it conquers” . (Our Revolution).

The minority around Trotsky, which published Nashe Slovo (Our World) , a product and crystallisation of a powerful movement of the class at the beginning of the century in Russia, was one of the currents that was best able to draw the crucial lessons about the historic spontaneity of the proletariat and the workers’ councils.But it also highlighted an essential reason for the failure of 1905: the situation of war.

In his article ‘Military Catastrophe and Political Perspectives’ (Nashe Slovo, April-Sept. 1915), Trotsky, in the name of his fraction, refused to speculate on the war itself – not for humanitarian reasons, but because of his internationalist conceptions. He pointed to the insurmountable division introduced by the process of war: while defeat shook the vanquished government and could consequently hasten its decomposition, this didn’t at all apply to the victorious government which on the contrary was only strengthened.Moreover, in the defeated country itself nothing positive would emerge if there wasn’t a strongly developed proletariat capable of completely destabilising the government after its military defeat. It was extremely doubtful whether the contradictions that come in the wake of a war would constitute a favourable factor for the success of the proletariat. This observation was subsequently confirmed by the failure of the wave of revolutionary social upheavals that began in the year 1917. War is not a guaranteed springboard for the revolution.It is a phenomenon over which the proletariat cannot have complete control;it’s not something that the proletariat can, of its own free will, get rid of while it’s raging on a world-wide scale.

During these years of apprenticeship, Trotsky clearly saw the impotence of a revolution solely based on “extraordinary circumstances” . The unfavourable conditions of a revolution which has come out of a military defeat in a given country derive not only from the fact that it is restricted to this country, but also from the material situation bequeathed by the war: “economic life shattered,finances exhausted, and unfavourable international relations” (Nashe Slovo).Consequently, the situation of war makes it difficult, if not impossible to realise the objective of a revolution.

Without denying that a situation of defeat can prefigure the military and political catastrophe of a bourgeois state and must be used by revolutionaries, Trotsky reiterated the point that the latter could not shape historical circumstances to their liking but were themselves one of the forces of the historical process. What’s more, hadn’t these revolutionaries been in error in 1903, believing in the imminence of a revolution after a massive development in Russia? This development was initially paralysed by the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war; after the turn-about of 1905 it was defeated by the stopping of the war. Trotsky saw an historical analogy with the important strikes of 1912-13, which despite having the advantage of being able to draw on previous experience, were once again blocked by the preparations for war. A Russian defeat in these circumstances did not seem to be all that favourable as far as Trotsky was concerned, all the more so because social patriots like Lloyd George, Vandervelde, and Herve looked favourably on the prospect of such a defeat because it would enhance “the governmental good sense of the ruling classes”. He thus criticised vulgar defeatist speculations about “the automatic strength of a military crash, without the direct intervention of the revolutionary classes” . The military defeat in itself was not the royal road to the revolutionary victory. Trotsky insisted on the vital importance of the agitation of revolutionaries in the period of upheavals that was opening up - even if it was doing so in unfavourable conditions, judging by previous historical experience.

By exhausting the capitalist autocracy’s means of economic and political domination, didn’t the military catastrophe bring with it the risk of only provoking discontent and protest within certain limits? Wasn’t there also the risk that the exhaustion of the masses brought about by the war would only lead to apathy and despair? The weight of war was colossal: there was no automatic route to a revolutionary outbreak. The havoc wrought by the war could pull the carpet from underneath the feet of a revolutionary alternative.
Unfortunately Trotsky was wrong on one point. He believed that an accumulation of military defeats would not facilitate the revolution. But he didn’t see that the contrary was true: precisely to avoid this danger, the world bourgeoisie, informed by its past experience, stopped the war in 1918. Also, Trotsky still used the slogan of the “struggle for peace” instead of the more consistent one of the revolutionary defeatism which was firmly defended by Lenin.

However, in the tragic and, in the long term, unfavourable circumstances of the first world war, Trotsky clearly pointed to the qualitative leap that was necessary with regard to 1905: the revolutionary movement could no longer be ‘national’ ; it could only be a class movement, contrary to the bleatings of the Menshevik and liberal social patriots who lined up behind the capitalist slogan of ‘victory’ ie, of prolonging the war. The proletariat in Russia was faced with all the bourgeois factions who wanted to isolate it and prevent it from reacting on its class terrain. In contrast to 1905, it could no longer count on the ‘benevolent neutrality’ of the bourgeoisie. In 1905 it was isolated from the proletarian masses of Europe, while Tsarism on the other hand had the support of the European states.
In 1915, two questions were posed: whether to recommence a national revolution in which the proletariat was once again dependent on the bourgeoisie, or to make the Russian revolution dependent on the international revolution? Trotsky responded affirmatively to the second question. More clearly than in 1905, the slogan ‘Down with the war! ” had to be transformed into ‘Down with the state power!’ In conclusion: “Only the international revolution can create the forces through which the struggle of the proletariat in Russia can be carried through to the end”.

This long resume of Trotsky’s interesting article, with its pertinent analysis of the unfavourable conditions created by an imperialist war, provides us with important material for combating the leftist and Trotskyist ideologies today, which try to convince us that the class struggle has always assumed a truly revolutionary dimension in the context of nationalism and war: thus these ideologies demonstrate that they belong to the camp of the bourgeoisie.

The explosion of October 1917, forced the capitalist world to stop the war. Because of the weakness and incompetence of the Russian bourgeoisie, world capitalism was caught napping by the proletariat of the industrial centres of Russia. But it was able to recover and call a halt to the revolutionary wave stirred up by this initial success. The crushing of the revolutionary movement in Germany was a decisive blow against the internationalisation of the revolution. This recovery of the world bourgeoisie condemned the proletariat in Russia to isolation, and consequently to a long but inexorable degeneration, which was to prove fatal for the whole world proletariat in the ensuing period. After this first gigantic appearance of the proletariat on the stage of the 20th century had had its brief victory, the bourgeoisie made the class pay a very high price indeed – a counter-revolution from which the international proletariat didn’t recover for decades, even during the course of the Second World War.

THE ABSENCE OF A PROLETARIAN REACTION DURING AND AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

In the middle of this half-century of triumphant counter-revolution, the Second World War could only complete this defeat which isolation had brought in 1920’s. There were no revolutionary movements comparable to those of 1905 and 1917-19. We can of course cite the so-called Warsaw Commune of 1944 – a desperate reaction, dominated by the social democrats, of a population martyrised and decimated under the military jackboot. This uprising held out for 63 days and was then exterminated by the Nazis with Stalin’s consent.  We can also mention the 1943-44 strikes in Italy repressed with the endorsement of the British and their Allies. Neither of these cases proved to be part of a world-wide resurgence of the proletariat, threatening the continuation of the imperialist war.

This was the most profound, most tragic coma the workers’ movement had ever been through. Its best forces had been decimated by the Stalinist counter-revolution and finished off by the democratic and Nazi belligerents, with their resistance fronts and their terror bombings. This second world imperialist carnage achieved an even higher level of horror than the previous one.

Could a revolution put an end to this planetary massacre, could it emerge during or after the war? Dispersed and isolated, the revolutionaries hoped in vain.The victory went to the counter-revolutionary ‘maquis’, with its chauvinist ideology of ‘national liberation’ – a ‘liberation’ by ordered stages,supervised by the democratic strike-breakers, Churchill, De Gaulle, Eisenhower, with ‘comrade’ Stalin at their side. The war ended not because of a new proletarian danger, but because the limits of total destruction had been reached, because the capitalist ‘allies’ had achieved what they wanted in world hegemony.

There was no new October 1917. Capitalism regained a breath of youth, like the grass which grows up over human corpses. A period of reconstruction began on the ruins. This period of reconstruction was temporary: after just over two decades the system once again plunged into an economic morass, accelerating the development of a war economy in preparation for... a third world war. The few workers’ revolts which took place in this period remained fragmented and isolated. Whether in France, in Poland, or the third world, they were derailed and smothered in the mire of capitalist reconstruction or in the so-called liberation of the colonies, planned by the two‘superpowers’ . Fundamentally the course of history was still unfavourable to the proletariat. It would take a long time to recover from the physical and ideological defeat of the 1920’s. You have to understand just how deep this defeat was to see why the world war followed on ineluctably in 1940’s .

THE LIMITS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS INCONDITIONS OF WAR

World war is the highest moment in the crisis of decadent capitalism, but in itself it does not bring about the conditions for the generalisation of the revolution. To understand that is to emphasise the historic responsibility of the proletariat faced with the possibility of a third world war. When we examine the period of the first world war, we can see that, after having suffered an ideological defeat, and then reviving in Russia, Germany and central Europe, the proletariat remained shut up within each nation. By stopping the war to face up to the proletarian attack, the bourgeoisie strengthened national barriers. Although they were a product of a deteriorating economic situation and constituted a revival of the powerful struggles which had begun in 1910, these combative actions by the proletariat were unable to go beyond an illusion propagated by the treacherous IInd International - that the revolution would develop gradually country by country. Despite the justified foundation of a truly communist IIIrd International, the grip of nationalism was strengthened by social chauvinism. Moreover, when the war stopped,differences between the economic situation of the victorious and the vanquished countries maintained illusory divisions within the international proletariat. In putting forward the idea of ‘peace’, the world bourgeoisie was aware of the dangers of revolutionary defeatism and the risks of contagion which, despite everything, existed both in the victorious and the vanquished countries. Only the armistice between the different capitalist belligerents enabled them to close ranks and re-establish ‘social peace’ . Thus Clemenceau was able to lend Hindenburg and Noske a hand against the proletariat in Germany. The isolated proletariat was pushed into rapid, unfavourable insurrections. The conditions for this failure were completed by the stopping of the war in Germany; the proletariat’s one success was isolated within Russia in the exceptional conditions of the ‘weakest link’ – i.e., a situation which didn’t deal a decisive blow against the geographical heart of capitalism:Europe. In this first decisive and inevitable historic confrontation between the reactionary bourgeoisie and the revolutionary class, the bourgeoisie remained the master of the terrain. We can thus say that the whole period of the First World War did not create the most favourable conditions for the proletarian revolution.

A bloody repetition of this capitalist barbarism, the Second World War came directly out of the clauses of the‘Armistice’ of 1918, a provisional and hypocritical peace aimed at justifying the new capitalist division of the world. This repetition was only possible after the physical defeat of the proletariat in the early 1920’s, a defeat completed by the counter-revolutionary ideologies of Stalinism, fascism and anti-fascism.

If the proletariat was able seriously to disrupt the waging of the First World War it was because it hadn’t been physically and frontally crushed beforehand. Fighting on its class terrain, it was inevitably led into opposing the war. Moreover, trench warfare, because of the proximity of the combatants, was favourable to the spreading of the revolutionary contagion. This factor no longer existed during the Second World War with its bombers and submarines. By perfecting the destructive capabilities of these long-range weapons of death, and by developing its first nuclear weapons – ‘tested’ at Hiroshima by the ‘democratic’ American bourgeoisie - capitalism was already preparing to ‘go further’ in a third world war. Now that it could destroy entire cities and could dangle the threat of war over the remotest part of the planet, it was even better equipped to deal with any possibility of internal revolt. There’s nothing mystical about noting this growth in capitalism’s destructive capacities. It merely emphasises the responsibility of the proletariat, whose historic task is to stop this march towards generalised destruction by applying the weapons of the class struggle with at least as much vigour as during the revolutionary wave at the beginning of the century.

Is a third world war inevitable? The last few years certainly invite comparisons with the periods which preceded the two world wars: ‘armed peace’, deterioration of capitalist international relations,local wars, unlimited growth of militarism. social pacifism, relentless ideological campaigns. The comparison is easy to make but the arguments don’t stand up very well to social reality. In saying this it’s not a question of taking our desires for realities but of looking at the concrete situation of the 1980s.

FOUR CONDITIONS FOR THE REVOLUTION IN OUR TIME

If we fixate on the surface phenomena of the two greatest imperialist slaughters in the history of humanity, we could say spitefully ‘never two without three’ , like a superstitious coffee-bar philistine. But if we use the marxist method, we can say that “great historical events repeat themselves: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”.We are all well aware that communism is not inevitable, that it all depends on whether the proletariat can raise itself to the level of its historic responsibilities.

But if we examine the immense potential of the modern proletariat, we can also see that the third world war isn’t inevitable either. More than ever, it’s up to the revolutionaries who have drawn the lessons from past defeats to show the real path that has been opened up by the dead generations.

However, it has to be said that the immense majority of the proletarian masses today are still not fully conscious of what’s at stake nor are they ready to embark upon decisive struggles. Despite this, they are more and more being forced to prepare themselves for such struggles. We can’t prove this by talking vaguely about social discontent or by counting the millions of strike-days lost in all countries over the past twenty years. Today, the curve of these strikes tends to be in the descendent, and most struggles end in failure. The bourgeoisie even manages to organise false strikes, counterfeit struggles, or to sow illusions about the self-management of bankrupt factories. But, despite this hardly glossy table of journalistic facts and figures, there have been a certain number of workers’ outbreaks overt he last two decades, in all parts of the planet, from Brazil to Poland, which have built up a series of international experiences. These experiences, though irregular, reveal the essential conditions for the world revolution.

1. The world economic morass

The first real condition for the revolution resides in the world economic morass which has definitively buried all bourgeois hopes for a world in perpetual development. This unstoppable,incurable economic crisis has done more than any revolutionary speech to expose the mystification of humanity progressing towards happiness under capitalism (a mystification which puts the working class back in the 19th century).

Much longer and more intense than the cyclical economic crisis of the 19th century or the crisis of the in-between period at the beginning of the century, this crisis has hit every corner of the planet. Not one capitalist, not one country not one bloc has escaped it. It effects concern, mutilate, aggravate the situation of the entire world proletariat. The economic infrastructure is slowly collapsing, revealing the fatal weakness at the heart of the system. It can no longer be blamed on the enemy on the other side of the Rhine or the Pyrenees. It’s the ‘same the world over’. Despite all the censorship and distorted news in the west as well as the east, ‘they’ can no longer govern as before. The system is showing its retrograde, decadent character and is thus incessantly compelled to renew its panoply of mystifications. ‘They’ are no longer just the bosses but a whole state  superstructure for containing and dominating social life: governments, unions,parties of left and right with their shared language of austerity. The                                                                        disintegration of the economic infrastructure can’t fail to shake the bourgeois political infrastructure. Even though the latter is trying to prevent the proletariat from becoming aware of the causes of the economic morass, it’s not easy to find alibis when the system is suffering from a profound crisis in its basic structures and no longer has any real outlets as it did in its ascendant phase last century. It’s becoming harder and harder to conceal the fact that the only perspective capitalism has to offer is destruction, waste and impoverishment, culminating in a new world war.

2. The perspective of world war

This perspective of world war, which has become particularly clear over the past ten years, is thus the second condition for the development of the proletarian alternative. This isn’t paradoxical. Two world wars have left an indelible mark despite all the boasts of the ‘liberation’. The bourgeoisie, in all its varieties, has always presented these two world wars as:

-            a way of resolving its economic difficulties (‘export or die’)

-            inevitable, despite the good will of men of peace (‘it’s the other’s fault’ or ‘we had no choice’).

The exacerbation of imperialist competition,and the pauperisation which followed on from these wars, as well as today’s gigantic economic crisis, reveal the inanity of the first argument. The barbarism of the two world wars is the product of the bourgeoisie’s inability to resolve the aberrations of its system. Despite the fact that a faction of the capitalist class – the Stalinists  -have outrageously stolen the term for themselves, the net result of all this barbarism has been to hold back the movement towards communism.
As for the idea that the next war is inevitable, this is all the more a lie in that the capitalists themselves are not convinced of this – fundamentally because they haven’t managed to convince the proletariat and the immense majority of the population of this planet. War is indeed inevitable if you only consider the military aspect of the question, but the bourgeoisie can’t be reduced to its military apparatus, even if the latter holds the reins during the war, or comes to the fore when it’s a question of physical repression. The bourgeoisie can’t run society through the military alone: it’s never been able to mobilise for war and repress the proletariat solely via its military HQ,which doesn’t have a sufficient grasp of social reality. If you just look at things from the perspective of the military command, you won’t understand why the proletariat refuses to subordinate itself to the bourgeoisie. This isn’t a classic war with troops in recognisable uniforms, with generals, munitions,etc, facing a similar adversary. The real threat exists inside each capitalist  country, ‘friends’ or ‘enemies’. It’s name is proletarian unity and consciousness.

The hypothesis of a third world war in the short term presupposes an imbecility or suicidal folly on the part of the bourgeoisie, or at least an inability to have any control over the unleashing of a war. We should never forget that the capitalists and their generals can’t make war without troops. The previous world wars weren’t conflicts between professional armies or mercenaries. We’re not saying that the capitalists are preparing for trench warfare or will bring back the musket. The point is that they can’t just present themselves to the world as the murderers of humanity.It’s alright to brand Hitler or some other defeated enemy with this reputation, but capitalism as such has to exempt itself from such a responsibility. Neither Foch, nor Clemenceau, nor Wilson, nor Churchill, nor Stalin, nor Eisenhower could say that they were organising a war for capitalist booty. They had to talk about ‘liberty’, the ‘right of nations to self-determination’, or ‘socialism’. Each one needed such mystifications to lead their troops to the slaughter, justifications to parade before those whom they sent off to figh tfor ‘fatherland or death’. Today, can the Reagan administration invoke the interests of humanity without blushing? Can Brezhnev or Mitterand talk about socialism without making people throw up? Only the proletarian revolution can consign the horrors of local and world wars to the dustbin of capitalism’s past.

3. The awakening of working class consciousness

The third basic condition for weakening the perspective of war, but above all for raising the prospect of revolution, is the conscious, organised, centralised emergence of the only revolutionary force: the proletariat, which has been moving into action since the end of the 60s.

The proletariat wasn’t asleep after the end of the second world war, but during the years of reconstruction its reactions were isolated and the relative prosperity of the system allowed the bourgeoisie to make economic concessions. The year 1968 was a major turning point, marked not only by the massive strike in France in May, but also and above all by the fact that from this point on workers’ struggles began to develop all over the world. The beginning of the 1970s was marked by a succession of important struggles in several European countries,but thanks to the successful sabotage of the bourgeois left, whose speciality in this area was derailing discontent into the trap of electoralism, it appeared towards the end of the 70s that the proletariat had calmed down. With the aid of its sociological lackeys (Marcuse, Bahro, Gorz, etc.) the bourgeoisie was once against spreading the idea that the proletariat had disappeared. Then the workers of Poland came along. Too bad for all the ideologues:today, as in 1918, the proletariat is the only class that can prevent war and put forward the communist alternative. Against all those who in one way or another encourage the survival of capitalism, the proletariat must raise the cry ‘War OR Revolution’. This cry wan’t heard in Poland, but ian affirmation of the class struggle such as August ’80 amounts to the same thing. For two years, western ears have been pounded with propaganda about the invasion of Afghanistan, a ‘confirmation’ of the ‘Russian threat’ .We’ve heard all about the USA’s supposed military weaknesses in comparison with the Warsaw Pact forces. But the Polish mass strikes once again raised the spectre of the proletariat. Despite the unequal and dispersed struggles of the last decade, they confirmed that the proletariat is moving towards a new level of struggle.
The proletariat’s leap onto this new level will be based on the struggle against capitalist austerity, but its also true to say that it is maturing out of all the contradictions of decadent capitalism.

The essential element, class consciousness, is developing because a certain number of bourgeois mystifications are being used up. Even in the 19th century, Marx could see (in the Communist Manifesto) that the bourgeoisie was producing its own gravediggers. Today as well we can say that: “The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education; in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie” .

At the beginning of the century, there were those who doubted the proximity of the revolution because the working class had only recently emerged out of the artisan strata or out of the countryside, or because of the residues of feudalism, of illiteracy, etc. Today no hesitation is possible: in the main industrialised countries, the proletariat really has been formed into a class, and it’s the same in a number of third world countries. It exists as a force which is historically compelled to overcome the weaknesses and failures of its past. Today the lessons of the whole history of the workers’ movement can be reappropriated much more quickly despite all the filth of capitalism. There’s no longer any need for a ‘socialist education’ or for party schools for the cadre. By fighting the economic laws of capital, the proletariat is at the same time smashing up the ideological superstructure of bourgeois rule. This takes place through two factors: the education dispensed by bourgeois society and the modern methods of communication.

We’re not making a eulogy of bourgeois education, the aim of which is to reproduce social inequalities; nor are we making a fetish of ‘knowledge’, which is no measure of class consciousness. Moreover,this education dispensed and fabricated by capitalism is to a large extent a means of manipulation. It makes individuals vulnerable to the dominant ideology and takes the place of feudal religious obscurantism in the maintenance of social discipline. But we have to understand that, at a certain level of the degeneration of any society, even the best fireguards can help to spread afire. In the main industrialised countries illiteracy hardly exists and many proletarians have gone through secondary education and speak a second language.In themselves this ‘progress’ and this ‘education’ have nothing revolutionary about them: they only facilitate revolt because they are synonymous with DEQUALIFICATION and unemployment, because the bourgeoisie has developed school and university education in an anarchic way. Many workers and employees have degrees. Many of the unemployed have university diplomas and are thus without any ‘productive’ qualifications. After being beguiled all through their studies by the promise of escaping the working class condition, the former pupil or student then confronts the harsh reality of capitalism, if he hasn’t understood it already. In the past, an illiterate worker might swallow the speeches of a schoolmaster, or believe that differences in intelligences are hereditary, and leave important issues to ‘those in the know’ . But today they are different.
Modern electronic means of communication are also a two-edged weapons. Radio and TV broadcasts, with their use of the lie-by-omission, penetrate every building today, reaching the most atomised proletarian even if he doesn’t want to read a newspaper, and have the function of smothering class consciousness.But after a certain point these emissions of sophisticated bourgeois propaganda - because that’s what they are – become unable to go on playing the role of‘directors’ of consciousness; when the condition of life are getting worse and worse. When the bailiffs start to knock at the door, they can no longer mask the horrors of decomposing capitalism.
The general crisis of bourgeois ideological values is much more striking when you compare the situation with the 19th century. Then, many workers were illiterate, got their news late, and were crammed with patriotism. Today the system has given rise to a new breed of workers who are constantly dissatisfied, full of doubt about the promises offered by various ideologies.In the absence of class struggle these aspects of contemporary alienation can lead to demoralisation, but when the struggle does develop they can turn against the bourgeoisie and speed up the tendency to question its whole system of oppression.

4. The internationalisation of proletarianstruggles

The internationalisation of proletarian struggles is the fourth factor which will not only facilitate, but will actually be the decisive step towards the world revolution. In the 19th century, the development of struggles could still be seen as something taking place within nations. As Marx put it: “Nations cannot constitute the content of revolutionary action. They are only the forms within which the only motor of history operates: the class struggle.”

In the First and Second Internationals, the realisation of world socialism was seen like this: first struggles added up enterprise by enterprise (nationalisations); then they became revolutions country by country; then the latter would ‘federate’. This is still the vision of the Bordigist wing of the revolutionary movement.

However, although the changed conditions of declining capitalism have shattered this vision, Marx’s idea hasn’t been invalidated, it’s been extended: the form within which the class struggle operates is the whole capitalist world, over and above the barriers of nations or blocs. The world bourgeoisie exploits each proletariat in every country - the Italian machinist, the Russian bricklayer, or the American electrician. A South American worker employed in an off-shoot of Renault knows that his main boss lives in France; the Polish metal-worker knows that he’s dependent on a ‘fraternal’ company in Russia. All this explains concretely why all capitalists have an interest in closing ranks against any strike or mass struggle. On the other hand, corporatist identification with a particular branch of industry has never really permitted workers’ solidarity to break down national divisions. The nature of the working class can’t be defined in corporatist terms: it’s independent of the different professions. The American air traffic controllers recently had a tragic experience of the absence of international solidarity within a particular corporation, an illusion fed by the ideology of the left of capital. In the context of unbridled capitalist competition, the British steel workers on strike saw ‘foreign’ steel being preferred to ‘their’ steel; French miners saw the same with ‘Polish’ or‘German’ coal. The defence or exaltation of the product of a corporation is a terrain where capital remains the master, particularly through the trade unions. It’s a fertile soil for chauvinism. To hope for the extension of the struggle through the same branch or a sister company is to put the workers on the same competitive terrain as the various firms which turn out the same product. It encourages ‘patriotism’ with regard to a particular enterprise,strengthening the capitalist idea that the products ‘belong’ to the workers of this or that industry. Thus the workers are tied to the limits of the enterprise instead of calling the whole capitalist mode of production into question.

The proletariat in its entirety produces all the wealth. Capitalist production, fragmented and mercenary, is alien to it. It has no ‘rights’ over how this production is used at the end of the day. A proletarian is essentially defined  by being a wage-labourer, an exploited subject in a commodity system which is hostile to him. When the proletarians struggle, they don’t fight for a better French coal or a better British steel: they struggle whatever their profession- against the conditions of exploitation and subordination. And, providing they don’t allow themselves to founder on the obstacles put in their way by the trade unions, this struggle leads them into a confrontation with the capitalist state. The generalisation of struggles onto an international level can’t come out of a corporatist extension. The massive strike in May ’68 in France, the strikes which followed elsewhere in the world, or the mass strike of August ’80 in Poland, weren’t the product of a sum of corporations in struggle, first going through a particular branch, then one branch joining another. It was by going beyond the whole idea of a sum of corporations that the workers of Poland found the road of struggle against the state. In the factories and the streets they posed the same objectives: their revolt against the condition of  exploitation became a struggle against the capitalist order and not for a better management or production of commodities. The reaction of the Polish state received the solidarity of capitalist states everywhere. Behind it stood both the Russian state and the western states. This coalition of the bourgeoisie teaches a clear lessons about the proletariat’s lack of international unity. It shows the necessity for a unified fight by the whole proletariat against a ruling class which can momentarily suspend its intrinsic divisions in order to face up to the class struggle. The fact that all factions of the bourgeoisie hurled themselves as one man to fight the Polish fire proves that, despite its insurmountable economic difficulties, this retrograde class will seek at any price to prevent itself being destroyed by the proletariat. It proves that it is wary of the dangers of imitation and contagion. The repression that had been prepared for along time beforehand on an international scale was presented as  a ‘settling of accounts’ between ‘Poles’ .But none of this can hide the fact that behind the Polish army and militia stood the whole world bourgeoisie.

The renewed utilisation of national barriers is a dominant trait of bourgeois  policy today and it makes it hard to envisage an absolutely simultaneous explosion of workers’ struggles in different countries, in which the workers go beyond corporations and start to link up across national boundaries. But the deepening of the economic crisis is undermining these barriers in the consciousness of a growing number of workers, since the facts show that the class struggle is the SAME everywhere. We must draw the lessons from the fact that the main struggles in recent years have been separated in time and without direct links from one country to another. But now the crisis is tending less and less to hit first one country then another, one going up while the other goes down, as in the period of reconstruction after the Second World War. Now it’s tending to hit all countries at the same time, especially the most industrialised countries –those which up till now have been the leaders of capitalist ‘growth’ . Thus the whirlwind of the economic crisis, even though it’s still moving slowly, is nevertheless tending to reproduce a moment such as in 1968 when a sudden acceleration gives rise to workers’ struggles in several countries at the same time, and on the same basis: the struggle against capitalist austerity, against the threat of unemployment, and implicitly against the threat of war. Much more than through the successive struggles that have taken place in recent years, it will be through this growing simultaneity of struggles in different countries that the problem will be posed of joining up the struggles across national frontiers and imperialist blocs. Whether it likes it or nor, this is the next qualitative step the proletariat will have to take. It’s possible in the present world situation, it’s obligatory if the class is to take its struggle forward. In such a situation a mass movement on the scale of Poland in 1980 won’t remain isolated but will get solidarity through the development of other mass movements.
In the 1980s the proletariat has to hit at the main capitalist metropoles if it is to give a powerful impetus to its international struggle. Particularly in the old heart of capitalism, Europe,contacts between different zones in struggle can no longer be the caricature offered by the union officials. The concretisation of real international contacts will be an example to the whole world. This will be decisive for the international revolution. The problem of the destruction of the bourgeois states may be posed more abruptly elsewhere but it can only be resolved in the heartlands.

Gieller