Many comrades, unfamiliar with the history of the Italian Left since the 1920s, will have trouble finding their way through this relatively little-known period of the revolutionary movement. We are aware of this difficulty and have tried to contribute to overcoming it by reprinting a whole series of texts from the past in the press of the ICC. The reprinting of the ‘Appeal of 1945' in the International Review no.32 sparked a response by Battaglia Comunista (which we are reprinting below) and later by the Communist Workers' Organization in Revolutionary Perspectives no. 20 (new series). Before answering the criticisms of these groups we would just like to make a brief comment about methods used. For the CWO, the ICC was lying when it talked about an appeal to the Stalinists, making it seem "that the Appeal was directed to the Stalinist parties instead of simply to the workers under their influence" (RP no.20 p.36). At this point there are 2 objections to raise. The first is that the CWO' s allegations are false. The Appeal is not addressed to workers influenced by counterrevolutionary parties but to the Agitation Committees of the Stalinist and Social-Democratic parties themselves.
Second of all, the ICC did not "try to make it seem" like anything; we published the Appeal in its entirety so that comrades could make up their own minds. But speaking of this, what exactly is the judgment of the CWO on the content of this text aside from these accusations about lying?
Such methods are completely unproductive and contrary to the excellent initiative in the same issue of Revolutionary Perspectives: the publication of several internal discussion texts of the CWO on the Italian Left "so as to bring the debate into the whole revolutionary movement". Up to now the ICC was practically the only organization to publish in its press some of its internal discussions. The ICC and the CWO can only hope that Battaglia Comunista will someday follow this example.
About origins (from Battaglia Comunista, no.3, 1983)
"It often happens in partisan polemics that when there are no valid arguments left, people fall into lying ruses hidden in rhetoric and demagogy. Thus the ICC, for example, in discussing the crisis of the Partito Comunista Internazionale (Programma Comunista) in the International Review no. 32 claims to find in the origins of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PC Int) in 1943-45 the signs of an original sin condemning the PC Int to damnation (or at least the faction that split in 1952).
We do not want to go into an exhaustive answer here; we offer only some very short comments:
1. The document entitled "Appeal of the Agitation Committee" which was published in no.l of Prometeo in April 1945 -- was it in fact an error? Yes, it was; we admit it. It was the last attempt of the Italian Left to apply the tactic of the ‘united front at the base' defended by the CP of Italy in 1921-23 against the Third International. As such, we categorize this as a ‘venial sin' because our comrades later eliminated it both politically and theoretically with such clarity that today we are well armed against anyone on this point.
2. Here and there other tactical errors were committed but without waiting for the ICC we have already corrected them all by ourselves and we are keeping them in mind so as never to repeat them. But these errors have not prevented us from going forward precisely because we have corrected them. We have never left our own terrain which is that of revolutionary Marxism.
3. Only those who never make a move or who don't exist never make mistakes. Thus, during the imperialist war, when the exploited masses pushed into a massacre showed the first signs of a tendency to break out of the prison of the inter-classist forces linked to the imperialist blocs, the ‘forefathers' of the ICC, judging that the proletariat was defeated because it had accepted the war, remained comfortably at home without ever thinking of ‘dirtying their hands' in the workers' movement.
4. Much later, judging that the proletariat was no longer prostrate and defeated, they resurfaced, having collected some students and intellectuals, to ‘fertilize' the new class struggles which will supposedly lead us straight to the revolution. Here we see the real fundamental error of the ICC. The original sin of the ICC lies in its way of dealing with problems including the relation between the class, its consciousness, and the party. And if (we say "if" because it is a strong probability) war breaks out before the working class engages the enemy, the ICC will simply return home again while we will ‘dirty our hands', working to the fullest of our organizational possibilities towards revolutionary defeatism before, during and after the war.
5. Concerning the errors of Programma, they are as great as its profound opportunism. (see preceding issue of Battaglia Comunista). In Programma Comunista many very important questions remain open despite protestations to the contrary: the questions of imperialism, of national liberation wars and, certainly not by accident, unionism. It is because of these questions that Programma is in crisis, like the ICC. And if we may say so, that is exactly what we wrote in no.15 and 16 in December 1981 in the article ‘Crisis of the ICC or Crisis of the Revolutionary Movement'. We said that only some organizations are in crisis, namely the ICC and Programma. Organizations without clear ideas on very important problems break up when these problems no longer correspond to their schemas and forcefully intrude. These are crisis-organizations which never manage to intervene in the movement. They are ‘alive' only when the situation is ‘calm'; they survive as a dead weight as long as their delicate balance is not disturbed.
Our response
First of all, we are pleased to note that Battaglia Comunista has at least confirmed the authenticity and truthfulness of the texts we published.
This being clear, BC then asks: "was this Appeal an error? Yes, we admit it", but only a ‘venial sin'! We can only admire the delicacy and refinement with which BC fixes up its own self-image. If a proposal for a united front with the stalinist and social democratic butchers is just a ‘minor' sin what else could the PC Int have done in 1945 for it to fall into a really serious mistake ... join the government? But BC reassures us: it has corrected these errors quite a while ago without waiting for the ICC and its has never tried to hide them. Possibly, but in 1977 when we just brought up the errors of the PC Int in the war period in our press, Battaglia answered with an indignant letter admitting that there had been mistakes but claiming that they were the fault of comrades who left in 1952 to found the PC Internazionale.[1]
At the time we said that it seemed strange to us that Battaglia should just wash its hands of the whole affair. In effect, Battaglia told us: "We participated in the constitution of the PC Int ... we and the others. What is good is from us and what is bad is from them. Even admitting that this could be true, the ‘bad' existed ... and no one said anything about it." (from Rivoluzione Internazionale no 7, 1977)
It's much too easy to accept compromise after compromise in silence in order to build the Party with Bordiga (whose name attracted thousands of members) and with Vercesi (who took care of a whole network of contacts outside Italy) and then when things go badly start to whine that it is all the Bordigists fault. It takes two to make a compromise.
Apart from this general point, the claim to throw the blame on the ‘bad guys' is just not on. The Appeal of ‘45 was not written by the ‘groups from the South' who referred to Bordiga. It was written by the Centre of the Party in the North, led by the Damen tendency which is today Battaglia Comunista. To give another example, just one among many, the worst activist and localist errors came from the Federation of Catanzaro led by Francesco Maruca who was a member of the Stalinist Communist Party until his expulsion in 1944. But when the split took place in the PC Int the Federation of Catanzaro did not go with Bordiga and Programma Comunista but remained in Battaglia. In fact, an article in no. 26/27 of Prometeo still cited Maruca as an exemplary militant. It is true that the article (a sort of apology) did not actually deal with the positions defended by Maruca. On the contrary, to pretty things up, the article dated his exclusion from the CP in 1940, that is, four years before it really happened. This is how Battaglia Comunista deals with its continual need to correct its own errors.
At the beginning, Battaglia publicly bragged about having a spotless past. Afterwards, when some spots came out, they attributed them to the ‘programmistas'. When they can no longer deny their own participation, they present their errors as mere pecadillos. But they still have to find someone to blame and so they make it all our fault or, more precisely, the fault of our ‘forefathers' who, judging that the proletariat was defeated because it accepted the war, supposedly remained safe at home without "dirtying their hands with the workers' movement".
An accusation of desertion from the struggle is a serious one and the ICC wants to answer it right away, not to defend ourselves or our ‘forefathers' -- they don't need it -- but to defend the revolutionary milieu from unacceptable smearing techniques: throwing around grave accusations without even feeling the need to offer a minimum of proof.
During the war, a whole part of the Italian Fraction and the Belgian Fraction of the International Communist Left felt that the proletariat no longer had any social existence. These comrades abandoned all political activity except at the end of the war when they participated in the Anti-Fascist Committee in Brussels. The majority of the Italian Fraction reacted against this tendency led by Vercesi and regrouped in Marseille in 1940. In 1942 the French nucleus of the Communist Left was formed with the help of the Italian Fraction; in 1944 the nucleus published Internationalisme and the agitational paper ‘1'Etincelle'. During these years the debate centered on the class nature of the strikes in 1943 in Italy:
"One tendency in the Italian Fraction, the Vercesi tendency and parts of the Belgian Fraction, denied right up to the end of the war that the Italian proletariat had emerged on the political arena. For this tendency, the events in Italy in 1943 were simply a manifestation of the economic crisis, as they called it, ‘the crisis of the war economy' or a mere palace revolution, a dispute among the higher echelons of Italian capital and nothing else.
"For this tendency, the Italian proletariat was completely absent, politically and socially. This was supposed to go along with a whole theory they had made up about the ‘social non-existence of the proletariat during the war and during the entire period of the war economy'. Thus, before and after 1943 they were totally passive and even defended the idea of the organizational dissolution of the Fraction. With the majority of the Italian Fraction we fought this liquidationist tendency step by step. With the Italian Fraction, we analyzed the events of 1943 in Italy as an avant‑garde manifestation of the social struggle and an opening of a course towards revolution; we defended the possibility of the transformation of the Fraction into the Party." (Internationalisme, no 7, February 1946: ‘On the First Congress of the PC Internationaliste of Italy')
But in 1945 a whole series of theatrical turnabouts took place. When it became known that the Party had indeed been formed in Italy at the end of 1943, the Vercesi tendency did a triple back-flop and propelled itself into the leadership of the Party along with the tendency excluded in 1936 for its participation in the Spanish Civil War and the majority of the Italian Fraction that had excluded them at the time!
The only ones who refused to join this opportunist back-slapping were our ‘forefathers' in Internationalisme. And there was good reason for this. Unlike Vercesi they were in the forefront of illegal work during the war to reconstitute the proletarian organization; that is why they had no reason to hide behind ‘hurrahs' for the Party when the reckoning came. On the contrary, they saw that capitalism had succeeded in defusing the proletarian reaction against the war (March 1943 in Italy; Spring 1945 in Germany) and had closed off any possibility of a pre-revolutionary situation. Consequently, they began to question whether the time for the transformation of the Fraction into a Party had really come. Furthermore, although Internationalisme defended the proletarian character of the PC Int against the attacks of other groups[2], it refused to cover up for the political wanderings and non-homogeneity of the new Party. The comrades of Internationalisme constantly called for a political break with all opportunist temptations:
"Either the Vercesi tendency must forsake its anti-fascist policy and the whole opportunist theory that determined it publically in front of the Party and the proletariat, or the Party, after open discussion and critique, must theoretically, politically and organizationally forsake the opportunist tendency of Vercesi." (idem)
What was the reaction of the PC Int to this? For more than a year it pretended not to notice and completely ignored the repeated appeals of Internationalisme. At the end of 1946, when an International Bureau was reconstituted under the impetus of the PC Int and their French and Belgian comrades, Internationalisme sent another of the many, many open letters asking to participate in the conference so as to create an honest discussion on the points that the PC Int refused to discuss and to work towards clearly defining the opportunist danger. The only answer that it got was:
"Since your letter only demonstrates once again the proof of your constant deformation of facts and the political positions of the PC Int of Italy and the Belgian and French Fractions; that you are not a revolutionary political organization and that your activity is limited to spreading confusion and throwing mud on our comrades, we have unanimously rejected your request to participate in our International Meeting of the organizations of the International Communist Left.
Signed: PCI of' Italy."
(Internationalisme no 46, ‘Answer Of the International Bureau of the International Communist Left to Our Letter')[3]
This is the way the ‘forefathers' of Battaglia, in the name of an opportunist alliance with the Vercesi tendency, liquidated the only tendency of the International Communist Left which had the political courage to stand up against sectarianism and those who conveniently chose to forget.
In terms of physical courage, it is not our style to play up this aspect but we can assure Battaglia that it took a great deal more courage to put up defeatist posters against the resistance during the ‘liberation' of Paris than to fall in with the ranks of the partisans and participate in the fascist-hunts of the ‘liberation' of northern Italy.
To come back to today, Battaglia claims that the revolutionary movement is not in crisis but just the ICC, Programma Comunista and all the other groups of the Italian left (except of course Battaglia) plus all the groups in other countries who did not participate in the International Conference organized by Battaglia and the CWO. But wait a minute. If we take away all these groups what is left? Just Battaglia and the CWO!
But the crisis does not manifest itself only through the disintegration of groups through splits. It is also produces political backsliding such as when the CWO considered insurrection to be an immediate necessity in Poland, or when Battaglia presented the Iranian Unity of Communist Militants and the Kurdish KOMALA, extremely suspicious forces from any proletarian class point of view, all of a sudden communist organizations and encouraged them with critical support in the ‘exchange of prisoners (!)' between the KOMALA and the Iranian Army.
It must be noted that both Battaglia and the CWO have corrected mistakes after fraternal criticism in our press, especially in our English-language press. But this only goes to show that the momentary hesitations of a group can be corrected also through the efforts of other groups and that no revolutionary organization can consider itself totally independent from the rest of the revolutionary milieu.
Battaglia seems to think that in republishing documents from the revolutionary movement, the ICC wants to show that Battaglia has a history full of errors and therefore should be outside the proletarian milieu. They are very much mistaken in this. The hesitations of a Maruca do not belong to Battaglia any more than the defeatism of a Damen or any more than the errors and contributions of a Vercesi belong to Programma Comunista. All of this, the good and the bad, is part of the heritage of the whole revolutionary movement. It is up to the entire revolutionary movement to draw up a critical balance sheet that will allow us all to profit from these lessons.
This balance sheet cannot be drawn up by isolated groups each nursing its own wounds. It demands the possibility of open and organized debate as was begun in the framework of the International Conferences of the groups of the Communist Left (1977, 78, 79) . Battaglia was one of the gravediggers of these conferences[4]. It is not surprising today that it does not understand how to contribute to the discussion.
Beyle
[1] Up to 1952, the Bordiga tendency and the Damen tendency were in the same organization called the Partito Comunista Internazionalista. Thus the Bordiga tendency cannot bear the exclusive responsibility for what happened in the PC Int especially because this tendency was a minority. When the split came in 1952 the Bordiga tendency had to leave the PC Int and founded the PC Internazionale (Programma Comunista) while the Damen tendency kept the publications Prometeo and Battaglia Comunista. Although Battaglia Comunista polemicized a great deal against Programa, it has never attacked its origins because these origins are the same for both groups.
[2] Refer, in the article cited "Revolutionaries (in Italy) should join the PC Int of Italy - response to the Communist Revolutionaries in France and Germany.
[3] All these documents were published in Internationalisme December 1946. The open letter from the GCF to the PC Int was published in the Bulletin d'etude et de Discussion of Revolution Internationale no. 7, June 1974.
[4] See the International Review no. 16, 17, 22 and "Texts and Proceedings of the International Conferences (Milan 1977, Paris, 1978, 1979).
The workers' struggle in Poland was a striking demonstration for workers the world over that the so-called ‘socialist paradise' of the Eastern bloc is only another face of the capitalist hell that maintains the yoke of human exploitation throughout the planet.
The myth of the ‘socialist' countries has had a long life. In fact, all sectors of the bourgeoisie, from East to West, have an interest in its survival whether as a theme to enroll the workers in imperialist wars or as a means to disgust them with the idea of ‘socialism' and turn them away from any perspective of social transformation. For fifty years revolutionaries have fought unceasingly against this mystification which was the most effective weapon of the terrible counter-revolution that struck down the world proletariat in the ‘20s and which lasted until the end of the ‘60s.
But as Marx said, "one real step forward of the real movement is worth a dozen programs." In this sense, the workers' struggles of summer 1980 have done more to clarify the consciousness of the international proletariat than decades of propaganda from communist groups. And it's not finished ... Under the repeated blows of the world economic crisis, the bourgeoisie's mystifications crack and collapse -- and that of the supposed ‘socialism' of the Eastern bloc in particular. What has happened to the Eastern bloc's supposed ‘economic prosperity', to the magnificent development of the productive forces so vaunted by stalinists and trotskyists alike? What is the condition of the proletariat in this ‘workers' paradise', where exploitation and the bourgeoisie are supposed no longer to exist?
We deal with this question in the first of the two articles below.
The powerful proletarian struggles in Poland did more than simply confirm what revolutionaries have been saying for decades. They have also, as we said in IR 27, brought to the fore front "certain problems that have not yet been decisively resolved in practice, even though they have long been posed at the theoretical level." In this article we mentioned among others the problems of "the kind of bourgeois weapons that the working class will have to confront in the Russian bloc", and more especially the contradiction between, on the one hand the ruling class' need to use (as it does in the West) a left in opposition with the task of sabotaging the workers' struggles from the inside, and on the other the stalinist regimes' inability to tolerate an organized opposition.
The declaration of the state of martial law in December 1981 and the official ban laid on Solidarnosc in October 1982 have made it possible to add further elements to this question. These elements are put forward in the second article.
The crisis of capitalism and its offensive against the workers
The Eastern bloc plunges into the economic crisis
For any capitalist business, inability to pay its debts means bankruptcy. Even if states cannot shut up shop in the same way as a company does, the inability of Poland and Romania to repay debts incurred with western banks on the world market reveals capitalism's economic bankruptcy in the East, just as the similar situation in Mexico or Brazil does so in the West. The Russian bloc's indebtedness has grown considerably in recent years to reach extraordinary sums:
-- the Polish debt of over $25 billion represents a third of the annual GNP;
-- the same is true of the Romanian debt of $10 billion.
During the ‘70s the bourgeoisie in the East, like their colleagues in the West, resorted to credit in an attempt to conceal and retard the economic deadline of a collapse in production. Debts, however, must always be paid and the attempt to cheat the law of value is today coming to its limits. As in the West, Eastern capitalism has gone into recession.
It is very difficult to give complete confidence to the official figures supplied by the bourgeoisie; this is true in general and especially in Russia. Nonetheless, their evolution corresponds exactly to what is happening in the Western bloc. For 1982, the official figure for growth in national income will be 2%, this is the lowest level ever and follows a continuous drop spanning several years. This rate of growth would have to be doubled in order to carry out the ambitious 5-year plan decided under Brezhnev. Industrial growth has been at its lowest since the war: in 1982 production of steel, cement and plastics fell relative to previous years. Debt and recession -- the only thing missing from the picture is inflation, and we find ourselves once more with the same characteristics of capitalist crisis as in the West. Well, this inflation also exists in the East! Without speaking of the inflation in consumer prices, which we'll come back to, prices rose throughout industry an average 13.4%: the rise was 42% for coal, 20% for steel products, 70% for thermal energy[1].
The same factors are thus at work both East and West; the world economic crisis' devastating effects on capitalist production are accelerating. The economically weaker Eastern bloc suffers the effects of the crisis more deeply. The USSR's GNP per inhabitant is lower than that of Greece; East Germany's -- that of the most developed country in the Russian bloc -- is roughly equal to Spain's. Economically underdeveloped, the Russian bloc has not the slightest chance of achieving any kind of economic competitivity in a period of worldwide overproduction; it has great difficulty in selling its products on the world market. This is not a novelty for Russia and its bloc, arriving as it did too late on the scene of world capitalism. The myth of overtaking the West, so much pushed by Stalin and Khrushchev, is long since dead! Today the economic crisis is baring all the lies, and showing up all the weaknesses of capitalism in Russia and its satellites.
In these conditions, the tendency that has allowed the Russian bloc to survive since its creation is further accentuated: the ever-greater concentration of the economy in the hands of the state at the service of the war economy.
The growth of war economy
Since the Eastern bloc cannot rival the West economically, its only means of keeping its place on the world scene is to develop its war economy, to mobilize its whole productive apparatus for military production. This phenomenon has existed since Stalin, but has been still further accentuated in recent years.
Confronted with the West's economic and military pressure, the USSR has no choice other than the increasing sacrifice of its economy to war production.
Let's take an example: transportation is one of the black spots of Russian capitalism, paralyzing all economic activity. Lack of equipment is the main reason for the transport sector's inadequacy -- and yet freight-car production in 1982 was scarcely higher than in 1970. This might seem a paradox, in view of the fact that 4/5 of land transport goes to the railway network. But it is easier to understand when we add that freight-car production was sacrificed to give priority to satisfying military needs (the main rolling-stock factory, at Niznij Taghil, also builds tanks).
What is true for rolling-stock is true for the rest of the Russian economy; in every factory, military production has absolute priority which blocks the whole of production. Unlike capital goods which are used in a new cycle of production, and unlike consumer goods which serve to reproduce labor-power, weapons are useless in the production process. This means that massive arms production is equivalent to a gigantic destruction of capital, which can only sharpen the effects of the crisis.
The USSR alone is responsible for 40% of world military production while producing only 10% of Gross World Product. This country can only keep its place on the world scene at the cost of a constantly growing military effort which further deepens its economic bankruptcy.
Exact figures are hard to come by since all things military are necessarily secret. According to ‘Military Balance', Russian military spending is equivalent to the GNP of Spain (about £90 billion). This means that in Russia, the production of a country the size of Spain is destroyed in the arms economy -- without counting the cost of the resulting economic disorganization, ie at least 20-30%, of production.
For the proletariat in the Russian bloc, the choice between ‘butter or guns' takes on a form of caricature. For the proletariat, the combined effects of the war economy and the crisis mean a constantly growing misery in the ‘workers' paradise'.
Austerity for the working class
The official absence of inflation and unemployment has always been major arguments for the stalinist and trotskyists in affirming the ‘socialist gains' of workers in the Eastern bloc. In reality, for the working class in the so-called ‘socialist' countries, austerity is a euphemism. The misery of its economic and social condition no longer needs demonstrating, and the bourgeoisie's current attack on the workers' living standards means an even more austere austerity.
The Russian bourgeoisie itself is no longer able to hide the reality between faked figures. Officially, in the USSR 1982 saw zero growth in working class purchasing power. The avalanche of price increases has finally exposed the myth of the lack of inflation in the Eastern bloc. The explosion of discontent in Poland was sparked off by brutal price increases on foodstuffs forming the workers' staple diet, with some increases going as high as 100%. The working class' living standards were brutally attacked; as in the West, the prices of consumer goods are rising but with scarcity and draconian rationing of most products into the bargain. More and more guns always mean less and less butter.
As for full employment, it does indeed exist. But it is not the product of the ruling class' generosity in not leaving the poor workers unemployed. This full employment expresses the scarcity of capital, the lack of machines and the paralysis of the productive apparatus. All the capital that is not invested in constant capital that is destroyed in the production of war machines is replaced by ‘human capital'. Elbow grease replaces machine oil. Moreover, living standards are so low that workers are generally obliged to have two jobs and do a double day's work to ensure their and their family's survival.
Full employment is also a means for maintaining a draconian supervision of the proletariat. Andropov's arrival in power has been followed by increased surveillance in the work-place: clocking-on, identity checks and controls of presence on the job, ‘raids' in the shops to see that workers are not doing their shopping during working hours, etc ... all in the police tradition of this one-time boss of the KGB. All this in the name of the struggle for productivity, against absenteeism and slackness. Labor discipline is a constant theme of Russian state propaganda and indicates an increased repression of the working class.
In the Eastern bloc, as in the West, the ‘80s are marked by a vicious attack on the working class' living conditions.
Forms may differ (policed full employment, scarcity, rationing), but the fundamentals remain the same -- the capitalist crisis and the war economy -- and the consequences for the working class are the same in each bloc: an overgrowing misery.
Confronted with this situation, the workers in Poland have shown the example of the class struggle. This example will not remain isolated. Under the pressure of the crisis, the bourgeoisie East and West is forced to attack the working class ever harder.
Such a situation generalized throughout the planet must necessarily lead the proletariat to develop its class struggle.
JJ
The weapons of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat
For revolutionaries, the proletarian struggles of 1980-81 in Poland came as no surprise. Those who have upheld the firm defense of Marxist principles, against desertions and onslaughts of every kind, have known and said for decades that the so-called ‘socialist' countries are as capitalist as all the others, that their economies are subject to the same contradictions that afflict capitalism as a whole, that the working class is exploited and struggles against its exploitation there as everywhere else. They have understood, and have announced before their class, that since the mid-‘60s world capitalism has used up the respite accorded by the post-war reconstruction period, and has entered a new phase of acute economic convulsions, which will leave no country immune, and which will everywhere provoke proletarian counter-attacks. In the May ‘68 general strike in France, the ‘hot autumn' in Italy ‘69, the 1970 uprising in Poland, and in the numerous other movements between 1968 and ‘74, they were able to recognize the first of these counter-attacks, and to foresee that these struggles would not be the last.
However, the immense movement of 1980, while it confirmed their analyses, demanded from revolutionaries prudence and humility in confronting situations unlike anything we have seen up till now. So that, while we analyzed the development of the independent trade union Solidarnosc as the Polish form of the policy of the left in opposition put into action by the bourgeoisie on a world scale to sabotage and stifle the workers' struggles, we were careful to avoid proclaiming that the Eastern bloc countries were going to evolve towards the ‘democratic' political forms that exist in the advanced Western countries.
"...the confrontations between Solidarity and the Polish CP aren't just cinema, just as the opposition between right and left in the western countries isn't just cinema. In the west, however, the existing institutional framework generally makes it possible to ‘make do' with these oppositions so they don't threaten the stability of the regime, and so that inter-bourgeois struggles for power are contained within, and resolved by, the formula most appropriate for dealing with the proletarian enemy. In Poland on the other hand, although the ruling class has, using a lot of improvisations, but with some momentary success, managed to install these kinds of mechanisms, there's no indication that this is something definitive and capable of being exported to other ‘socialist' countries. The same invective which serves to give credibility to your friendly enemy when the maintenance of order demands it, can be used to crush your erstwhile partner when he's no longer any use to you ... By forcing the bourgeoisie to adopt a division of labor to which it is structurally inadapted, the proletarian struggles in Poland have created a living contradiction. It's still too early to see how it will turn out. Faced with a situation unprecedented in history.... the task of revolutionaries is to approach the unfolding events in a modest manner". (International Review, no. 27, 3/10/81).
Since then, events have spoken. The military coup of 13th December 1981 suspended all activity on Solidarnosc's part. On 8th October 1982, the Polish Diet (Parliament) banned it definitively. How are we to interpret these events?
Is this ban revocable, as the leaders of the underground Solidarnosc claim? -- the same leaders who mix radical declarations with continued appeals for a ‘national entente' and for ‘trade union liberty'.
Does the outlawing of Solidarnosc mean that this organization is no longer of any use to capital?
More generally, what kind of weapons do and will the bourgeoisie use against the workers' struggles in the Eastern bloc. Will they play the card of the left in opposition? Within what limits and with what specificities?
Can the Eastern bloc regimes ‘democratize' themselves?
Solidarnosc's 15 months of legality apparently answered the affirmative. This was the period when Kuron, theoretician of the KOR, waxed eloquent on the prospects for democratization in Poland ‘along Spanish lines'. This perspective was at the heart of all Solidarnosc's propaganda: it was necessary to accept economic ‘sacrifices', not to ‘abuse' the strike weapon, to be ‘responsible' and ‘moderate' in order to preserve and extend the ‘democratic gains' of the Gdansk agreement.
Since then, history has shown that this ‘moderation' has done nothing for ‘democracy', and everything to prepare the ground for the worker's defeat and the repression that has hit them since December 1981.
In fact, the proclamation of the state of war went further than a mere concretization of this defeat. Like all repression, it aimed to inflict a vicious ‘punishment' on the proletariat, to intimidate it, and to deprive it, through terror, of any taste for struggle. But it also aimed to outlaw Solidarnosc -- the main agent of the workers' demobilization and defeat.
Poland 1981 is not the only defeat the proletariat has suffered since its historic reappearance in 1968. In particular, the May ‘68 trial of strength between proletariat and bourgeoisie in France ended in a victory for the latter. As we know, the main instruments of this defeat were the trade unions, especially the CGT controlled by the French CP. And logically enough, the unions were rewarded by the employers' recognition of the union section in the factory; the CGT even got an extra little present, in the form of the renewal of a government subsidy that it had lost several years previously. In Poland, by contrast, Solidarnosc got no reward for its loyal services between 1980 and 1981. Quite the opposite: its main leaders were imprisoned, and while the most famous of them is now at liberty and back in his old job, many still remain in Jaruzelski's gaols -- Guriazda, Jurczyk, Modzelewski, Julewski, along with the leaders of the KOR like Kuron and Michnik. Does this mean that the bourgeoisie is less grateful in the East than in the West? It's certainly not a question of gratitude. The bourgeoisie has long since disencumbered itself of such sentiments, "and has left remaining no nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment'. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies...in the icy water of egotistical calculation" (Communist Manifesto). In fact, the main reason that the Polish authorities, unlike their Western colleagues, have not allowed the continued existence of an official or legal opposition is that "the Stalinist regimes cannot safely tolerate the existence of such oppositional forces" to the extent that these "are a foreign body... that every fiber of their organism rejects" (International Review, no. 24).
This means that, while it is only possible to understand the meaning and the implications of events in Poland during the last 3 years by situating them in their international context, and by considering them as an important moment in the historic and worldwide confrontation between the 2 main classes in society -- proletariat and bourgeoisie -- we cannot draw out all their lessons unless we take account of the differences that separate the conditions of the class struggle in the Eastern bloc from those in the advanced Western countries.
The most obvious, and the most widely known, characteristic of the Eastern bloc countries -- the one moreover which is the basis for the myth of their ‘socialist' nature -- is the extreme statification of their economies. As we have often pointed out in our press, state capitalism is not limited to those countries. This phenomenon springs above all from the conditions for the capitalist mode of production's survival in its decadent period: faced with the threat of the dislocation of an economy, and a social body, subjected to growing contradictions, faced with the exacerbation of commercial and imperialist rivalries provoked by the saturation of the world market, only a continuous strengthening of the State's power makes it possible to maintain a minimum of social cohesion, and a growing militarization of society. While the tendency towards state capitalism is thus a universal, historical fact, it does not affect all countries in the same way. It takes on its most complete form where capitalism is subjected to the most brutal contradictions, and where the classical bourgeoisie is at its weakest. In this sense, the state's direct control of the main means of production, characteristic of the Eastern bloc (and of much of the ‘Third World'), is first and foremost a sign of the economy's backwardness and fragility (see the previous article). To the extent that the tendency towards state capitalism is worldwide and irreversible, and that the present convulsions of the capitalist economy touch the backward countries still more violently than the others, there is no possibility, in these countries -- and in the Eastern bloc in particular -- of relaxing the statification of the economy, which is increasing everywhere, the developed countries included.
We thus have the beginnings of a reply to the question ‘can the Eastern bloc countries democraticize themselves?'in our observation that there can be no return, in these countries to the classical forms of capitalism. In fact, there is a close link between the bourgeoisie's economic and political forms of domination: the totalitarian power of a single party corresponds to the near-total statification of the means of production[2].
One Party
The one-party system is not unique to the Eastern bloc, or to the Third World. It has existed for several decades in Western European countries such as Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The most striking example is obviously the Nazi regime that governed Europe's most powerful and developed nation between 1933 and 1945. In fact, the historical tendency towards state-capitalism does not concern the economy alone. It also appears in a growing concentration of political power in the hands of the executive, at the expense of the classical forms of bourgeois democracy -- Parliament, and the interplay of political parties. During the 19th century, the political parties in the developed countries were the representatives of civil society in or before the state; with the decadence of capitalism, they were transformed into the representatives of the state within civil society[3]. The state's totalitarian tendencies are expressed, even in those countries where the formal mechanisms of democracy remain in place, by a tendency towards the one-party system, most clearly concretized during acute convulsions of bourgeois society: ‘Government of National Unity' during imperialist wars, unity of the whole bourgeoisie behind the parties of the left during periods of revolution, the prolonged and uncontested domination of the Democratic Party in the US 1933-53, of the Gaullists in France 1958-74, of the Social-Democrats in Sweden 1931-77, etc.
The tendency towards the one-party system has rarely reached its conclusion in the more developed countries. Such a conclusion is unknown in the US, Britain, Scandinavia, and Holland, while the Vichy government in France depended essentially on the German occupation. The only historical example of a developed country where this tendency has unfolded completely is that of Nazi Germany, and then only for a duration of 12 years -- 18 months less than the Democrats' domination of the United States. The phenomenon of fascism has been fully analyzed since the ‘30s by the Communist Left -- including in previous issues of the International Review.[4] We will therefore limit ourselves here to a brief resume of what brought the Nazi party to power:
-- violent economic convulsions (Germany was harder hit than any other European country by the 1929 crisis);
-- the fact that the working class had been physically crushed during the 1919-23 revolution, making the democratic mystification ineffective and unnecessary;
-- the wearing out of the democratic parties that had carried out this counter-revolution;
-- following on the Versailles treaty, the frustration felt by large sectors of the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, who deserted their traditional parties in favor of one that promised them their revenge.
If the traditional parties or political structures were maintained in the other advanced countries, this was because they had shown themselves solid enough, thanks to their experience, the depth of their implantation, their connections with the economic sphere, and the strength of the mystifications they peddled, to ensure the national capital's stability and cohesion in the difficulties that confronted it (crisis, war, social upheaval).
But what is only an exception in the advanced countries is a general rule in the under-developed ones, where the conditions we have outlined do not exist, and which are subjected to the most violent convulsions of decadent capitalism. And the Eastern bloc has a special position amongst the under-developed countries. To the strictly economic factors that go to explain the weight of state capitalism, we added historical and geo-political ones: the circumstances in which the USSR and its empire were founded.
State capitalism in Russia arose from the ruins of the proletarian revolution. The feeble bourgeoisie of the Tsarist era had been completely eliminated by the 1917 revolution (in fact, it is this very weakness that explains the fact that Russia was the only country where the proletariat succeeded in taking power during the revolutionary wave following World War 1) and by the defeat of the White armies. Thus it was neither this bourgeoisie, nor its traditional parties who took the head of the inevitable counter-revolution that was the result, in Russia itself, of the defeat of the world proletariat.
This task fell to the state which came into being following the revolution, and which rapidly absorbed the Bolshevik party -- the party having made the double mistake of substituting itself for the class and of taking on state power.[5] In this way, the bourgeois class was reconstituted not on the basis of the old bourgeoisie (other than exceptionally and individually), nor of private ownership of the means of production, but on the basis of the state/party bureaucracy, and of state ownership of the means of production. In Russia, an accumulation of factors -- the backwardness of the country, the rout of the classic bourgeoisie and the physical defeat of the working class (the terror and counter-revolution that it underwent were on the same scale as its revolutionary advance) -- thus drove the overall tendency towards state capitalism to take on its most extreme forms: near-total statification of the economy and the totalitarian dictatorship of a single party. Since it no longer had to discipline the different sectors of the dominant class, nor to compromise with their economic interests, since it had absorbed the dominant class to the point of becoming completely identified with it, the state could do away definitively with the classical political forms of bourgeois society (democracy and pluralism), even in pretence.
Imperialist domination
At the end of World War II, when the USSR extended its empire towards Central Europe, and temporarily towards China, it exported its political and ideological ‘model'. Obviously this has nothing to do with ideology as the narrow-minded western bourgeois claims.
The fundamental reason for Russia's installation of regimes like its own in its satellite countries must be sought in its weakness as leader of an imperialist bloc -- a weakness expressed first and foremost at the economic level. While the US was able to strengthen its supremacy over Western Europe by means of Marshall Plan dollars, the USSR had no other way of ensuring its grip on the zones it had occupied militarily than by putting into power parties devoted to it body and soul: the ‘communist' parties. This devotion does not mean that the stalinist parties are simply agents of Russian imperialism: all bourgeois parties are above all parties of national capital.
What sets the stalinists apart is the way they intend to manage this national capital, and to guarentee its external security in a world arena dominated by two imperialist blocs. Being the most determined defenders of the general tendency towards state capitalism, they are, within its political spectrum, the most favorable to their country's insertion in the Russian bloc. This foreign policy orientation is linked to the fact that these parties can only come to power by armed force, generally within an inter-imperialist conflict. In fact, a particular characteristic of the Stalinist parties -- capitalist parties ‘par excellence' -- is their total lack of support from the classic sectors of the bourgeoisie, great or small (from the large and small holders of individual capital) to the extent that their program includes these sectors' expropriation for the benefit of the state. While in some countries they can count on the support of at least part of the proletariat, they are unable to make very much use of it since the proletariat, deprived of any means of production, can only constitute a real force within the class by struggling on its own terrain -- ie potentially calling into question the domination all sectors and parties of the bourgeoisie. The stalinist parties have been able to use workers' struggles to put pressure on other sectors of the bourgeoisie (eg France 1947, where the French CP, having been kicked out of the government in May, hoped to win its place back in the wake of the massive strikes that continued until the end of the year) . But they have never encouraged these struggles to overthrow the government in power: in the end, bourgeois class solidarity has always won the day. This is why the conditions for these parties taking power have been the most favorable where:
-- the working class was weak, defeated, or enrolled behind the bourgeoisie (the latter case obviously including the former two);
-- they have been able to set themselves up as the best defenders of the national capital, which has allowed them to ally with other sectors of the bourgeoisie who they later eliminated;
-- they have had the help, whether direct or indirect, of Russian military strength.
These conditions were present during and after World War II, for which the ‘communist' parties were the most effective recruiting-sergeants, in the framework of the ‘resistance' movements (except in Poland, where the AK, directed from London, was far more powerful than the movement directed from Moscow), and where in most cases they were able to count on the support of the ‘red' army. The same conditions were also present in certain wars of decolonization or ‘national independence' (notably China and Indo-China) , or even in plain military coups d'état (Ethiopia, Afghanistan, etc) .
In fact, the stalinist parties' great capacity for military methods, for leading or transforming themselves into armies, is to be explained by their ultra-militarized structure, and by the capitalist form whose agents they are. The militarization of society is at once a cause and an expression of the historical tendency towards state capitalism. The parties that take this tendency in hand in the most determined way are never happier than when they are confining to barracks, barking orders, enforcing the reign of blind submission to authority through brutalization, terror, firing squads, prisons, special powers, cultivating chauvinism and xenophobia ‑- in a word, all those things that are the glory of the military institution.
In the final analysis, the fact that the USSR -- one of the least developed countries in its bloc -- can only maintain its grip on its empire by force of arms determines the fact that the ruling regimes in the satellite countries (as in Russia) can only maintain their grip on society by the same armed force (army and police). To some extent, the link between the USSR and the countries in its bloc is of the same variety as that between the USA and the ‘banana republics' of Latin America: the regimes of these latter are detested by the majority of the population, and only survive thanks to direct or indirect US military aid. In exchange, the US can count on their complete devotion to its economic and military interests. However, for the US this kind of control over their bloc is of secondary importance. The United States, by far the most developed country in its bloc, and the world's foremost economic and financial power, ensures its domination over the principal countries of its empire -- themselves fully developed nations -- without having to apply constant military force, just as these countries can do without an ever-present repression to ensure their own stability. The American bloc's mainstay is the military might of the United States -- the most powerful country in the world. But this military power is not set into motion to preserve America's domination of these countries, nor their internal stability, whether directly (as in Hungary ‘56, or in Czechoslovakia ‘68), or as a means of intimidation (Poland 80-81). The dominant sectors of the main western bourgeoisies adhere ‘voluntarily' to the American alliance: they get economic, financial, political and military advantages out of it (such as the American ‘umbrella' against Russian imperialism). In this sense, there is no ‘spontaneous inclination' amongst the major nations of the US bloc to pass over to the other side, in the same way as other movements in the opposite direction (the change of camp in Yugoslavia 1948 or China at the end of the ‘60s, the attempts in Hungary ‘56 or Czechoslovakia ‘68). The USA's strength and stability allows it to tolerate the existence of all kinds of regimes within its bloc: from ‘communist' China to the very ‘anti-communist' Pinochet, from the Turkish military dictatorship to the very ‘democratic' Great Britain, from the 200-year old French republic to the Saudian feudal monarchy, and from Franco's Spain to a social-democratic one. By contrast, the USSR's weakness and military backwardness prevents it from controlling other than military or stalinist regimes. As a result:
-- while a stalinist regime can always envisage ‘passing to the West' without risking any internal disorder, a ‘democratic' regime is unlikely to survive as such if it ‘passes to the East';
-- while the American bloc can quite well ‘manage' the ‘democratization' of a fascist or military regime whenever necessary (Japan, Germany, Italy following World War II; Portugal, Greece, Spain during the ‘70s), the USSR can tolerate no ‘democratization' within its bloc.
An impossible ‘democratization'
The ‘Spanish model' recommended by Kuron is thus every bit as absurd as Walesa's proposal to turn Poland into a ‘second Japan'. It is doubly meaningless:
1) despite the importance of the state sector, the classical bourgeoisie in Spain had kept control of the decisive sectors of the national capital: the change in regime had no effect on this partition of the economy, nor on the privileges of any sector of the dominant classes, whichever political force might be in control of the state (the Centre or the Social-Democratic); by contrast, any ‘democratization' in Poland would mean the immediate loss by the present bourgeoisie, to the extent that it is fused with the leadership of the Party, and that all its powers and privileges depend on the Party is complete domination of the state, on the fusion of these two institutions[6], and that ‘free' elections would only give the party an insignificant number of votes (those of its members, at best) .
2) the American bloc controlled the ‘transition to democracy' after Franco's death in a prudent, systematic and coordinated manner (in particular, with the close collaboration of German social-democracy and the French president Giscard); the protagonists had no difficulty in exercising this control: it was simply a matter of bringing Spanish political structures into line with those already existing in the advanced Western countries -- whose governments were even able to gain credit with their own ‘public opinions', traditionally hostile to Francoism; by contrast, it is hard to see how the USSR could control such a process in its own bloc: even if the eventual ‘democratic' replacements firmly committed themselves to ‘respect the traditional alliances', their arrival and continued presence in power in one East European country would give the green light to similar processes in the others, where the vast majority of the population aspires to this kind of change; the USSR would then be faced with a chain reaction that would destabilize the whole bloc, its own regime included: not only would this regime (the ‘toughest' in the bloc) be unable to serve as an ‘example' -- it would be seriously compromised by the ‘example' of the ‘democratization' of one of its vassals.
If the Eastern bloc is thus absolutely unable to tolerate any variety of ‘Spanish model' of ‘democratization', no more is it capable of tolerating the kind of intermediate version established in Poland in September 1980. Solidarnosc, despite being from the start an unconditional defender of the national capital, an indubitable enemy of the proletariat, whose main function and preoccupation was the sabotage of the workers' struggles, and although it never for a moment challenged either the power of the Party or Poland's place within the Russian bloc, thus embodied a program that was totally incompatible with the stalinist regime. Essentially, it was to mislead the workers that Solidarnosc put forward demands such as the ‘self-managed Republic', where the state power would be controlled by society ‘at the factory, communal and provincial level', where there would be ‘democratically elected diet', ‘independent courts' and where ‘culture, education, and the media would be at the service of society' (Solidarnosc's program). But these demands, upheld over a long period by an organisation with 9 million members and recognized as its representative by 90% of the population, constituted a danger for a regime as fragile as Poland, and for a bloc as fragile as Eastern Europe.
In the advanced Western countries, the dominant sectors of the bourgeoisie can tolerate the existence of stalinist parties, whose program threatens them with elimination -- though they do everything they can to weaken the stalinists for the benefit of social-democracy. Since these parties will never win a parliamentary majority, they are allowed free access to the parliamentary game, and even offered tit-bits of state power: this is a cheap way of refurbishing the tarnished image of ‘democracy'. But this is a luxury for the rich, for a strong bourgeoisie capable thanks to its economic power, the age of its institutions, and the weight of its mystifications, to master the workings of this ‘democracy' (however formal they may be) and the mechanisms of its ‘alternations'. It is a luxury that the bourgeoisie in power in the Eastern bloc cannot afford. They are incapable of restricting, in a lasting way, the political forces that they do not control directly within a well-defined role, as the Western bourgeoisie is able to do with the CPs . The mere official presence, even in opposition, of mass political forces that challenge the absolute power of the party-state calls into question the regime's very foundation, and is a permanent factor of instability for it.
So Solidarnosc's fate was sealed right from the start. The bourgeoisie of the Eastern bloc was obliged to legalize the ‘independent' trade union, and give it free rein as long as this was absolutely necessary to confront the workers' struggle; once the job was done, the union's outlawing was inevitable.
In the East, even more than in the West, all talk of democracy is no more than hollow phrases, lies whose job is to lead the proletariat into a dead-end and defeat.
F.M.
[1] ‘Le Courrier des Pays de l'Est', no. 27
[2] Officially, there exist in certain Eastern bloc countries, parties other than the ‘communist' one. So that, in Poland, we have alongside the ‘United Polish Workers' Party, the ‘Democratic Party' and the ‘United Peasant Party', all three being grouped in the ‘Front of National Unity' which officially governs the country. In East Germany there are no less than five separate parties. As in the Federal Republic we find a Liberal, a Christian Democratic and even a National-Democratic Party. It is obvious that these are no more than appendages for the ruling Stalinist party.
[3] This is particularly clear in the case of the workers' parties of the Second International. Before 1914, these parties (despite their increasingly reformist and opportunist tendencies) represented working class interests in parliament, local government and other elected bodies. This allowed them, under certain conditions, to put pressure on the state. From the start of the First World War these parties were absorbed by the capitalist state to become its agents within the working class with the job of using their origins and language to help enroll the proletariat in the imperialist war and to sabotage - or directly suppress - its struggles. The same process overtook the communist parties which, from being in the vanguard of the working class during the post-World War I revolutionary wave, degenerated with its defeat still more rapidly than the socialist parties before them: as decadent capitalism advances so increase the state's power to absorb proletarian organizations that claim to ‘use' bourgeois institutions. The betrayal of the trotskyist current during World War II is another example.
Though to a lesser extent the same reversal of functions has affected the classical bourgeois parties. From being the representative of different sections of the capitalist class within the state, they have increasingly tended to be the state's representative towards their respective clienteles. However, the fact that these clienteles belong to the economically dominant class forces these parties - under certain conditions, and unlike the so-called ‘workers' parties' - to defend in a real, though limited way some of the specific interests they supposedly represent.
[4] On fascism and anti-fascism, see the International Review nos 3 and 10, as well as Revolution Internationale (nouvelle serie) nos 14 and 21.
[5] See International Review no 8 (‘The Communist Left in Russia') and nos 12 and 13 (‘The Beginning of the Proletarian Revolution in Russia).
[6] In the Eastern bloc, all functions of any importance in society figure in the ‘Nomenklatura' - ie the list of positions whose incumbents are chosen by the leading circles of the party and which are associated with material privileges relative to their place in the hierarchy. These functions range from chief of police to hospital director, from chiefs-of-staff to secretaries of the party's ‘rank-and-file' organizations in the factories, from factory managers to regional presidents of the volunteer firemen's association, from ambassadors to presidents of district committees for physical culture. Thus, the director of a state farm is chosen, not by the Ministry of Agriculture but by the party district committee; generals and colonels are nominated, not by the Ministry of Defense or the Chiefs of Staff but by the Politburo or the Party Secretariat.
ICC Introduction
The immaturity of the proletarian political milieu today as shown by its sectarianism and immediatism, especially since the failure of the International Conferences has stood in the way of serious public debate on the main issues of our time. The ICC’s analyses on the perspectives for class struggle in the light of the left moving into opposition and on the role of revolutionaries have not -- side from a few rare exceptions -- encountered much of an echo. Sarcasm and “the silent treatment” have taken the place of a serious and responsible attitude towards the confrontation of political positions. The fact that questions raised in debate have an importance going beyond the existence of any one particular group or organization, that the ideas put forward are not the personal property or the trademark of any one political group but the result of a common effort -- all this is far from being understood. The idea that there is only one political group, “one’s own”, has led to the most frantic and destructive immediatism and has lowered the level of debate and weighed heavily on the development of the whole revolutionary milieu.
However, it is encouraging to see that despite this state of affairs, there are some revolutionaries developing today who realize the need to take positions on major political issues and who consider these positions as “everyone’s business” in the milieu. It is worth noting that the text we are publishing – “The ICC’s Perspectives on the Left in Opposition: Empirio-Criticism and the Role of Revolutionaries” -- was written by a comrade from Hong Kong who left the anarchist group “Minus”; a person geographically isolated from the political milieu in Europe. His contribution to the debate on the left in opposition is concrete proof that this question is not just a hobby-horse of the ICC nor a question limited to only the “western” revolutionary milieu. All fundamental political positions concern the entire proletarian milieu on all 5 continents. These positions express the world proletariat’s effort to arrive at a theoretical and political coherence and thus a unity, going beyond the geographical and political dispersion of revolutionary groups. As the comrade has written, “if the present weak milieu is to move forward it must be equal to the immense tasks facing it in the coming years”.
In this brief introduction we cannot go into all the points raised in this text, for example the criticism directed at the ICC for “a wrong analysis of the course of history”. While agreeing that the bourgeoisie is united against the proletariat (the author of the text calls it a “conspiracy”), he makes a distinction between a bourgeoisie 1 (the managers and “captains of industry”) and a bourgeoisie 11 (the “ideologists”). We do not think this distinction helps clarify things very much.
1. On the historical level, capitalist production relations have created 2 antagonistic classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The rallying of hesitant elements of the petit-bourgeoisie is a function of the social dynamic set up by class struggle. But experience shows that at decisive moments all factions of the bourgeoisie from left to right join together against the proletariat. The comrade seems somewhat in doubt about this; he maintains that political parties today exist to struggle for political power within the state. But in fact historical experience leads us to the opposite conclusion: divisions between the right and left today are only a facade.
2. The division of labor within the bourgeoisie (the various functions carried out in the economic political and ideological apparatus of the bourgeoisie) must not be mistaken for real, fundamental differences in the nature of the bourgeoisie. The existence of complementary factions within the bourgeoisie is not contradictory with its basic unity as a class. These factions have complementary functions which allow them to fulfill all the better their task of mystification in relation to the proletariat.
3. The role of the right is not specifically to prepare for war; the entire bourgeoisie does this including the left whose participation is mainly through pacifist campaigns. The role of the left in the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie is clear to see throughout the sixty year period since the First World War. Its anti-working class role is not for “later on” but for right now in the context of the bourgeoisie’s tactic of putting the left in opposition.
Aside from these few brief remarks, we think this text shows that the comrade is committed to really debating the question of the left in opposition and the machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie “not for the purpose of discrediting other organizations of the milieu but for the purpose of clarification for the whole milieu”. Such a commitment is particularly encouraging.
Letter from L.L.M. (Hong Kong)
Over the past three years or so, the ICC has systematically put forward its ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective which has been severely criticized by many. This short article neither attempts to defend nor to reject it, it merely wishes to discuss some of the questions thrown up by the debate, which seem to have been largely neglected by the revolutionary milieu.
Before going into these questions, I wish to make two general points:
1. In the past, with few exceptions, debates between organizations have rarely been addressed by third parties, ‘it’s their business’ seems to be the general attitude. It is my firm conviction that debates on important issues is not only the business of the parties directly involved, but are the business of the whole milieu. Third parties must be prepared to and should take up positions publicly. This is not a matter of throwing one’s weight behind the party one agrees with (if one does agree with one of the protagonists), nor is it a matter of acting as an arbiter, but a matter of clarification for the whole milieu. If the present weak milieu is to move forward to be equal to the immense tasks facing it in the years ahead, this is one prerequisite. The long-running disputes between the CWO and the ICC, the KPL’s rejection of the concept of decadence, etc, are, for example, issues on which third parties should have spoken extensively. The ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective is another example. Privately I have heard a lot of criticisms of it, but have not read one single detailed critique of it in print (as my only foreign language is English, I may have missed published criticisms in other languages, and there may be some in English that I am unaware of).
2. It has more than once been remarked that the ICC has been degenerating over the past few years, one of the signs of which is whereas previously it offered intelligent analyses, today it more often than not merely regurgitates empty journalistic assertions. I agree there is some justification for the latter accusation. As to the first, if it is meant that the ICC is increasingly compromising on class positions, then I do not agree. If on the other hand, it is meant that the ICC has organizationally degenerated, then I am not in the position to judge. Returning to the latter accusation, I think if it is partly justified, it also misses a very important point. It is easy to write a discourse on, say, Marx’s crisis theory or how and why the Communist International degenerated after its 3rd Congress. But it is extremely difficult and an entirely different matter when it comes to analyzing, say, the current state of the crisis or the current balance of class forces. In the latter type of analyses, because events are only in the process of emerging, because a lot of things are at best only half-known, because we lack the benefit of hindsight,…their very nature is that they can only be based upon scanty evidence, and thus inevitably have a ring of mere assertion about them. If we look at, for example, the International Review, the tasks of its early issues were mainly to reappropriate the lessons of the proletarian struggle since World War 1. In this type of analysis, one is able to amass considerable documentary evidence to support one’s perspective, and even more importantly, one possesses the wisdom of hindsight. But revolutionaries are not intellectuals/academicians. They do not only analyze the past, but must also analyze the present and forecast the future. They do not engage in theoretical elaboration for its own sake, but for the sake of using the theory to analyze the current balance of class forces, the current state of capital’s development; to map out the future of the class struggle; to devise strategy and tactics for the proletariat. Thus, when we criticize the ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective, or the ICC’s analysis of the historic course, we must not fall into the empiricist trap of rejecting them for lack of evidential support (of which more below) but must consider whether they are consistent with the Marxist method; nor must we remain, as does the intellectual/academician, on the ‘pure’ theoretical level (for example, the materialist theory of history versus a ‘conspiratorial’ theory), but must address the questions that they are addressing. This is how I propose to consider the ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective below.
The perspective is basically criticized for being a machiavellian view of the bourgeoisie and a conspiratorial view of history, held on to by the ICC to justify its (wrong) analysis of the historic course, against all evidence to the contrary. At one time I also held a similar view, as evidenced in the following remarks I made to the ICC sometime late last year:
“...this question involves the question of ideology... What is ideology? ... Is it created by ‘professional’ hacks in a conscious deliberate, machiavellian way? ... If Marx himself never made an exposition of the ‘nature’ of ideology, it is nevertheless implicit in at least his mature works. One of the most illustrative is his discourse in Capital III on the ideology of (bourgeois) political economy. To go straight to the point: on the basis that being determines consciousness, it is ‘natural’ that the bourgeoisie, occupying a particular position in the relations of production, thinks such relations from the vantage point of that position. The result is it thinks such relations in particular categories (rent, interest, virtue of abstinence, etc). If we recall Marx in Capital III, it’s obvious that for him, such categories are ‘natural’ for the bourgeois political economist, and there is nothing at all machiavellian about them. On the other hand, it is just as ‘natural’ for the proletariat to be unable to think in (or appropriate) such categories because they occupy a different (in fact, opposing) position in the relations of production. It was ‘natural’ for Marx to think in categories such as surplus value. If we accept the above formulation, then it’s obvious that as far as (bourgeois) ideology is concerned, it does not know the number 1 enemy of the bourgeoisie is the proletariat, for such a knowledge is impossible for it...But for the bourgeoisie who are directly engaged in the ‘management’ of the relations of production (the capitalists the high echelons state bureaucrats, top unionists, etc -- for the sake of presentation, I shall call them bourgeoisie 1), their immediate exposure to the class struggle gives them this knowledge. While they obviously (to various degrees) subscribe to the categories of bourgeois ideology, they know damn well that the existence of what these categories signify depends on the exploitation and suppression of the proletariat. On the other hand, for the sundry ideological hacks of the bourgeoisie (intellectuals, academics, mass media people, Trotskyists, rank and file unionists, etc – let’s call them bourgeoisie 11), this knowledge is absent. There is no doubt in my mind that bourgeoisie 1 are capable of uniting in a subjective conspiratorial way while bourgeoisie 11 only unite with bourgeoisie 1 in the sense that all factions of the bourgeoisie are always united against the proletariat. Personally, I don’t think, for example, that the Trotskyists, rank and file unionists etc ever co-operate with bourgeoisie 1 in a subjective conspiratorial way. It will therefore be fatally incorrect to assert that such conspiracies between bourgeoisies 1 and 11 exist for it flies in the face of the ‘nature’ of ideology. Even with the bourgeoisie 1 we must be very careful not to overexert their capability to subjectively unite against the workers in conspiracies, in case we forget that the fundamental contradictions within bourgeoisie 1 are also insolvable. (... ) One of these fundamental inner contradictions is that between seekers of' political power... As far as I can see, there is no possibility at all that the Left and Right political parties can sit together and work out which faction should form the Government. The grabbing of political power is the raison d’être of' political parties and even if politicians knew that the coming of revolution is going to sound the death knell for all of them, they don’t come together in such negotiations -- to say they are capable of doing so is to give them wisdom they are incapable of having. Of course, political parties often make tactical decisions as when to ‘go to the country’, to provoke crises for the government, etc. But these are of an entirely different nature. Such decisions are made for the purpose of grabbing power. The kind of negotiations that we are talking about here entails the decision on the part of some parties to relinquish power when it already has it or give up the search for it when it has the chance to get hold of it -- both occasions being antithetical to their raison d’être. My own interpretation of the Left (being) in opposition is as follows (...): it is not that the Left must stay in opposition today because to go in power, they will lose all credibility. This view represents a half-truth for it doesn’t follow through to the logical conclusion. Even if the left loses credibility.... by going into power, it doesn’t mean that the bourgeoisie will be at their wits’ end in terms of' political ideology. For to the left of the ‘established’ left, they still have the Trotskyists, etc. If the ‘established’ left does lose credibility by going into power, their ultra-lefts will surely take their place today. There will then not be a rightward split of Labor, but instead a leftward split (...). The Left is forced into opposition because the economic policies that they traditionally embody (Keynesianism) have now been proved to be ineffective...Ask the man in the street today what’s preventing the economic recovery, he’ll tell you it’s the high interest rates. For quite some time now, because of the failure of Keynesian economics, the ideological hacks of the bourgeoisie have been vigorously propagandizing the ideology that a return to (Adam) Smithian economics will do the job. With the sophistication of the mass media… the climate has been created that suddenly everybody is turned into an economist and ‘believes’ that lower interest rates will bring recovery”.
What I was saying, basically, was that in putting forward the ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective, the ICC was in danger of ignoring the ‘nature’ of ideology and unconsciously assuming that the bourgeoisie is capable of solving some of its fundamental inner contradictions.
As I see it now, the distinction between bourgeoisie I and II is still basically correct, but the point about being the raison d’être of political parties as well as that about the Right coming to power for reasons of their economic philosophy are too simplistic. I shall discuss why in more detail below. As the ICC said in reply: “The raison d’être of (the bourgeoisie’s) factions is not a simple lust for power....an over-emphasis on the idea of ‘power’ being held by a party ‘in parliament’ can tend to divert attention away from the framework of state capitalism and totalitarianism. We must not fall for the false antagonisms the bourgeoisie would have us believe”. More importantly, nowhere in my comments did I make any assessment of the present state of the crisis or that of the present balance of class forces. We can certainly dispute the ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective, but to do so we need to base our critique on an analysis of these two critical aspects of the class struggle, which, regardless of the perspective’s validity, is exactly what the ICC is doing, and is precisely what is lacking in most of the criticisms of the perspective that I am aware of, which are heavily intellectualist in their approach.
The more I come to consider it, the less can I understand why to say the bourgeoisie is capable of conspiring against the proletariat is scandalous. Today, we all revere Bilan’s analysis of the Spanish Republic and the Spanish Civil War in the 30s. But if we read its articles carefully, there can be no mistake that it suggested a conspiracy between the fascist wing of the bourgeoisie and the anti-fascist wing of the popular front to drag the workers to World War II. Bilan clearly stated that due to the proletariat’s resistance in Spain, the bourgeoisie found that to crush it head on was a worse strategy that to derail it by means of the Spanish Republic and that the anti-fascist popular fronts all over Europe were the means by which the bourgeoisie of the ‘democracies’ mobilized their proletariat in order to turn it into its cannon fodder. Today we all take as a fact that Bilan’s analyses were correct, as they indeed were. But why is it that a conspiratorial theory which has been proven to be correct is so much revered, but a similar theory today be regarded as scandalous?
All Left Communist groups today regard as a self-evident fact which it is, that trade unions are the state’s police inside the ranks of the workers. Trade unions do not betray the workers because in decadent capitalism, no durable gains can be made by the latter within capitalism, but are in fact consciously playing their policing role. A cursory examination of any Left Communist publication today will convey this attitude/position. Why, then, is it so hard to imagine the bourgeoisie’s left and right political parties to be in a conspiracy while the conspiracy between the trade unions and the bosses be taken without the slightest hesitation?
I am sure no one will deny that different states are capable of conspiring to achieve some common goals. For all who have eyes to see, the conspiracy between the US and the UK in the Falklands/Malvinas War, that between the US and Israel in the latter’s invasion of Lebanon, etc are clear as daylight. Or if we go back into history a bit, are not the lessons of the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution enough to drive home the lesson that, threatened by the proletariat, the bourgeoisie is capable of setting aside even its most powerful antagonists to unite against it, as the ICC has correctly pointed out? Why, then, is it that when it comes to a conspiracy between the right and left of the bourgeoisie within national frontiers, it becomes so unimaginable? Did Noske murder the German proletariat unconsciously or consciously? Wouldn’t we all laugh were someone to tell us that the left of bourgeoisie 1, blood on their hands, in actual fact subjectively have the interests of the workers at heart, though objectively they can only betray the workers in decadent capitalism?
To say that the bourgeoisie is constantly engaged in conspiracy is not the same as holding a bad guys’ conspiratorial view of history. The bourgeoisie conspires not because they are bad guys, but because capitalism compels it to conspire. If the bourgeoisie is capable of conspiring, then for a faction of it to conspire against it to conspire itself out of power isn’t so extraordinary either. The examples of the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution have already been mentioned while recently we have seen several military dictators in South America voluntarily relinquishing power in unfavorable circumstances.
The validity of the ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective is certainly open to question, but just as certainly, its method is valid. It is obvious that the crisis is biting deeper everyday, it is obvious that the bourgeoisie is preparing for war, it is obvious that to do so it must mobilize the proletariat and other sectors of the population. The perspective starts from these premises, and if we are to offer a genuine critique, we must also start from these premises, and not worry, as does the empiricist, about whether evidence exists to catch the bourgeoisie red-handed in conspiracy. Bilan did not worry about such things, neither should we. This does not, of course, mean that we do not concretely analyze the bourgeoisie’s maneuvers, but it does mean that our analysis must be of the dynamic of the system’s underlying relations, the hallmark of the Marxist methodology. To ‘fall for the false antagonisms the bourgeoisie would have us believe’ is to return to the phenomenological pseudo-science of the bourgeoisie.
In IR 31, the ICC says that the bourgeoisie’s maneuvers are “confined within and determined by a framework set by:
* the historic period (decadence);
* the conjunctural crisis (whether it has opened or not);
* the historic course (towards war or revolution);
* the momentary weight of class struggle (in upsurge or reflux).
According to the evolution of the actual period, the hand of particular key factions of the bourgeoisie is strengthened inside the state apparatus, as the importance of their role and orientation becomes clear for the bourgeoisie”. (p. 15).
I think this is basically correct, though the way it is phrased can surely be improved by linking it less to the ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective; but I also hasten to add that the perspective does not necessarily follow from it. Utilizing the same framework, it is possible to come to a very different perspective such as the following. The crisis has for a while reached a stage at which there will be a period of stagnation fluctuating around the level of the current trough. This has made the bourgeoisie realize that war will break out and thus has started to prepare for it with a view to really fight it. But just as in the ‘30s, the bourgeoisie needs an ideology to mobilize the proletariat and other laboring masses, and this ideology may well be a ‘moral’ crusade against Soviet aggression. That is, the peace (sic) movement is playing the role anti-fascism played in the ‘30s. In other words, when the crunch comes the Western proletariat will have to be led to war by today’s ‘champions’ of peace, that is the bourgeoisie’s left (the same old ‘to fight a war to end (sic) all wars’ in a new guise). This means that the groundwork of building up the war machine has to be undertaken by the right. The left, therefore, is in the oppositional role today not to derail the workers from their combatvity (which many dispute), but to prepare itself for its real role later. As WR 25 said some time ago: “Generally speaking, the left’s participation tin power is only absolutely necessary in two extreme situations: in a ‘Union Sacree’ to dragoon workers into national defense in … direct preparation for war, and in a revolutionary situation when the rest of the bourgeoisie willingly or otherwise hands over power to the left (cf my earlier erroneous point about the raison d’être of political parties) whose coming to power is presented as the ultimate goal of the revolution itself.” (p. 6, emphasis mine).
The above is only an off-the-cuff perspective stricken with many holes, implicit in it is an assessment that the historic course is towards war. But it does go to show that the ICC’s ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective does not necessarily follow from its own framework.
To summarize this short contribution, I am essentially making two points:
1. To suggest that the bourgeoisie (class l) is capable of conspiring against the proletariat is entirely consistent with the Marxist method. Concerning bourgeoisie 11, I agree with the ICC when it says: “It is therefore possible to talk, say, about the ‘plans of the bourgeoisie’ while in fact it is only a small proportion of the class actually making them”. (IR 31, p. 14).
2. In putting forward the ‘Left in Opposition’ perspective, with which I obviously have a lot of differences, the ICC displays a remarkable understanding of the role of revolutionaries and a willingness to assume the role, both still rare in the milieu today. We definitely need to put more effort to definitively supercede the still prevalent intellectualist attitude in our theoretical practice.
Finally, I wish to make one more point about the empiricist attitude that I sense to be existing to some degree in the milieu. When the ICC says the historic course today is towards revolution, many raise their arms in despair protesting that all evidence is against such a view. But how is the ICC supposed to be able to produce the evidence in support of its view? By carrying out a consciousness survey with the working class?! Given the very nature of revolutionary consciousness, can safely say that whatever evidence there is, it does not suggest revolution is on the cards until its very eve. There definitely will be more violent sporadic clashes between workers and the state, but until the revolution’s very eve these struggles will inevitably be engulfed more or less rapidly by trade unionism. Thus all analysis of the historic course can only be highly abstract, based upon general frameworks such as a longitudinal view of capitalism’s development (eg, decadence), what that development means in terms of the bourgeoisie’s ideological hold over the proletariat (see Marx’s preface to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’), etc. Evidence has no place in this type of analysis.
P.S. To expand somewhat on the point I made at the very beginning, while the spirit of open critique and self-critique in the present milieu is not lacking, it still leaves much to be desired. Not only is the ‘it’s their business’ attitude prevalent, even with the parties directly involved, they often maintain silences/half-silences on arguments they have lost; worse still, on many occasions they continue to stick to their fallen positions, and in some cases, even resort to what can only be regarded as slanders, which are based either upon positions not held by their victim, or upon sweeping denigratory remarks which, when unsubstantiated, are bound to be misleading (such as ‘unlike XYZ which erroneously says... we say....’). This, to varying degrees, exists in all groups, and I can cite at least half a dozen of examples off-hand (but to do so here, without going into some details, would be unfair to the parties involved). We are no leftists, we engage in debates not for the purpose of discrediting other organizations of the milieu, but for the purpose of clarification for the whole milieu. To these familiar with the positions of the slandered parties, slanders have nowhere to hide, but for the newly-initiated they create prejudices. If even an ex-Maoist as Sweezy was capable of admitting publicly that he had been convinced by another ex-Maoist Bettelheim of the falsity of his position (see their debate ‘Between Capitalism and Socialism (sic)’, Modern Reader) , I think we are justified to expect a more open milieu than there is today.
L.L.M. February 1983.
IR 34, 3rd Quarter 1983
“Workers of countries, unite.” This call at the end of the Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels in 1848 was not just an exuberant exhortation; it expressed one of the most vital conditions for the victory of the working class. From its very birth the movement of the working class proclaimed its international class character against the national boundaries which marked the development of the domination of the capitalist class over the proletariat. But in the 19th century capitalism had not yet exhausted all its potential for development in relation to pre-capitalist production relations. At certain moments and wider certain conditions communists took into account the possibility for the working class to support factions of the bourgeoisie because, in developing itself, capitalism accelerated the maturing of the conditions for the proletarian revolution.
But at the beginning of the 20th century, with the existence of a world market sanctioning the extension of the capitalist mode of production all over the globe, a debate began on the nature of this revolutionary support to national movements. The following article, the first of a series devoted to the attitude of communists towards the national question, goes back over the terms and the concerns of the debate between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.
The failure of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, the triumph of the counter-revolution in Russia and the 50-year subjection of the proletariat to the barbarism of decadent capitalism did not allow for a complete clarification of the national question in the workers’ movement. Throughout this period, the counter – revolution did everything to distort the content of the proletarian revolution, constantly trying to pretend that there was a continuity between the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and the state capitalism established in Russia, a continuity between the proletarian internationalism of the revolutionary period and the imperialist policy of the Russian state capitalism pillaging in the name of ‘the right of self-determination of peoples’ and the ‘national liberation of oppressed peoples’. The positions of Lenin were transformed into infallible dogma. Thus the possibility for the proletariat to use national movements as a ‘lever’ for the communist revolution, a tactic adopted at the time of the reflux of revolution in the key countries and the need to defend the ‘proletarian state’ in Russia, tended to be embraced as an absolute truth in the ranks of revolutionaries with the exception of some minorities.
Today the dispersion and the crisis of revolutionary organisations, particularly the crisis of the Bordigist party, the ICP (Programma) highlight the importance of communists defending a clear and principled position on the so- called wars of ‘national liberation’ if they want to avoid being broke under the enormous weight of bourgeoisie ideology on this crucial point. The fact that the ICP abandoned the internationalist position in the inter-imperialist conflict in the Middle East in order to critically support the capitalist force of the Palestine Liberation Organisation - a position which provoked the dislocation of the group and the birth of an openly nationalist and chauvinist split (1) – i.e. a recent example of the danger to the proletariat of any concession to nationalism in the period of capitalist decadence.
The source of the theoretical weaknesses of the Bordigist on the national question, like the whole so-called `Leninist’ tradition, lies in their defence of Lenin’s position in the early years of the Communist International in favour of supporting national movements under the slogan of ‘the right of self-determination of nations’. The ICC rejects all support of this nature in the epoch of imperialism. This rejection is based on Rosa Luxemburg’s criticism of Lenin’s ideas developed at the beginning of the century. Today, in the light of the experiences of the proletariat in the last 60 years, we can only reaffirm that Luxemburg’s position and not Lenin’s has been confirmed by history and offers the only clear basis for a Marxist approach to this question.
Today there are many elements emerging in the revolutionary milieu or at least making a partial break with leftism, who still take Lenin’s position against Luxemburg’s on this question. Because it is so essential to break clearly with all aspects of Leftist ideology, we are publishing a series of articles which critically examine the debates which took place in the revolutionary movement before and after the first imperialist world war. We want to demonstrate why Luxemburg’s position is the only one to deal coherently with all the implications of capitalist decadence on the national question. We also aim to restore to memory the real position of Lenin which was an error in the workers’ movement in the past but has been distorted and used by the left of capital.
NOTE
(1) See International Review 32.
“Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the ‘most just’, ‘purest’, most refined and civilised brand.” (Lenin, Critical Remarks on the National Question)
In view of the gross distortions of Lenin’s position on the national question inflicted by his epigones, it is necessary first of all to point out that Lenin, as a marxist, based his attitude to support for nationalist movements firmly on the foundations laid down by Marx and Engels in the First International: as with all social questions, he affirmed, marxists must examine the national question:
So while Lenin advocated that the proletariat should recognise ‘the right of nations to self-determination’ – meaning the right of a bourgeoisie to secede and establish an independent capitalist state if necessary – he emphasised that this should only be supported where it was in the interests of the class struggle, and that the proletariat, “while recognising equality and equal rights to a national state values above all and places uppermost the alliance of the proletarians of all nations, and assesses any national demand, any national separation, from the angle of the workers’ class struggle”. (Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, 1914).
For Lenin, the right to self-determination was a necessary demand in the struggle of the proletariat for democracy, along with equal rights, universal suffrage, etc. He posed the fundamental question as the completion of the bourgeois revolution which was still underway in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Nationalist movements were historically inevitable in the destruction of feudalism by the rising bourgeoisie and the spreading of capitalist social relations across the world. Where these bourgeois democratic nationalist movements arose, Lenin said, marxists must support them and fight for the maximum degree of democracy, to help sweep away feudal remnants and remove all national oppression, in order to clear away all obstacles to the class struggle against capitalism.
This task had a particular significance in Russia for the Bolsheviks who were concerned to win the confidence of the masses in the nations oppressed by the Tsarist Empire. Lenin saw ‘Great Russian’ nationalism as the principal obstacle to democracy and to the proletarian struggle, since it was “more feudal than bourgeois” (ibid): to deny the right of these small nations to secede would mean, in practice, supporting the privileges of the oppressor nation and subordinating the workers to the policy of the Great Russian bourgeoisie and feudal landlords.
But Lenin was well aware of the dangers of the proletariat supporting nationalist movements, because even in ‘oppressed’ countries the struggles of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were diametrically opposed:
From the point of view of the completion of the bourgeois revolution through the struggle for democracy and against national oppression support for the bourgeoisie of an oppressed nation was only to be given where it was actually fighting the oppressor nation: “... insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations stands for its own bourgeois nationalism; we stand against. We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part of the oppressed nation”. (ibid). In other words, bourgeois nationalist movements were to be supported solely for their democratic content, i.e. in their ability to contribute towards the best conditions for the class struggle and the unity of the working class: “The bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we unconditionally support. At the same time we strictly distinguish it from the tendency towards national exclusiveness...” (ibid) original emphasis)
As for the historical limits of the struggle for democracy and the need to raise the slogan of self-determination, Lenin in 1913 was quite specific. In western continental Europe the epoch of bourgeois democratic revolutions was over by about 1871: “Therefore, to seek the right to self-determination in the programmes of West-European socialists at this time of day is to betray one’s ignorance of the ABC of Marxism”. (ibid). But in Eastern Europe and Asia the bourgeois revolution was yet to be completed, and “It is precisely and solely because Russia and the neighbouring countries are passing through this period that we must have a clause in our programme on the right of nations to self-determination” (ibid, our emphasis).
From the beginning, the slogan of self-determination was full of ambiguities. For example, Lenin was forced to admit that it was a negative demand, for a right to form a separate state, for which the proletariat could give no guarantees, and which could not be given at the ‘expense’ of another nation. His writings, limitations and exceptions, some of them contradictory, and it was intended above all to be raised as a propagandistic slogan by socialists in the ‘oppressing’ countries. But according to Lenin’s strictly historical method, at root it was based on the continuing capability of the bourgeoisie in those areas of the world where capitalism was still expanding to struggle for democracy against feudalism and national oppression, the inescapable conclusion being that when this period was over the whole democratic content of these struggles disappeared, and then the only progressive task of the proletariat was to make its own revolution against capitalism.
Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of the Bolsheviks’ acceptance of the slogan of ‘the right of nations to self-determination’ was inseparable from the struggle of the left-wing of the social democratic parties in Western Europe against the growing tendencies towards opportunism and revisionism in the Second International.
By the early 20th century it was possible to see the emerging trend in the advanced capitalist countries towards state capitalism and imperialism, and the consequent tendency of the state machine to absorb the permanent organisations of the workers’ movement – the trade unions and social democratic parties. Inside the International, theoreticians like Bernstein arose to ‘revise’ the revolutionary marxism of the International in order to justify its accommodation to these developments in capitalism. Luxemburg was one of the foremost theoreticians on the left who fought the ‘revisionism’ and sought to expose its root causes.
She rejected the notion of self-determination so energetically because she saw it as a sign of dangerous ‘social-patriotic’ influences in the International; reactionary forces who disguised themselves in socialist colours and were justified by such leading theorists as Kautsky.
The adoption by the Second International in 1896 of a resolution recognising “the complete right of all nations to self-determination” was in response to an attempt by the Polish Socialist Party to obtain official support for the restoration of Polish national sovereignty. This was rejected, but the adoption of the more general formula in Luxemburg’s opinion avoided the underlying issues: the historical basis for the proletariat’s support to nationalist movements and the need to combat social-patriotism in the International.
Luxemburg began her critique by accepting the same
basic framework as Lenin, that:
But her first task was to defend the marxist approach to the national question against those who, like the Polish social patriots, used the writings of Marx in support of Polish independence to justify their own reactionary projects for national restoration, trying hard “to transform a particular view of Marx’s on a current issue into a genuine do dogma, timeless, unchangeable, unaffected by historical contingencies, and subject to neither doubt or criticism – after all, ‘Marx himself’ once said it”. This is nothing but “an abuse of Marx’s name to sanction a tendency that in its entire spirit was in jarring contradiction to the teachings and theory of Marxism”. (Foreword to the Anthology ‘The Polish Question and the Socialist Movement’, 1905).
Against this fossilisation of the historical methodology of Marxism, Luxemburg affirmed that “without a critical assessment of the concrete historical conditions, nothing of value can be contributed to the problem (of national oppression)”. (The Polish Question at the International Congress, 1896), and from this standpoint, proceeded to outline her main arguments against the slogan of self-determination:
The majority of her arguments, which in many cases simply repeated basic marxist positions on the state and the class nature of society, went unanswered by Lenin. Against the idea of the proletariat supporting self-determination, she emphasised the second part of the general resolution adopted by the International in 1896, which called on workers on all oppressed countries “to join the ranks of the class conscious workers of the whole world in order to fight together with them for the defeat of international social democracy”. (Cited on The National Question and Autonomy, 1908). Only in this way, in the victory of international socialism, could real self-determination be effected.
Luxemburg’s critique of self-determination was
developed with particular reference to Poland, but
the reasons she gave for rejecting support for its independence from Russia have
a general importance in clarifying the marxist approach to such questions and
the implications of change in the conditions of capitalism for the national
question as a whole.
Marx and Engels originally gave their support to
Polish nationalism as part of a revolutionary strategy to defend the interests
of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Western
Europe from the Holy Alliance of feudal, absolutist Eastern
European regimes. They went so far as to call for a war against Russia and
for insurrections in Poland to
safeguard bourgeois democracy. Luxemburg pointed out that this support for
Polish nationalism was given at a time when there were no sign of revolutionary
action in Russia itself; nor indeed was there a significant proletariat in
Russia or Poland to wage a struggle against feudalism: “Not socialist theory or
tactics, but the burning political exigencies of German democracy at the bourgeois
revolution on Western Europe-determined the viewpoint that Marx, and later
Engels, adopted with respect to Russia and Poland” (Foreword).
Luxemburg’s re-affirmation of the marxist approach was based on an analysis of the historical development of capitalism: by the last half of the nineteenth century Poland was experiencing: “the frantic dance of capitalism and capitalist enrichment over the graves of the Polish nationalist movements and the Polish nobility...” (ibid), which gave rise to a Polish proletariat and a socialist movement which from the start took up the interests of the class struggle as opposed to nationalism. This was matched by developments in Russia itself where the working class began to assert its own struggle.
In Poland, capitalist development created an opposition between national independence and the interests of the bourgeoisie, which renounced the nationalist cause of the old nobility in favour of the closer integration of Polish and Russia capital, based on their need for the Russian market-which would be denied to them if Poland were to break away as an independent state. From this, Luxemburg concluded that the political task of the proletariat in Poland was not to take up the utopian and diversionary struggle for independence but to join in a common struggle with the Russian workers against absolutism, for the broadest democratisation in order to create the best conditions for a struggle against Polish and Russian capital.
The revival of Marx’s 1848 support for Polish nationalism by the Polish Socialist Party was therefore a betrayal of socialism; a sign of the influence of reactionary nationalism within the socialist movement which used the words of Marx and Engels while turning its back on the proletarian alternative to national oppression: the united class struggle, which showed itself in 1905 when the mass strikes spread from Moscow and Petrograd to Warsaw. Nationalism in Poland had become “a vessel for all types of reaction, a natural shield for counter-revolution”; it had become a weapon in the hands of the national bourgeoisie who in the name of the Polish nation attacked and murdered striking workers, organised ‘national unions’ to counteract the class’s militancy, campaigned against ‘unpatriotic’ general strikes, and used armed nationalist bands to assassinate socialists. Luxemburg concluded: “Mistreated by history, the Polish national idea moved through all stages of decline and fall. Having started its political career as a romantic, noble insurgent, glorified by international revolution, it now ends up as a national hooligan – a volunteer of the Black Hundreds of Russian absolutism and imperialism”. (The National Question and Autonomy, 1908).
Through an examination of the actual changes brought about by capitalism’s development, Luxemburg was able to wipe away the abstract talk of ‘rights’ and ‘self-determination and most importantly to refute the whole rationale for Lenin’s position that it was necessary to support Polish self-determination in order to advance the cause of democracy and hasten the erosion of feudalism. Nationalism itself was becoming a reactionary force wherever it was faced with the threat of unified class struggle. Whatever the specificities of Poland, Luxemburg’s conclusions could only have a more and more generalised application in a period when bourgeois national liberation movements were giving way to the growing antagonism between the bourgeoisie as a class and the proletariat.
Luxemburg’s rejection of self-determination and Polish independence was inseparable from her analysis of the rise of imperialism and its effect on national liberation struggles. Although this was a major issue in the socialist movement in Western Europe, Luxemburg’s comments were not taken up at all by Lenin until after the outbreak of the first world war.
The rise of capitalist imperialism, Luxemburg argued, rendered the whole idea of national independence obsolete; the trend was towards “the continuous destruction of the independence of more and more new countries and peoples, of entire continents” by a handful of leading powers. Imperialism, by expanding the world market, destroyed any semblance of economic independence: “this development, as well as the roots of colonial politics, lies at the very foundations of capitalist production....colonialism will inevitably accompany the future progress of capitalism.... only the innocuous bourgeois apostles of ‘peace’ can believe in the possibility of today’s states avoiding that path” (ibid). All small nations were condemned to political impotence, and to fight to ensure their independence within capitalism would mean, in effect, returning to an earlier stage of capitalist development, which was clearly utopian.
This new feature of capitalism gave rise, not to national states on the model of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions in Europe, but states of conquest, better suited to the needs of the period. In such conditions, national oppression became a generalised and intrinsic feature phenomenon of capitalism, and its elimination impossible without the destruction of imperialism itself by the socialist revolution. Lenin dismissed this analysis of the growing dependence of small nations as irrelevant to the question of national movements; he did not deny that imperialism or colonialism existed, but for him political self-determination alone was the issue, and on this question he defended Kautsky, who supported Polish restoration, against Luxemburg.
The development of imperialism as a condition of the world capitalist system was not yet unequivocally clear, and Luxemburg could point only to a few ‘model’ examples – Britain, Germany, America – while she recognised that the world market was still expanding and that capitalism had not yet entered into its mortal crisis. But the value of her analysis was that it examined some of the basic tendencies in capitalism and their implications for the working class and the national question: her rejection of national liberation struggles was based on an understanding of the changed conditions of capitalist accumulation, and not on moral or subjective consideration.
The slogan of self-determination for Lenin served a dual purpose: as an important demand in the proletariat’s struggle within capitalist society for democracy; and as a propaganda tactic to be utilised against national chauvinism in the Tsarist empire. But from the beginning this slogan contained theoretical ambiguities and practical dangers which undermined the Bolshevik’s defence of proletarian internationalism on the eve of capitalism’s imperialist phase:
-- as a democratic demand it was utopian. The achievement of national independence by any faction of the bourgeoisie was determined by relations of force, not rights, and was a product of the evolution of the capitalist mode of production. The task of the proletariat was first of all to maintain its autonomy as a class and defend its own interests against the bourgeoisie.
-- the forging of proletarian unity was undoubtedly a problem for communists, in the Tsarist empire or anywhere else, in their struggle against the influence of bourgeois ideology. But it could only be solved on the solid ground of the class struggle, and not by giving concessions to nationalism, which even in the late nineteenth century was becoming a dangerous weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
Furthermore, Lenin’s use of the terms ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ nations was inadequate even in ascendant capitalism. It is true that Luxemburg used the same terms herself in describing the rise of a handful of ‘Great Powers’ which were dividing up the world between them, but for her these ‘states of conquest’ were only models for a general tendency within capitalism as a whole. One of the values of her writings on Polish nationalism was to demonstrate that even in so-called oppressed nations, the bourgeoisie used nationalism against the class struggle and acted as an agent of the major imperialist powers. ‘All talk of ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ nations leads to an abstraction of the bourgeois ‘nation’ which hides the fundamental class antagonism within it.
The whole strategy of ‘self-determination’ was adopted not from Marx and Engels, but the Second International which, by the end of the nineteenth century, was thoroughly corroded by the influence of nationalism and reformism. Lenin’s position was shared by the centre of the social democratic parties and on this question he supported Kautsky, the foremost ‘orthodox’ theorist, against Luxemburg and the left-wing in the International. Arguing strongly from the point of view of the situation in Russia, Lenin failed to show that self-determination was adopted in the first place as a concession to nationalism: in order to go to the roots of social democracy’s degeneration, it was therefore necessary to reject ‘the right of nations to determination’.
The real importance of Luxemburg’s position was that it was based on an analysis of the major tendencies in the heart of the capitalist mode of production, and in particular the rise of imperialism in Europe, as indicators of the nature of the whole world economy in the imperialist epoch. Lenin’s position, in contrast, was based on the experience and needs of these countries in backward areas of the world where the bourgeois revolution was not yet completed, on the eve of the epoch in which it was no longer possible for the proletariat to win reforms from capitalism, and in which nationalism could serve no further progressive role. It was a strategy for a fast disappearing historical period, which was incapable of serving the needs of the working class in the new conditions of capitalist decadence.
(to be continued)
S. Ray
Part 2: The debate during the years of imperialist war [9]
Part 3: The debate during the revolutionary wave and the lessons for today [10]
When the working class openly demonstrates its strength, when it threatens to paralyze production, pushes the state back, stirs up a real ferment in the whole of society -- as was the case, for example, during the mass strike in Poland in the summer of 1980 -- the question ‘is the working class the revolutionary force of our time?' seems rather absurd. In Poland, as in all the social struggles that have shaken capitalism, the heart of the social movement was none other than the heart of the working class: the shipyard workers of the Baltic coast, the steel workers of Nova Huta, the miners of Silesia. When the Polish peasants went into struggle, when the students or artists decided to fight the state, they had no other reflex than to ‘go and see the workers.'
When the workers manage to break through the forces that keep them powerless and atomized, when they unite against the ruling class and shake the whole edifice of their domination, it's easy, even obvious, to understand how and why the working class is the only force capable of conceiving and undertaking the revolutionary transformation of society.
But, as soon as the open struggle ceases, as soon as capital regains the upper hand and reimposes its leaden weight on society, what once seemed obvious can become blurred, even in the memory, and decadent capital then inflicts on its subjects its own sinister view of the world: that of subjugated atomized working class which silently troops through the factory gates every morning, incapable breaking its chains by its own efforts.
At such moments there is no lack of ‘theoreticians' to explain to all those who want to hear that the working class, as such, is an integral part of the system, that it has a place in it to defend, and that only blind fanatics cam see this mass of money-conscious individuals as the bearer of a new society.
Those who openly defend the benefits of the capitalist system, whether in its ‘western' or stalinist form, never come up with any other credo. But in periods of retreat in the workers' struggle we also see the regular appearance of groups or publications who theorize ‘doubts' about the historic nature of the working class, even among those who claim to be for the communist revolution and who have no illusions about the so-called ‘socialist' countries or the so-called ‘workers' parties in the west. A new lease of life is given to old ideas coming from anarchism and populism, according to which the revolution will not be the work of a specific economic class, but of all people who in one way or another suffer the inhumanity of capital.
Today, with the post-Poland retreat in the workers' struggle, ‘modernist' ideology, the ideology of a ‘modern theory of the revolution' which rejects the ‘old workers' movement' with its ‘dusty marxism', seems to be undergoing a certain revival, as it did during the reflux that followed the 1968-74 wave of struggles. Thus, among other things, we have seen in France the appearance of the review La Banquise[1] (literally ‘The Great Ice Barrier') and the review La Guerre Sociale[2] becoming a quarterly, and in Britain the reappearance of Solidarity[3].[4]
These publications are quite a bit different from each other. La Guerre Sociale and La Banquise are more directly part of a theoretical line which passes through Invariance and Le Mouvement Communiste. But they all share the same rejection of that basic idea of ‘old' marxism: the working class is the only truly revolutionary force in society; the destruction of capitalism and the opening up of a communist society requires a period of transition characterized by the political dictatorship of this class.
It's not our intention here to develop a complete critique of all the ideas defended by currents of this type. Polemic with these tendencies is, in any case, often sterile and tedious; firstly because we're talking about groups that are somewhat informal (and proud of being so), comprising various ‘independent' individuals, which means that articles that appear in the same publication can contain contradictory ideas; secondly, because modernists permanently cultivate ambiguities, ‘yes-buts' and ‘no-buts', especially vis-a-vis marxism, whose vocabulary they often use (Marx is quoted wherever possible) while rejecting what is essential. Because of this, they can always reply to criticisms with the classic formula ‘that's not what we say, you're distorting our position.'
What is important now, in a period of temporary retreat in the working class struggle, a period in which the social contradictions that will lead to the communist revolution are maturing at an accelerated rate, is to reaffirm the central role of the working class, to show why it is the revolutionary class and why, from the moment you ignore this essential reality of our time, you condemn yourself both to not understanding the course of history unfolding in front of our eyes (cf. the pessimism of La Banquise), and to falling into the worst traps of bourgeois ideology (cf. the ambiguities of La Guerre Sociale and Solidarity about the Solidarnosc union in Poland)
This is all the more necessary because, like the ‘radical' students in 1968, certain modernist groups often develop a lucid and searching analysis of some aspects of decadent capitalism, which only adds to the credibility of their political nonsenses.
What is the proletariat?
With Marx, as with all marxists, the terms working class and proletariat have always been synonymous. However, among those who call into question the revolutionary nature of the working class as such, without daring to openly espouse the anarchism or radical populism of the end of last century, we often find that a distinction between the two words is invented. The working class is defined as the workers and employees as you see them day-by-day under the domination of capital, with their struggles for better wages and for jobs. The proletariat is defined as a revolutionary force, its contours being somewhat indeterminate, but generally embracing all those who, at one moment or another, are in revolt against the authority of the state. This can be anyone from a metal worker to a professional criminal, and might include battered women, rich or poor, homosexuals or students, depending on the modernist ‘thinker' in question (cf. the fascination of the Situationist International or Le Mouvement Communiste with ‘outlaws'; cf. the journal Le Voyou (The Hooligan) in the mid-70's; cf. Solidarity's headlong flight into feminism).
For the review Invariance (Carnatte) in 1979, the definition of the proletariat ended up being extended to its maximum: the whole of humanity. Since the domination of capital over society had become more and more impersonal and totalitarian, the conclusion was that the whole ‘human community' had to revolt against capital. This amounted to denying that the class struggle was the dynamic of the revolution.
Today La Guerre Sociale offers us another definition, more restricted, but not much more precise:
"The proletarian isn't the worker or even the worker and employee, those who labor at the bottom rung. The proletarian is not the producer, even if the producer may be a proletarian. The proletarian is he who is ‘cut off', ‘excluded', who has ‘no reserves'. (La Guerre Sociale no. 6, ‘Open letter to the comrades of the maintained International Communist Party, December 82).
It's true that the proletarian is excluded, cut off from any real control over the running of social life and thus of his or her own life; it's true that, contrary to certain pre-capitalist exploited classes, the proletarian does not possess any means of production and lives without reserves. But there's more to it than that. The proletarian isn't just someone who's ‘poor', they're also a producer, the producer of surplus value that is transformed into capital. They are exploited collectively and resistance against exploitation is immediately collective. These are essential differences.
To broaden the definition of the proletariat in this way isn't to enlarge the revolutionary class, but to dilute it in the fog of humanism.
********************
La Banquise, following in the wake of Invariance, believes that you can refer to Marx to broaden the notion of the proletariat.
"From the moment... that the individual product is transformed into a social product, into the product of a collective laborer whose different members participate in handling the material at many diverse degrees, or even not at all, the determination of productive labor, of the productive laborer necessarily broaden. In order to be productive, it's no longer necessary to touch things with your hands; it's enough to be an organ of the collective laborer or to fulfill one of its functions." (Marx, Capital Vol. 1) However, what Marx was emphasizing here wasn't the idea that anybody and everybody in the world had become productive or proletarian. He was showing that in developed capitalism it wasn't the specific quality of the task accomplished by this or that worker which was a criterion for determining whether they were productive or not. By modifying the process of production according to its needs, capital exploits the whole of the labor power it buys, as though it were that of one productive laborer. The concrete use it makes of each member of this collectivity, bakery worker or office employee, producer of arms or floor-cleaner, is secondary from the standpoint of knowing who is exploited by capital. It's the collectivity as a whole which is exploited. The proletariat, the working class, today includes most of the employees in the so-called ‘tertiary' sector.
However much it developed, capitalism has never generalized the condition of the proletariat to the whole of society. Capital has engendered huge masses of marginals without work, especially in the underdeveloped countries. It has allowed pre-capitalist sectors to survive, such as small individual peasants, small shopkeepers, artisans, the liberal professions.
Capital dominates all sectors of society. And all those who are living in misery and subjected to its domination have good reasons for revolting against it. But only those who are directly linked to capital through wage labor and the production of surplus value are truly antagonistic to capital, they alone constitute the proletariat, the working class.
Why is the proletariat the revolutionary class?
Before Marx, the dynamic of the history of society remained a mystery. In order to vainly try to develop a coherent picture of history, you had to resort to religious notions like Providence, to the genius of military leaders, or to History with a capital H. By demonstrating the central role of the class struggle in this dynamic, marxism made it possible to understand it for the first time. However, in doing so, it didn't evolve a way of interpreting the world, but a view of the world that made it possible to transform it. Marx considered that his fundamental discovery wasn't the existence of the class struggle in itself -- this the bourgeois theoreticians had already established -- but the fact that the class struggle led to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Marx said that the irreconcilable antagonisms between the working class and capital had to lead to a revolutionary struggle for the destruction of capitalist social relations and the establishment of a communist society. The protagonist of this revolution would be the working class, which had to organize itself autonomously, as a class, in relation to the rest of society, and to exercise a political dictatorship in order to destroy the bases of the old regime from top to bottom.
It's this analysis which the modernists reject:
"In order to really transform their conditions of existence, the proletarians cannot rise up as the ‘working class'. But this is difficult, because they fight precisely on the basis of their condition of existence. This contradiction can only be clarified in theory when it has been overcome in practice." (La Banquise no 1, ‘Arant la Debacle' p.11) "The proletariat cannot first pose itself as a social force before changing the world." (ibid, no 2, ‘Le Roman de nos Origines')
"But, right now, you can only close yourself up in this oppression if you don't attack it as proletarians, or as humans, and not on the basis of a specificity -- which is becoming more and more illusory -- to be conserved or defended. The worst thing would to be to make this specificity the depositary of a capacity for revolt." (our emphases, La Guerre Sociale no 5,'Towards the Human Community', p 32).
The modernists don't know what the proletariat is fundamentally because they don't understand why it is revolutionary. Why should it organize separately, as a class, when it has to fight for the elimination of classes? For the modernists, the working class, as a class, is no more revolutionary than anyone else: as a class, its struggle is limited to the fight for better wages and to the defense of a slave's employment. Instead of constituting itself into a political class, the proletariat must begin to negate itself as a class and to affirm itself as... ‘human'. The worst thing, says Le Guerre Sociale, would be to make a specificity -- being a worker for example - "the depositary of a capacity for revolt."
With the modernists, history always seems to begin with them. The Paris Commune, the mass strike in Russia in 1905, the October 1917 revolution in Russia, the revolutionary movement in Germany in 1919 -- none of this shows us or teaches us anything. "The contradiction can only be clarified in theory when it has been overcome in practice", says La Banquise. But who led all the revolutionary struggles against capital for over a century if it wasn't the working class, which was fighting to defend its specific aspirations?
Why has it always been like that?
"...in the fully formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need -- the practical expression of necessity -- is driven directly to revolt against this humanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the condition of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of .society today which are summed up in its own situation." (Marx, The Holy Family)
This is the specificity of the working class: its immediate and historic interests coincide with those of humanity as a whole. This isn't the case with any other layer of society. It cannot liberate itself from capitalist wage labor, the most complete form of the exploitation of man by man, without eliminating all forms of exploitation, "all the inhuman conditions of life of society today." But it doesn't follow from this that all parts of humanity possess the material force and the consciousness indispensable for undertaking a communist revolution.
The working class derives its strength first of all from its central situation in the process of production. Capital isn't machinery and raw materials, it's a social relation. When through its struggle, the working class rejects this relationship, capital is immediately paralyzed. There's no capital without surplus value, no surplus value without the labor of proletarians. Here resides the power of mass strike movements. This explains in part why the working class can materially undertake the destruction of capitalism. But it's not enough to explain why it can lay the bases for a communist society.
The Spartacus slaves in antiquity, or the serfs in feudalism, also played a central, decisive role in the process of production. However, their revolts could not give rise to a communist perspective:
"The separation of society into an exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary consequence of the deficient and restricted development of production in former timed. So long as the total social labor only yields a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence of all; so long, therefore, as labor engages all or almost all the time of the great majority of the members of society -- so long, of necessity, this society is divided into classes." (Engels, Anti- Duhring. Part 3, chap 2)
The proletariat is the bearer of communism because capitalist society has created the material means for creating it. By developing the material riches of society to the point of allowing sufficient abundance to suppress economic laws, ie the laws of managing scarcity, capitalism has opened up a revolutionary perspective for the class it exploits.
In the final analysis, the proletariat is the bearer of communism because it is the bearer of communal consciousness. If we leave aside the semi-religious, pre-capitalist visions of a society without exploitation, the project of a communist society without private property, without classes, where production is oriented directly and exclusively towards the satisfaction of human needs, appeared and developed with the emergence of the working class and of its struggles.
The socialist ideas of Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Owen or Fourier reflected the development of the working class at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. The birth of marxism, the first coherent and scientifically-based theory of communism, coincided with the appearance of the working class as a specific political force (the Chartist movement, the 1848 revolutions). Since then, in one way or another, with greater or lesser degrees of clarity, all the important struggles of the working class have taken up communist ideas.
Communist ideas, revolutionary theory, can only be developed through an understanding of workers' struggles. All the great steps forward in the theory of the communist revolution have been the product, not of the pure logical deductions of a few thinkers in their studies, but of a militant and committed analysis of the major advances of the real movement of the working class.
This is why it's only the working class which has attempted to destroy the power of capitalism in a communist manner (Paris Commune, October1917). The history of the communist movement is none other than the history of the workers' movement.
*******************
Does this mean that the proletariat can make the revolution all on its own, ignoring the rest of society? Since the 19th century, the proletariat has known that communism has to be "the unification of the human species". The experience of the Russian revolution clearly showed it the importance of winning the support of all exploited strata. But experience has also shown that the proletariat alone can put forward a coherent revolutionary program. The unification of humanity, and to begin with, of all the exploited, can only be brought about on the basis of the activity and program of the working class. By organizing separately, the proletariat doesn't divide society. It is giving itself the means to achieving its communist unification.
This is why, contrary to what the modernists say, the movement towards the communist revolution begins with the unitary organization of the working class as a force; with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The disorientation of modernism
The Historic Period
Understanding the present historic period while being unaware that the working class is the revolutionary force is as difficult as understanding the end of the feudal regime without taking into account the development of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
It's hard to find out whether the conditions for a revolutionary upheaval are developing if you don't know how to identify the protagonist of the revolution.
Anyone who knows the history of the workers' movement and understands its revolutionary nature knows that the process which leads the proletariat towards the communist revolution is neither linear nor automatic. It is a dialectical dynamic made up off advances and retreats, in which only long practice and the experience of the struggle enables millions of proletarians, under the pressure of poverty, to unite, to rediscover the lessons of past struggles, to break the ideological grip of the ruling class, and launch a new assault on the established order.
But when you see the struggles of the working class as a class as something with no future, if you can't understand their revolutionary potential and dynamic, you can only be ‘disappointed'. If you see struggles like those in Poland in 1980 merely as struggles ‘within capital', it's obvious you're going to be depressed, fifteen years after May 68; it's obvious that you won't see the significance of the fact that, despite the momentary retreat in the workers' struggle since 1980, strikes have broken out here and there in the heart of the industrialized countries (Belgium 82, Italy 83), and that we are not seeing the mobilization of the workers behind the interests of the national economy and its union representatives, but on the contrary, increasingly violent clashes between workers and unions.
Thus no 1 of La Banquise opens with a phrase marked by a nostalgia for the barricades of 1968 in Paris and by a depressed tone:
"‘Under the paving-stones, the beach', we said before the great glaciation. Today the Great Ice Barrier has covered all that. Ten, twenty, a hundred meters of ice above the paving-stones. Then, the beach."
This is a depression as senile as the radical students of 1968 were infantile in their belief that you could have ‘everything, now.' Modernism seems to grow old very quickly!
The Impotence and Confusion of Modernism in the face of the Class Struggle
It's no accident that modernist publications like Solidarity or La Guerre Sociale ceased to appear during the struggles in Poland. Like the petty bourgeoisie of which it is the ‘radical' expression, the modernist current lives in a state of ambiguity and hesitation between the rejection of bourgeois ideology and a contempt for the down-to-earth struggles of the workers. When the revolutionary force affirms itself, even in a still embryonic manner, as in Poland, history has a tendency to get rid of ambiguities and thus of the ideologies which splash about in them. This is what happened temporarily with the modernists in 1980.
But the political disorientation of the current doesn't unfortunately remain at the level of mere impotence. It can lead to the defense of frankly leftist positions when it comes to pronouncing on a workers' struggle.
Thus La Guerre Sociale found itself alongside the Trotskyists and other democrats in repeating that Solidarnosc -- organiser of the defeat of the workers in Poland -- is a proletarian organ: "Solidarity is incontestably an organ of the proletariat. The fact that elements coming from non-working class strata (intellectuals or others) were installed at its head didn't alter the fact that from the beginning the proletariat recognized itself in it. How else can we explain the adhesion of virtually the whole Polish proletariat? How can we explain the union's influence on the class?" (La Guerre Sociale no 6)
This is a typically leftist way of reasoning, in the spirit of the degenerating IIIrd International. Following this logic, the Polish Church, which has more faithful workers than Solidarnosc should also be "incontestably an organ of the proletariat"... and the Pope, Lenin!
La Guerre Sociale also talks in general terms about the nature of the unions, but only to serve up the old ambiguous soup of the group Pouvoir Ouvrier (at the end of the 1960s -- in fact, also of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie) about the ‘dual nature of the unions':
"The union isn't an organ of capital, a war machine against the proletariat, but the organizational expression of its relationship with capital, antagonism and cooperation. It expresses the fact that capital is nothing without the proletariat, and that, in the immediate, the reciprocal is also true" (ibid)
In decadent capitalism there's no cooperation between capitalism and workers that benefits the workers. In our epoch, the view that identifies the unions with the working class is none other than the propaganda of the ruling class (which also knows how to cooperate on a world level to create a credible ‘Solidarnosc'). It is based on the idea that there can be a conciliation between the interests of capital and the interests of the proletariat. It ignores the revolutionary nature of the working class. Thus La Guerre Sociale makes the following candid observations: "The essential difference between Solidarity and the Polish proletariat is that the former took into account national and international economic interests necessary for the survival of the system, whereas the second carried on the defense of its immediate interests without in the least concerning itself with the problems of the valorization of capital." (ibid)
Only by ignoring the revolutionary nature of the proletariat, by considering it as essentially a part of capital and not as its destroyer, can you see some sort of identity between "the national and international economic interests" of capital, and the "immediate interests" of the proletariat.
The disorientation provoked by failing to recognize the revolutionary character of the working class thus leads to the same view as that of the leftists, so heavily criticized by radical modernism.
********************
The proletariat is the first revolutionary class in history that is also an exploited class. The process of struggle which leads to the communist revolution is inevitably marked by periods of retreat. These retreats are not only concretized -- by a diminution in the number of workers' struggles. On the level of consciousness, the proletariat also undergoes a disarray which manifests itself in the weakening of its revolutionary political expressions and the resurgence of political currents who cultivate ‘doubts' about the working class.
The breakthrough in 1968, after nearly half a century of triumphant counter-revolution, opened a course towards decisive class confrontations. This course hasn't been reversed by the post-Poland retreat any more than it was by the reflux of 1975-78. The historic conditions of this retreat are being worn out at the same rate as the economic crisis is deepening, and it is the reality of the crisis which is slowly but systematically undermining the pillars of decadent bourgeois ideology (the working class nature of the eastern bloc, the welfare state, parliamentary democracy, unions, national liberation struggles, etc...)
All the conditions are maturing for the struggle of the proletariat to point the way to the future of humanity, and to sweep away all doubt about its revolutionary nature.
RV
[1] La Banquise, BP 214, 75623 Paris, Cedex 13, France.
[2] La Guerre Sociale, BP 88, 75623 Paris, Cedex 13, France. Yearly from 1977 to 1979, this publication temporarily ceased to appear in ... 1980, during the biggest struggles in Poland. It didn't reappear till May 81 and went quarterly in June 82.
[3] The group Solidarity has its origins in 1960s. Throughout the 1970s it published, fairly, regularly, a review of the same name. but, in autumn 1980, unable to take a coherent position on the struggles in Poland and to pronounce on what attitude to adopt towards Solidarnosc, the review disappeared. It reappeared at the beginning of 83 with a new series (the crisis of 1980 was discussed here) Solidarity: c/o 123, Lathom Road, London E6, UK.
[4] These three groups are directly and indirectly linked to Socialisme ou Barbarie, a magazine of the 50s and 60s, whose main animator, Castoriadis (alia Chaulieu, Cardan, Coudray) has spent a great deal of time theorizing the transcendence of Marxism.
This text of Internationalisme is taken from a series of articles published in 1947 called ‘Present Problems of the Workers' Movement'. We refer the reader to the introduction to the first part of this article published in the International Review 33. In that introduction we tried to put Internationalisme's critique of the organizational conceptions of the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy into the historical context of the post-war period.
Having criticized in part 1 the ‘conception of the brilliant leader' which theorized that only certain individuals have the capacity to deepen revolutionary theory, in this second part Internationalisme attacks ‘discipline', a corollary of this conception which treats the militants of the organization as robots who have nothing to do with discussing the political orientation of the organization. Internationalisme reaffirms that "the only basis for the organization and for concerted communist action is the consciousness of the militants participating in it. The greater and the clearer this consciousness, the stronger the organization, the more concerted and effective its action."
Since the ‘40s, all the repeated splits from the original ICP of Italy founded on this ruinous vision of the organization, up to today's dislocation of the biggest of these splits (the International Communist Party (Programma Communista)) have only confirmed the validity of Internationalisme's warning about such conceptions.
"Discipline ... our principal strength..."
At the time of the parliamentary elections in Italy at the end of 1946, a lead article -- which was really a program unto itself -- appeared in the main publications of the Internationalist Communist Party with ‘Our Strength' as its title and the Secretary-General of the Party as its author. What was it all about? The disturbance provoked in the ranks of the ICP by the electoral policy of the Party. One part of the comrades, more obedient (it appears) to the memory of the abstentionist traditions of the Bordiga faction than to a really clear position, revolted against the policy of participation in the elections. These comrades reacted more out of bad temper, lack of enthusiasm and practical ‘carelessness' in the electoral campaign than a clear political and ideological struggle within the Party. On the other hand, a certain number of comrades carried their electoralist enthusiasm to the point of taking part in the referendum ‘for the Monarchy or the Republic', evidently by voting for the Republic, despite the abstentionist position on the referendum taken by the Central Committee.
Thus, in seeking to avoid ‘disturbing' the Party by a general discussion on parliamentarism, in again-taking-up the no longer valid policy known as ‘revolutionary parliamentarism', the Party has effectively confused the understanding of its members who no longer know to what ‘genius' to bow, some participating too eagerly, others too coolly. The Party has blown hot and cold, and has come out of the electoralist adventure in a very bad way[1].
It is against this condition that the Secretary-General rose up with such vehemence in his editorial. Brandishing the thunderbolt of discipline, he cleaves asunder the local political improvisations of left and right. What counts is not the correctness or error of a position, but of impressing the fact that there is a general political line -- that of the Central Committee -- to which one owes obedience. It is a matter of discipline. The discipline which is the principal strength of the Party ... and of the army, the first NCO to come by would add. It is true that the Secretary-General specifies a discipline which is freely consented to. God be praised! With this addition we are completely reassured...
What beneficial results have come in the wake of this call to discipline? From the south, from the north, from right and left, a growing number of militants have, in their own way, translated ‘freely consented discipline' into freely executed resignations. The leaders of the ICP have told us, in vain, that this is the "transformation of quantity into quality" and that the quantity which left the Party took away with it a false understanding of communist discipline. To that we reply by saying that our view is that those who have remained -- and most of all the Central Committee -- have retained not a false understanding of communist discipline, but a false conception of communism as a whole.
What is discipline? An imposition of the will of others. The adjective ‘freely consented' is only a rhetorical flourish at the end to make the thing more attractive. If it emanates from those who submit to it, there is no need to remind them -- and above all to continuously remind them that it has been freely ‘consented'.
The bourgeoisie has always pretended that its laws, its order, its democracy are the emanation of the ‘free will' of the people. It is in the name of this ‘free will' that it has constructed prisons on the front of which it has inscribed in letters of blood, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity'. It is also in this same name that it mobilizes the people into armies, where during the intervals between massacres it reveals to them their ‘free will' which is called discipline.
Marriage, it seems, is a free contract, so that divorce, separation turns into an intolerable mockery. ‘Submit to your own will' has been the perfection of the jesuitical art of the exploiting classes. Thus, gift-wrapped and nicely decked out in ribbons, oppression is presented to the oppressed. Everyone knows that it was out of love, out of respect for their divine souls, to save them, that the Christian inquisition burned heretics whom it sincerely pitied. The divine soul of the inquisition has become today ‘freely consented' discipline.
"One, two, one, two, left, right... march!" Exercise your ‘freely consented' discipline and you will be happy!
What is the basis of the communist conception -- and we repeat, not of discipline but -- of organization and action? It has as its postulate that men act freely in being fully conscious of their interests. Historical, economic and ideological evolution condition this development of consciousness. ‘Freedom' only exists when this consciousness is present. Where there is no consciousness, freedom is an empty word, a lie; there is only oppression and submission, even if it is formally ‘freely consented'.
Communists do not have the task of bringing freedom to the working class; they have no gifts to bring. They only aid the proletariat in becoming conscious "of the general goals of the movement", as the Communist Manifesto expresses it in a truly correct fashion.
Socialism is only possible by being a conscious act of the working class. Everything which promotes the development of consciousness is socialist, but only what promotes it. You do not bring socialism by the club. Not because the club is an immoral means -- as a Koestler would say -- but because the club does not contain the element of consciousness. The club is quite moral when the goal you assign yourself is class oppression and domination, because it concretely brings about this goal. There do not -- and cannot -- exist other means to this end. When one has recourse to the club -- and discipline is a moral club -- to compensate for a lack of consciousness one turns one's back on socialism, one brings about the conditions for non-socialism. That is why we are categorically opposed to violence within the working class after the triumph of the proletarian revolution, and are the resolute adversaries of the recourse to discipline within the Party.
Let there be no misunderstanding! We do not reject the necessity for organization, we do not reject the necessity for concerted action. On the contrary. But we deny that discipline can ever serve as a basis for this action, being in its nature alien to it. Communist organization and concerted action have for a basis uniquely the consciousness of the militants who compose it. The greater and clearer is this consciousness, the stronger is the organization and the more concerted and more effective is its action.
Lenin more than once violently denounced the recourse to ‘freely consented discipline' as a club of the bureaucracy. If he used the term discipline, he always understood it -- and he many times explained himself on this subject -- in the sense of the will to organized action, based on the revolutionary consciousness and conviction of each militant.
One cannot require militants -- as does the Central Committee of the ICP -- to carry out an action with which they do not understand, or which goes against their convictions. That would be to believe that one can do revolutionary work with a mass of cretins or slaves. The need for discipline, raised to the level of a revolutionary divinity, then becomes understandable. In reality, revolutionary activity can only be done by conscious and convinced militants. And then, this activity breaks all the chains, including the ones forged by holy discipline.
Old militants remember what a trap, what a terrible weapon against revolutionaries, this discipline constituted in the hands of the bureaucrats and leadership of the Communist International. The Nazis had their holy tribunals, the Zinovievs at the head of the CI had their holy discipline: a veritable inquisition, with its control commissions torturing and investigating the very soul of each comrade. A strait-jacket was imposed on the parties, imprisoning and stifling every manifestation of the development of revolutionary consciousness. The height of refinement consisted in forcing militants to publicly defend what they condemned in the organizations and organs of which they were a part. This was the test of the perfect Bolshevik. The Moscow trials did not differ in nature from this conception of freely consented discipline. If the history of class oppression had not bequeathed this notion of discipline, it would have been necessary for the Stalinist counterrevolution to invent it.
We know militants of the first order in the ICP of Italy, who in order to escape this dilemma of participating in the electoral campaign against their convictions, or through lack of discipline, could find nothing better than the ruse of an opportune trip. To consciously use guile, deceit with the Party, to disapprove and hold one's tongue, to let things alone: here are the clear results of these methods. What degradation for the Party, what debasement for the militants!
The discipline of the ICP doesn't extend only to the members of the Italian Party, it is also required on the part of the Belgian and French fractions. Abstentionism was something that went without saying in the International Communist Left. So, a comrade of the French Fraction of the Communist Left writes an article in its newspaper trying to reconcile abstentionism with the participationism of the ICP. According to her, this is not a question of principle and therefore the participation of the ICP is perfectly acceptable, though she believes that it would have been "preferable" to abstain. As one can see, a not very ‘vicious' criticism -- dictated above all by the need to justify the French Fraction's critique of the electoral participation of the Trotskyists in France.
But even this criticism was enough for the offending comrade to be called to order by the Secretary of the Party in Italy. Fulminating, the Secretary declared the criticism of the policy of the Central Committee from overseas to be unacceptable. The accusation of "a knife in the back" was taken up again, but this time it came from Italy against France.
Marx, Lenin said: teach, explain, convince. "... discipline ... discipline ..." echoes the Central Committee. There is no task more important than that of forming conscious militants, by a steady work of education, explanation and political discussion. This task is at the same time the safe way of guaranteeing and strengthening revolutionary activity. The ICP of Italy has discovered a more effective means: discipline. There is nothing surprising in that, after all. When one adheres to the concept of the genius contemplating himself and basking in his own reflected light, the Central Committee becomes the general staff distilling and transforming this light into orders and ukases, the militants into lieutenants, NCOs and corporals, and the working class into a mass of soldiers who are taught that "discipline is our principal strength".
This conception of the struggle of the proletariat and of the Party is that of a drill sergeant in the French army. It has its source in age-old oppression and the domination of man by man. It is up to the proletariat to get rid of it forever.
The right of factions: The internal regime of the revolutionary organization
It can appear flabbergasting after the past long years of epic struggles within the CI over the right of factions, to return today to this question. It seemed resolved, for every revolutionary, by lived experience. It is, however, this right of factions that we are obliged to defend today against the leaders of the ICP of Italy.
No revolutionary can speak of freedom or democracy in general, because no revolutionary is duped by general formulae, because he always tries to bring out their real social content, their class content. More than anyone else, we are beholden to Lenin for having torn off the mask and laid bare the shameless lies covered up by the beautiful words ‘freedom' and ‘democracy' in general.
What is true for class society is also true for the political formations active within it. The Second International was very democratic, but its democracy consisted in drowning the revolutionary spirit in an ocean of bourgeois ideological influences. Communists want nothing of this democracy, where all the flood-gates are opened to drown the revolutionary spark. The break with these parties of the bourgeoisie which call them-selves socialist and democratic was necessary and justified. The foundations of the Third International on the basis of the exclusion of this so-called democracy were the historic response to this. This response is a definitive acquisition for the workers' movement.
When we speak of workers' democracy, of democracy within the organization, we understand something completely different from the socialist left, the Trotskyists and other demagogues. The democracy which they try to sell to us, with a tremor in their voice and honey on their lips, is the one where the organization is ‘free' to furnish ministers to run the bourgeois state, the one which allows you to ‘freely' participate in imperialist war. These organizational democracies are no closer to us than the non-democratic organizations of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, which do exactly the same work.Nothing is more revolting than the annexation (the socialist parties are familiar with imperialist annexations) of Rosa Luxemburg by the tartuffes of the socialist left in order to oppose its ‘democratism' to Bo1shevik ‘intolerance'. Rosa, any more than Lenin, hadn't resolved all the problems of workers' democracy, but both know what this ‘socialist' democracy meant, and both denounced it accordingly.
When we speak of the internal regime, we must be understood as talking about an organization based on class criteria and on a revolutionary program, and not one open to the first advocate coming from the bourgeoisie. Our freedom is not freedom itself, abstract, but essentially concrete. It is the freedom of revolutionaries, grouped together, seeking the best means to act for social emancipation. On this common basis, tending to the same goal, many divergences always unfailingly arise along the way. These divergences always express either the absence of all the elements for an answer, the real difficulties of the struggle or the immaturity of thought. They can neither be conjured away nor prohibited, but on the contrary must be resolved by the experience of the struggle itself and by the free confrontation of ideas. The regime of the organization, therefore, consists not in stifling divergences but in creating the conditions for their solution. That is to say, to promote, and to bring them into the light of day, instead of allowing them to develop clandestinely. Nothing poisons the atmosphere of an organization more than when divergences remain hidden. Not only does the organization thereby deprive itself of any possibility of resolving them, but it slowly undermines its very foundations. At the first difficulty, at the first serious reverse, the edifice that one believed was as solid as a rock, cracks and collapses, leaving behind a pile of stones. What was only a tempest is transformed into a decisive catastrophe.
We need a strong party, say the comrades of the ICP, a united party, which the existence of tendencies, the struggle of factions, will divide and weaken. To support this thesis, these same comrades invoke the resolution presented by Lenin and adopted at the 10th Congress of the Russian CP, prohibiting the existence of factions in the Party. This appeal to the famous resolution of Lenin and its adoption today, characterizes better than anything else the whole evolution of the Italian Fraction which has become a Party. A policy which the Italian Left and the whole left in the CI rebelled and fought against for more than 20 years has today become the credo of the ‘perfect' militant of the ICP. Must we also recall the fact that the resolution was adopted by a party three years after the revolution (it had never been envisaged previously) which found itself in the grip of innumerable difficulties: foreign blockade, civil war, famine and economic ruin within? The Russian revolution was in a terrible impasse. Either the world revolution would save it or it would succumb under the combined pressure of the external world and internal difficulties. The Bolsheviks in power submitted to this pressure and retreated on the economic plane and, what is a thousand times more serious, on the political plane. The resolution on the prohibition of factions, that Lenin moreover presented as temporary, dictated by the terrible contingent conditions in which the Party was operating, was one of a series of measures which far from strengthening the revolution in fact only opened up the road to its degeneration.
The 10th Congress saw, at the same time as this resolution was adopted, the crushing by state violence of the workers' revolt at Krondstadt and the beginning of the massive deportation of oppositionists in the Party to Siberia. Ideological suffocation within the Party could only be conceived together with violence within the class. The state organ of violence and coercion substituted itself for the ideological, economic and unitary organs of the class; party, unions and soviets. The GPU replaced discussion. The counter-revolution swamped the revolution, under the flag of socialism; an iniquitous regime of state capitalism was being constituted.
Marx said, a propos of Louis Bonaparte, that great historical events happen twice, and he added, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." The ICP of Italy reproduces as farce what was the grandeur and tragedy of the Russian revolution and of the Bolshevik Party. The anti-fascist coalition committee of Brussels for the Petrograd Soviet, Vercesi in the place of Lenin, the poor Central Committee in Milan for the Communist International in Moscow, where the revolutionaries of all countries assembled; the tragedy of a struggle of tens of millions of men by the petty intrigues of a few village chiefs. Around the question of the right of factions, the fate of the Russian and world revolution was played out in 1921. No factions in Italy in 1947 are the cry of the impotent, not wanting to be forced to think as a result of criticism, and not wanting their peace to be disturbed. No factions led to the assassination of a revolution in 1921. No factions in 1947 are at the most a little miscarriage of a non-viable party.
But even as farce, the prohibition of factions becomes a serious handicap to the reconstruction of the revolutionary organization. The reconstruction of the International Bureau of the International Communist Left could serve us as a palpable example of the prevailing methods. This International Bureau found itself dislocated with the outbreak of the war. During the war political divergences manifested themselves within the groups and between the groups belonging to the International Communist Left. What must be the method for the reconstruction of the organizational and political unity of the ICL? Our group proposed the convocation of an international conference of all the groups belonging to the ICL and having for its objective the broadest discussion of all the questions at issue. Against us, there prevailed the other method, which consisted in muting divergences as much as possible and in exalting the constitution of the Party in Italy -- round which any new regroupment had to be made. No international discussion or criticism was tolerated, and a semblance of a conference took place at the end of 1946. Our spirit of criticism and frank discussion was considered intolerable and unacceptable, and in response to our documents (the only ones which had been submitted to discussion for the conference) they preferred not only not to discuss them, but besides to simply eliminate us from the conference.
We published in Internationalisme no 16 of December 1946 our document sent to all the groups belonging to the ICL with a view to the conference. In this document, we have -- as is our old habit -‑ enunciated all the political divergences existing in the ICL and frankly explained our point of view. In this same number of Internationalisme can also be found the ‘response' of this singular International Bureau. This response says "since your letter once more demonstrates the constant deformation of the facts and political positions taken by the ICP of Italy or the French and Belgian Fractions" and further on "since your activity is limited to sowing confusion and slinging mud at our comrades, we have unanimously excluded the possibility of accepting your demand to participate in the international meeting of organizations of the ICL."
One can think what one likes about the spirit in which this response has been made, but one must recognize in its absence of political arguments that it does not lack energy and decision ... of a bureaucratic sort. What the response does not say and what is to a very high degree characteristic of the truly general conception of discipline professed and practiced by this organization, is the following decision taken in great secrecy[2]. Here is what a comrade of the ICP of Italy wrote us on this subject the day following this international meeting:
"On Sunday, December 8, the meeting of the delegates of the International Political Bureau of the ICP took place. In reference to your letter addressed to the comrades of the fractions of the ICL of Italy, an official response will be made and sent shortly. In reference to your request for common meetings for subsequent discussions, your proposition has been rejected. Besides, an order has been given to every comrade to break all communication with the dissident fractions. I therefore regret that I will not in the future be able to continue my contact with your group." Jober, December 9, 1946.
Do we need to comment on this internal and secret decision? Certainly not. We will only add that in Moscow, Stalin evidently had more appropriate means to isolate revolutionaries: the cells of the Loubianka prison, the camps at Verkhni Ouralsk and if necessary a bullet in the neck. Thank God the ICL does not yet have this power -- and we will do everything so that it never does -- but this is not to its credit. What really important is the goal pursued and the method, which consists in trying to isolate, in wanting to reduce to silence the thought of an adversary, of those who do not think as you do. Fatally, and corresponding to the place that you occupy and the strength you possess, you are led to more and more violent measures. The difference with Stalinism is not a question of nature, but solely one of degree.
The only regret that the ICP must have is that of being compelled to have recourse to these miserable means of forbidding members to have any contact with dissident fractions. The whole conception concerning the internal regime of the organization and its relations with the class is illustrated and concretized in this -- in our opinion -- monstrous and disgusting decision. Excommunication, calumny, imposed silence; such are the methods which are substituted for explanation, discussion and ideological confrontation. Here is a typical example of the new conception of organization.
Conclusion
A comrade of the ICL has written us a long letter, as he says "to unburden himself of everything which has weighed on him, from the anti-fascist coalition to the new conception of the party." "The Party," he writes in his letter, "is not the goal of the workers' movement, it is only a means. But the end does not justify the means. These must be impregnated with the character of the ends that they seek to attain, the ends must be present in each of the means employed. Consequently, the Party cannot be built following Leninist conceptions, because that would mean -- once again -- absence of democracy: military discipline, prohibition of free expression, infractions for one's opinions, the mystification of the monolithism of the Party. If democracy is the most glorious mystification of all times, that must not prevent us from being for proletarian democracy in the Party, the workers' movement and the class. Or let someone propose a better term. What counts is the thing itself. Proletarian democracy means the right of expression, freedom of thought, freedom to disagree, an end to naked violence and terror in all their forms in the Party -- and naturally, in the class."
We understand and share entirely the indignation of this comrade when he speaks out against the building of the barracks Party and the dictatorship over the proletariat. How far is this comrade's healthy and revolutionary conception of the organization and internal regime from this other conception that one of the leaders of the ICP of Italy recently gave us: "Our conception of the Party" -- he literally said - "is a monolithic, homogeneous and monopolistic Party."
Such a conception, linked to the concept of the brilliant leader and to military discipline, has nothing to do with the revolutionary work of the proletariat, where everything is conditioned by the raising of consciousness, by the ideological maturation of the working class. Monolithism, homogeneity and monopoly are the holy trinity of fascism and of Stalinism.
The fact that a person or party calling itself revolutionary can lay claim to such a formula tragically indicates all the decadence, all the degeneration of the workers' movement. On this triple basis, you cannot construct the party of the revolution, but rather a new barracks for the workers. You effectively contribute to keeping the workers in a state of submission or domination. You engage in a counter-revolutionary act.
What makes us doubt the possibility of putting the ICP of Italy right, more than its actual political errors, is its conception of organization, of its relation to the whole of the class. The ideas through which the end of the revolutionary life of the Bolshevik Party manifested itself and which marked the beginning of its disgrace -- prohibition of factions, suppression of free expression in the Party and in the class, the cult of discipline, the exaltation of the infallible leader -- serve today as the foundation, as the basis of the ICP of Italy and of the ICL. If it sticks to this road, the ICP can never serve the cause of socialism. It is with a full consciousness of the gravity of what we are saying that we cry out: "Stop! Turn back, because you're heading for a fatal fall."
Marc
[1] According to the latest news, the ICP of Italy will not participate in the next elections. So the Central Committee has decided. Is this the result of a re-examination of the position and of a discussion in the Party? Don't be fooled. It is always too soon to open a discussion which would risk ‘disturbing' the comrades, as our well-known leader told us. But what then? Simply that the Party has lost many members and its treasury is empty. So, lacking munitions the Central Committee has decided to stop the war and not participate in the next elections. It is a convenient position which satisfies everyone and, besides, has the advantage of disturbing no one. It is what our leader calls "the reverse transformation of quantity into quality".
[2] This is comrade Jober who was then in discussion with us in the name of Turin Federation of the ICP, which he represented. Since then, the Turin Federation, protesting against the method of the Central Committee, has become autonomous and in this capacity participated in the international contact conference. See International Review no 24.
“In each crisis, society is smothered under the burden of its own productive forces, of its own products which it cannot put to use, and it is thrown helplessly up against this absurd contradiction: the producers have nothing to consume because there aren’t enough consumers.” This passage, written by Engels in 1876 for Anti-Duhring shows the whole relevance of marxism today.
The capitalist economy is collapsing because of a lack of solvent outlets, ie of consumers who can pay. This is the contradiction which translates itself into the horrible paradox in which the majority of the world's population is threatened with famine, in which the living standards of the proletariat is sinking below the poverty line, not because not enough is being produced but because capitalist industry produces more than it can sell; not because there’s ‘not enough’ but because there’s ‘too much’ as far as the laws of capital are concerned.
Because there is generalized overproduction on a market that is too restricted, competition between capitalists becomes more and more frenzied. The policies of ‘recovery’ based on an intensive utilization of credit, which artificially expand the market, are coming up against the barriers of inflation which threatens to make the international monetary system explode. The bourgeoisie is seeing the mechanisms of the economy escaping its control: it can’t prevent deeper and deeper lurches into recession, while at the same time inflationary pressures are becoming more and more powerful.
Graph no 1 shows that since 1967 the policies of ‘recovery’ have three times led to a revival of world trade, ie of demand to keep production going. But they haven’t prevented the fall in the growth of production, nor the recession of 1974-75, nor the still more profound one that began in 1980.
Why is this? Because, as an exploited class, the proletariat produces more than it can consume.
This supplementary production, surPlus value, can only be realized and lead to an accumulation of value if capital sells it to extra-capitalist sectors. When these disappear, capital can no longer find outlets for the totality of production. In order to sell, you have to be as competitive as possible, to reduce wages in order to reduce the costs of production. As each capitalist nation has no choice but to follow the same policy, the world market becomes more and more restricted. In these conditions, production collapses, factories close and the workers are hurled into unemployment, which does not make them good consumers. The policies of austerity imposed on each bourgeoisie by the competitive nature of the capitalist economy can only accelerate the fall in world demand and thus the collapse of production.
Graph no 2 shows the fall in the rate of utilization of the productive apparatus in the USA, the world’s major power, which has 20%, of world production. At a rate of 68% in 1982, this is the equivalent of nearly one factory in three closing down. In West Germany at the end of 1982, 76% of the productive apparatus was being used -- the equivalent of one factory in four being closed. In Britain, only 30% of factories are operating at full capacity.
Capitalism can find no way out of its contradictions; it can only sink deeper and deeper into economic chaos and race ahead with its imperialist rivalries. The proletariat is today being subjected to an attack the like of which it hasn’t seen since the last world war. Inflation, unemployment and poverty are its daily lot, and they merely point the way to worse to come. The future of humanity depends on the proletariat’s capacity to react to all this. Capitalism has nothing more to offer but misery and death. The present economic catastrophe has no solution within capitalism, 15 years of failed economic policies show that the bourgeoisie has no perspective: it’s up to the world proletariat to demonstrate that it alone can offer a way out.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/bordigism
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/battaglia-comunista
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/17/stalinism-eastern-bloc
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/correspondance-other-groups
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/18/proletarian-struggle
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/037_natqn_02.html
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/042_natqn_03.html
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/339/communists-and-national-question
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/22/national-question
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/contribution-discussion
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1995/communist-left-after-world-war-ii
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/110/party-and-fraction
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis