The bourgeoisie is making a lot of noise about a so-called economic ‘recovery’ which is supposed to represent the victory of Reagan’s austerity policies. The OECD begins its report, in Econ­omic Perspectives, December 1983, with an almost triumphant declaration: “The recovery of econ­omic activity now involves almost all the coun­tries of the OECD.” And it highlights a series of positive points: increasing GNP and indust­rial production, falling inflation, reduction in budget deficits, increasing profits. Two pages later, the OECD writes: “If this appreciation were to prove false, it would be necessary to revise this forecast as to the vigor and dura­tion of the recovery.” ... This kind of remark shows how much confidence the bourgeoisie its­elf has in the recovery it announces so loudly!

Undeniably, certain economic indicators which were negative in 1982 turned positive in 1983, which means simply that 1983 was less appall­ing than 1982 -- at least for the bourgeoisie. From this to a real economic recovery there is not a step but a gulf to be leapt. Before analyzing its causes and perspectives, let us briefly examine the reality of this ‘recovery’.

The growth in GNP and industrial production

This growth is to all intents and purposes lim­ited to the US and its extent is wretched enough, In the US, the GNP has risen by 3.5%, whereas in Europe it has hardly risen by 1%. Industrial production rose by 6% in the US, which does not even compensate for the fall of 1982 (-8.1%): the balance over two years is still a fall of -2.6%! As for the European countries, the growth in their industrial production is magnificent, varying as it does from ... -4.3% in Italy to 1% in Britain!

Degree of use of the productive forces

Under-utilization of the productive forces is one of the clearest signs of over-production. Despite a 10% increase over 1982, the rate of utilization of productive capacity has not risen above 80% in the US. As for unemployment, cont­rary to the miracles that were forecast, it has only fallen at an annual rate of 0.2% in the US and continues its rapid advance in all the Euro­pean countries.

Investment

Company investments have continued to decline, despite the ‘recovery’. Since these investments are the basis for any long-term recovery, this is a sign that the bourgeoisie itself does not believe in the recovery.

World trade

This remained stagnant in 1983, after a 2% drop in 1982.

Taken as a whole, these figures (drawn from the bourgeoisie’s official statistical body -- the OECD) prove incontestably that, while capitalism may well be pausing briefly in its deepening crisis, there can be no question of a real econ­omic recovery. The only positive development that the bourgeoisie can boast of is a real drop in inflation, and we shall see later just what this drop in inflation really means. The exist­ence of a momentary lull in a general course to­wards collapse merely expresses the uneven pro­file that has always characterized the develop­ment of the capitalist economy. The important thing is to see whether this development is rising or falling: today, it is pointed firmly downwards, with no perspective of reversing direction.

After the profound recession of 1975, the west­ern bourgeoisie resorted to a massive dose of its classic drug: credit, printing paper money without any economic counterpart. The United States played a primary role here: the multi­plication of dollars and its balance of pay­ments deficit did indeed act as a locomotive on the whole world economy. This policy’s failure, in the form of unbridled worldwide inflation, pushed the bourgeoisie to reverse the tendency and develop its monetarist con­ceptions. History does not repeat itself, and the bourgeoisie today no longer has the means to reproduce the same scenario, since the specter of a collapse in the international monetary system remains ever-present, even without inflation, if only because of colossal state indebtedness, which simply gets worse as the dollar rises. And so, despite the fam­ous ‘recovery’, the US experienced a record number of bank failures in 1983.

The ‘trick’ invented by the American bourg­eoisie to stimulate the economy without stimulating inflation consists essentially in transferring capital from one hand to the other. On the one hand, the US, thanks to exceptional interest rates, attracts capital from all over the world, and repatriates the mass of dollars scattered abroad. On the other, the worldwide reduction in wages and rapidly growing productivity allows the bourgeoisie to increase significantly the capital accr­uing to it in the form of surplus value. This double movement of impoverishment of the prol­etariat and of other countries relative to the US, gives the latter the necessary resources to finance its budgetary, commercial and current operations deficits. These have grown considerably during the previous year, showing that Reagan’s monetarist language is merely, in the final analysis, a bluff. The federal budget deficit has tripled in two years, from $70 billion in 1981 to $179 billion in 1983; the balance of payments deficit has doubled in one year, from $36 billion in 1982 to $63 bill­ion in 1983; the current operations deficit has quadrupled in one year, from $11 billion to $42 billion.

These astronomical figures, which are nonethe­less accompanied by falling inflation and a rising dollar -- apparently in contradiction to all economic logic -- are a good expression of the enormous flow of capital into the US taking place today. At the same time, it reveals the full limits of the present ‘recovery’. In con­trast to the end of the ‘70s, the US is no long­er up to acting as ‘locomotive’ for the world economy. Although it is once again importing vast quantities of goods, the uplifting effect of pursuing this policy is partially wiped out by the transfer of capital in the same direc­tion, and the increasing cost of raw materials priced in dollars (eg, oil). The improvement of the economic situation in the US, which has nothing spectacular about it as we have seen, is accompanied by a stagnation of the European economies, which is not destined to change qualitatively.

In the longer term, the present mechanism of the US ‘recovery’ heralds a catastrophic future for the world economy. The present over-valuing of the dollar, as a result of the high American interest rates, allows the US to import cheaply, but it undermines the competitiveness of the exporting sector, which further increases the balance of payments deficit. Under the pressure of the law of value, the dollar is bound to de­value, and the whole beautiful machinery at work today will burst like a balloon. At this point, the American budget and balance of payments deficits, which have been left to swell in the most spectacular manner, will no longer be com­pensated and the inflation presently hidden by high interest rates and the movement of capital will come into the open.

Capitalism will then find itself in a situation ten times worse, and will be hurled ever deeper into the abyss.

ML

In the first article in this series in International Review 34, we examined the attitude of communists to the national question on the eve of capitalism’s decadent epoch, and in particular the debate between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg on whether the working class should support ‘the right of nations to self determination’. We concluded that even when some national liberation struggles could still be considered progressive vis a vis the interests of the working class, such a slogan had to be rejected.

With the declaration of war in 1914, a whole new range of questions was posed for the workers’ movement, and in this article we want to look at the first attempts of communists to discuss them, and their implications for the question of support for all nationalist struggles.

One of the specific functions of revolutionaries is always to do their best to analyse the reality which confronts their class. The debate amongst the fractions of the ‘Zimmerwald Left’ during the first imperialist world war on the question of national liberation struggles was a vital part of this concern to delineate the conditions confronting the class struggle; new, unprecedented conditions of global capitalist warfare, unfettered imperialism and  massive state control.

Sixty years later the debate is not the same and revolutionaries have no need to repeat its inadequacies or errors. The experience of the class itself has provided answers, as well as new problems. But if today’s political minorities do not adopt for themselves the same spirit of ruthless critique and practical investigation, clinging instead to slogans more appropriate to the ascendant period of capitalism, then they fail in their basic duties and reject the whole methodology of Lenin, Luxemburg and left fractions. It is this methodology which has led the ICC, to reject the position of Lenin on the national question and develop the contribution made by Rosa Luxemburg.

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THE NATIONAL QUESTION IN THE ZIMMERWALD LEFT

Those revolutionaries who remained faithful to the spirit of the Communist Manifesto and its rallying call – “The workers have no fatherland. Workers of the world unite!” – regrouped in the Zimmerwald movement of those opposed to the war, but were soon forced to organise themselves as a left-wing within this movement in order to defend a clear class position against the reformist and pacifist tendencies of the majority. The Zimmerwald Left was founded in 1915 on the basis of a recognition:

• of the imperialist nature of the war, against the lie of ‘defence of the fatherland’;
• of the need for a struggle for political Power and the proletarian revolution as the only answer to imperialism;
• that the beginning of this struggle was an active struggle against the war.

While not rejecting the old minimum programme of social democracy and the struggle for reforms within capitalism, this struggle now had to be waged “in order to sharpen in general any social and political crisis of capitalism as well as the crisis caused by the war and to turn this struggle into an onslaught against the fundamental stronghold of capitalism... Under the slogan of socialism this struggle will make the labouring masses impervious to the slogan of the enslavement of one people by another...” (Draft Resolution of the Zimmerwald Left, 1915).

Despite a continuing attachment to the minimum programme, which was appropriate to the ascendant period of capitalism, the positions of the Zimmerwald Left reflected the break in historical period, and in the workers’ movement itself. It could no longer be a straightforward question of the proletariat supporting bourgeois nationalist movements in order to advance the struggle for democracy within the context of a still expanding capitalist mode of production. The proletariat’s attitude to national liberation was now inseparable from the need to struggle against imperialist war and, more generally against imperialist capitalism itself, with the direct aim of creating the conditions for the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class.

Within the Zimmerwald Left, the Bolshevik Party had already clearly expressed the general, historical attitude of revolutionaries to national liberation struggles:

“At the bottom of real nationalist wars ‘such as took place especially in the period between 1789 and 1871 lay a slow and long process of nationalist mass movements of struggle against absolutism and feudalism, of overthrow of national oppression and of the creation of states upon a national foundation as prerequisites for capitalist development.

"The national ideology created by this epoch left deep traces upon the masses of petty bourgeoisie and upon a section of the proletariat. The bourgeois sophists and the betrayers of socialism, who trail behind these sophists, are making use of this at present, in an entirely different, and imperialist epoch, to divide the workers and to divert them from their class problems and the revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie.

"The words of the Communist manifesto that “workers have no fatherland” are now truer than ever. Only the international struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie can open to the oppressed masses the road to a better further”. (Resolution on the character of war, adopted at the Berne conference of the Bolshevik Party, 1915).

It is within this framework that the debate between the different fractions of the Zimmerwald Left on the national question took place. This debate, principally between the Western European communists on the one hand and Lenin on the other, initially focussed on whether it was still possible for the proletariat to give its support to ‘the right of nations to self-determination’, much along the lines of the pre-war polemics between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, but inevitably widened out to address two more fundamental questions raised by the entry of capitalism into its imperialist, decadent phase:

• Was it still possible for the proletariat to struggle within capitalism for a ‘minimum programme’ of democratic demands (which included the ‘right to self-determination’)?
• Were progressive national wars still possible which allowed the proletariat to give its support to the bourgeoisie?

Whereas Lenin answered emphatically yes to both questions, others like the German, Dutch and Polish Lefts, along with the Kommunist group around Bukharin and Piatakov inside the Bolshevik Party, tentatively began to answer no, rejecting the slogan of self-determination and attempting to elaborate the tasks of the proletariat faced with new conditions of capitalist decadence. It was these fractions, who tended to cohere around the theory of imperialism defended by Rosa Luxemburg, who were most successful in coming to grips with the national question in decadence, against the rearguard actions of Lenin who was loath to give up elements of the obsolete minimum programme which might still play a vital role in the proletarian revolution in Russia and the backward countries of Eastern Europe and Asia.

1. IS IT STILL POSSIBLE TO STRUGGLE FOR ‘DEMOCRACY’?

When Bukharin opposed the right of nations to self-determination as a proletarian tactic at the Berne Conference of the Bolshevik Party in 1915, Lenin was the first to point out that one could not reject one point in the proletariat’s struggle for democracy without calling into question this struggle itself: if self-determination was impossible to achieve in the imperialist epoch, why not all other democratic demands? Lenin posed the problem as how to link the advent of imperialism with the struggle for reforms and democracy, and from this standpoint he denounced Bukharin’s position as “imperialist economism”; that is, a rejection of the need for a political struggle, and therefore a capitulation to imperialism [1] [2].

But Bukharin was not rejecting the need for a political struggle at all, only the equation of this with the struggle for the minimum programme. Bukharin and the Kommunist group posed the problem as the need for the proletariat to make a decisive break with the methods of the past, and to adopt new tactics and slogans corresponding to the need to destroy capitalism through proletarian revolution. Whereas communists were formerly in favour of the struggle for democracy, now they opposed it. As Bukharin more fully expressed it in a later amplification of this position:

“...it is perfectly clear, a priori, that the specific slogans and aims of the movement are wholly dependent on the character of the epoch in which the fighting proletariat has to operate. The past era was one of gathering strength and preparing for revolution. The present era is one of the revolution itself, and this fundamental distinction also gives rise to profound differences in the concrete slogans and aims of the movement. The proletariat needed democracy in the past because it was as yet unable to think about dictatorship in real terms...Democracy was valuable in so far as it helped the proletariat to climb a step higher in its consciousness, but the proletariat was forced to present its class demands in a ‘democratic’ form...But there is no need to make a virtue out of a necessity...the time has come for a direct assault on the capitalist fortress and the suppression of the exploiters...” (The Theory of The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1919)

Since the period of progressive bourgeois democracy was now over, and imperialism was inherent to capitalism’s continued existence; it was utopian and reactionary to advance anti-imperialist demands which left capitalist relations intact. The only answer to imperialism was the proletarian revolution:

“Social democracy must not advance ‘minimum’ demands in the realm of present-day foreign policy... any advancement of ‘partial’ tasks, of the ‘liberation of nations’ within the realm of capitalist civilisation, means the diverting of proletarian forces from the actual solution to the problem, and their fusion with the forces of the corresponding national bourgeois groups... The slogan of ‘self-determination of nations’ is first of all utopian (it cannot be realised within the limits of capitalism) and harmful as a slogan which disseminates illusions. In this respect it does not differ at all from the slogans of the courts of arbitration, of disarmament, etc, which presupposes the possibility of so-called ‘peaceful capitalism’ ”. (Theses on the Right of Self-Determination, 1915).

But Bukharin went further in his rejection of the minimum programme in the imperialist epoch, by showing the need for tactics and slogans which expressed the need for the proletariat to destroy the capitalism state. Whereas in ascendant capitalism the state had ensured the general conditions for exploitation by individual capitalist, the imperialist epoch gave rise to a militaristic state machine which directly exploited the proletariat, with a change from individual ownership of capital to collective ownership through unified capitalist structures (in trust, syndicates, etc.) and the fusion of these structures with the state. This tendency towards state capitalism spread from the economy to all areas of social life:

“All these organisations have a tendency to fuse with one another and to become transformed into one organisation of the rulers. This is the newest step of development, and one which has become especially apparent during the war... So there comes into being a single, all-embracing organisation, the modern imperialist pirate state, an omnipotent organisation of bourgeois dominance.... and if only the most advanced states have attained this stage, then each day, and especially each day of war, tends to make this fact general”. (The Imperialist Pirate State, 1915)

The only force which could confront these united forces of the entire bourgeoisie was the mass action of the proletariat. The need of the revolutionary movement in these new conditions was first of all to manifest its fundamental opposition to the state, which implied a rejection of support for any capitalist country. [2] [3]

It was against this broad attack on the minimum programme, and the rejection of self-determination by most of the Western European lefts, that Lenin wrote his Theses on Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination in 1916. From the beginning he was forced onto the defensive by the need to avoid objectively supporting reactionary bourgeois democracy and the democratic state. So he had to agree with Bukharin that:

• "The domination of finance capital and of capital in general is not to be abolished by any reforms in the sphere of political democracy; and self-determination belongs wholly and exclusively to that sphere". (Thesis 2);
• "...all the fundamental demands of political democracy are only partially 'practicable' under imperialism, and then in a distorted form and by way of exception (for example, the secession of Norway from Sweden in 1905)". (Ibid) [3] [4];
• the formation of new nations (Poland, India, etc) in the future, he implied, would be the result of "some slight change" in the political and strategic relations between the major imperialist powers.

Lenin's position was also based on a recognition that the nature of the new period demanded a break with the old reformist methods of struggle:

"...these demands must be formulated and put through in a revolutionary and not a reformist manner, going beyond the bounds of bourgeois legality, breaking them down... and drawing the masses into decisive action, extending and intensifying the struggle for every fundamental democratic demand up to a direct proletarian onslaught on the bourgeoisie, i.e. up to the socialist revolution that expropriates the bourgeoisie". (Ibid).

Capitalism and imperialism could only be overthrown through economic revolution. Nevertheless:

"It would be a radical mistake to think that the struggle for democracy was capable of diverting the proletariat from the socialist revolution or of hiding, overshadowing it, etc. On the contrary, in the same way as there can be no victorious socialism that does not practice full democracy, so the proletariat cannot prepare for its victory over the bourgeoisie without an all-round, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy". (Ibid).

This is Lenin's whole argument in a nutshell, but in view of the arguments ranged against it at the time, two key questions remained unanswered:

• in the imperialist epoch, in which bourgeois democracy was reactionary, what was the content of this struggle for democracy?
• how could the proletariat avoid, in practice merely propping up the militarist and imperialist state apparatus?

Lenin was undoubtedly aware of these problems, but could not resolve them. Imperialism, he agreed, turned democracy into an illusion - 'aspirations' among the masses; that is, there existed an antagonism between imperialism's denial of democracy and the masses 'striving' for democracy. What this boiled down to in Lenin's position was the continuing need for a struggle by the working class, not to destroy the capitalist state - not yet, at least - but to work within it and to use its institutions to win further democratic reforms: "The marxist solution to the problem of democracy is for the proletariat to utilise all democratic institutions in its class struggle against the bourgeoisie in order to prepare for its overthrow and assure its own victory". (Lenin, Reply to P. Kievsky (Y. Piatakov), 1916).

Before the February revolution, Lenin was united with Kautsky in believing that the marxist attitude towards the state was that the proletariat should capture state power and use it to create socialism. Be criticised Bukharin's position as un-marxist and semi-anarchist, re-affirming that socialists were in favour of using the existing state institutions.

But in the process of formulating his own answer to Bukharin in 1916 he changed his position, returning to Marx's original writings on the need to smash the bourgeois state apparatus, and stressing that the real significance of the appearance of workers' soviets in 1905 was as the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the alternative to bourgeois state power; his repudiation of Bukharin became instead the pamphlet better known as State and Revolution, which clearly calls for the demolition of the bourgeois state.

However, despite this vital clarification of his attitude to the state, and despite his attitude to the state, and despite his determined practical struggle for the achievement of the call for "All power to the soviets" in October 1917, Lenin never relinquished his theoretical vision of a democratic revolution'. So for example while in his April Theses he concluded that, to the extent that state power had now passed to the bourgeoisie, "the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia is completed", he still included in his programme the need for the proletariat to carry out bourgeois-democratic tasks, including self-determination, in the struggle for soviet power. In Bukharin's phrase, his position on the national question remained "pre-state", remaining largely influenced by the conditions confronted by the proletariat in the under-developed capitalist countries, and based on obsolete conceptions more appropriate to the period of ascendant capitalism than imperialist decadence.

2. ARE NATIONAL WARS STILL PROGRESSIVE?

Since the period of national wars embraced a definite historical period - broadly between 1789 and 1871 - the question posed was firstly whether this period was definitively ended with the outbreak of war in 1914, and secondly, given the undoubtedly imperialist and reactionary nature of this war, whether this signified a general and irreversible characteristic of wars in the new period. Again, whereas the European lefts began tentatively to answer yes to both questions, Lenin was reluctant to concede either, despite a large degree of actual agreement.

This whole issue was obviously a vital one for the Zimmerwald Left who in the midst of the imperialist war denounced the bourgeoisie's lies of defending the fatherland and dying for one's country; if some wars could still be pronounced progressive and revolutionary, then the internationalists should instead call on the working class to defend its fatherland in that particular case. As Bukharin pointed out, in the war this had become a class line:

"The most important question of tactics of our time is the question of the so-called defence of the country. For that is exactly where the line of separation is drawn between the entire bourgeois and the entire proletarian world. This word itself contains a deception for it concerns not really the country as such, i.e. its population, but the state organisation..." (The Imperialist Pirate State).

Therefore:

"The task o social democracy at the present time is a propaganda of indifference with respect to the 'fatherland', to the 'nation', etc, which presupposes the posing of the question not at all in a "pro-state" manner... (protests against a state 'disintegration') but on the contrary, posing it in a sharply expressed revolutionary manner with regard to state power and to the entire capitalist system". (Thesis 7, Theses on the Right of Self-Determination, 1915)

Bukharin demonstrated that if the slogan of self-determination was concretely applied (i.e. through granting independence and the right to secede) in the conditions of imperialist war, it became nothing other than a variant of the slogan 'defence of the fatherland', since it would be necessary to materially defend the borders of the newly independent state in the imperialist arena; otherwise what meaning could the demand have in reality? In this way, the internationalist forces of the proletariat would be splintered and their class struggle taken onto a nationalist terrain:

"Hence it follows that in no case and under no circumstances will we support the government of a Great Power which suppresses the uprising and revolt of the oppressed nation; neither will we mobilise the proletarian forces under the slogan 'the right of nations to self-determination'. Our task in this case is to mobilise the forces of the proletariat of both nations (in common with others) under the slogan of a civil, class war for socialism and for a propaganda against a mobilisation of forces under the slogan 'the right of nations...'." (Thesis 8, Ibid).

The German Left, basing itself on the theory of Rosa Luxemburg, who in the Junius Pamphlet had stated that "Today the nation is but a cloak that covers imperialist desires, a battle cry for imperialistic rivalries, the last ideological measure with which the masses can be persuaded to play the role of cannon fodder in imperialist wars", also came out clearly against the idea of progressive national wars in the imperialist epoch:

"In the era of the unleashing of this imperialism, national wars are no longer possible. National interests serve only as the pretext for putting the labouring masses of the people under the domination of their mortal enemy, imperialism." (Theses 5, Theses of the Internationale group on the Tasks of International Social Democracy, 1916)

In his vigorous riposte, Lenin drew back from making such a general conclusion about the nature of the new period:

• the undoubted imperialist character of the world war did not imply that national wars could not still be possible. On the contrary they were both inevitable and progressive;
• while defence of the fatherland was reactionary with regard to a war between rival imperialist powers, in a 'genuine' national war socialists were not at all opposed to called for national defence.

Lenin could not accept that the entry of capitalism into its imperialist phase dictated the reactionary nature of every war, emphasising the need for a concrete assessment of each separate war, and he refused to accept that the obvious imperialist nature of the advanced countries of Europe and America signified a change in the entire capitalist system from which even the backward countries of Asia and Africa could not escape. In the advanced capitalist countries the era of national wars was long over, but in Eastern Europe and the semi-colonial and colonial countries bourgeois revolutions were still underway; here, national liberation struggles against the major imperialist powers were not yet a dead letter, and therefore defence of the fatherland was still progressive in these cases. Furthermore, even in Europe national wars could not be considered impossible (though he implied they were unlikely), on part of small annexed or oppressed nations against the major powers. He posed the hypothetical example of Belgium annexed by Germany in the course of the war to illustrate the need for socialists to support even the 'right' of the 'oppressed' Belgian bourgeoisie to self-determination.

Lenin's reluctance to concede the German Left's more coherent argument on the impossibility of national wars stemmed mainly from his very practical concern not to reject any possible movement or event which could help to precipitate a crisis in the capitalist system which could be exploited by the proletariat.

"The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene... We would be very poor revolutionaries if, in the proletariat's great struggle for socialism, we did not know how to utilise every popular movement against every single disaster imperialism brings in order to intensify and extend the crisis". (The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up, 1916)

He was not interested in the fate of nationalist movements in themselves, but only in their ability to weaken the grip of the major imperialist powers in the middle of the world war, and he therefore placed the Irish rebellion of 1916 on the same level as colonial rebellions in Africa and mutinies among colonial troops in India, Singapore, etc. as signs of the deepening crisis of imperialism.

Let us take the concrete example of the Irish nationalist rebellion of 1916 to illustrate some of the dangers in this approach. For Lenin, the rebellion was evidence in support of his position that encouragement for the nationalist aspirations of oppressed nations could only be an active and positive factor in the struggle against imperialism, against others like Radek and Trotsky who argued that it was a hopeless putsch without serious backing which showed, on the contrary, that the era of national liberation struggles was dead. Lenin didn't argue that there was a mass proletarian movement behind the rebellion, which manifested itself as "street fighting by a section of the urban petty bourgeoisie and a section of the workers": the real issue was the class nature of such nationalist revolts vis a vis the proletariat, or to put it another way: did such movements help to strengthen "the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat" (Lenin) - or the imperialist bourgeoisie?

Lenin dangerously ascribed to such nationalist actions an anti-capitalist potential: despite their reactionary fantasies, he said, "objectively they will attack capital", (Ibid), and the proletariat had only to unite and direct them to advance the process of social revolution. But without going into the whole history of the 'Irish Question', we can briefly say that it provides facts which repudiate this idea.

The Easter Rebellion of 1916 put the seal of nationalism on the class struggle of the Irish proletariat, already weakened by the partial defeat of its pre-war struggles, but actively mobilising workers behind the armed struggle of southern Irish Catholic nationalism. Despite the lack of sympathy among the mass of workers for this desperate military putsch, the subsequent mass terror campaigns of the British state only served to complete their disorientation and drive them into the arms of the reactionary nationalists, resulting in massacre and the systematic sabotage of any last sign of autonomous class struggle against capital by both British 'Black and Tans' and republican IRA. This defeat of a relatively weakened and isolated sector of the world proletariat by the combined forces of the Irish and British bourgeoisies could only represent the strengthening of world imperialism, whose primary interest is always the defeat of its mortal class enemy. The Irish rebellion only proved that all factions of the bourgeoisie, even in the so-called oppressed nations, side with imperialism when faced with the threat of the destruction of the exploiting system they all rely on for their privileges.

With the benefit of hindsight, revolutionaries today can only conclude that history has proved Lenin wrong, and the lefts, despite their confusions, were essentially right. The lesson of the Irish rebellion is that support for nationalism leads directly to the sub-ordination of the class struggle to the wars of imperialism in the decadent epoch of capitalism.

LENIN AGAINST THE 'LENINISTS'

Lenin's exhortation to support all nationalist revolts has inevitably been exploited by the bourgeoisie as an excuse to drown workers and peasants in countless bloodbaths under the banners of nationalism and 'anti-imperialism'. However, a river of blood still separates the worst of Lenin's errors from the 'best' position defended by those Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist butchers of the proletariat who proclaim themselves his true heirs. It is also necessary to rescue the original critical content of Lenin's writings from those like the Bordigists of the ICP (Communist Program) and others who, while remaining within the revolutionary camp, prefer also to remain attached to all the errors of the past even when they lead dangerously close to defending the most reactionary capitalist factions in the name of 'national liberation' (see IR 32 for a fuller treatment of the ICP's errors and recent decomposition).

Lenin was always aware of the dangers of revolutionaries supporting nationalism and constantly emphasised the need for the proletariat to maintain its unity and independence from all forces of the bourgeoisie; - even though this only tended to make his position even more unworkable and contradictory in practice. So even where he called on revolutionaries to support every revolt against imperialism, he added "provided it is not the revolt of a reactionary class". What the lefts like Rosa Luxemburg were arguing more coherently was that the nationalist element in all revolts against the bloody repression of the major imperialist powers was always injected by the most reactionary class - the bourgeoisie - to stifle the threat of real class revolt; revolutionaries had to draw a clear dividing line between nationalism and the class struggle, since only the latter in the imperialist epoch represented the progressive way forward for humanity.

All along the line, Lenin qualified his position in order to avoid the ever present danger of subordinating the class struggle to the national struggle, whether through capitulating to the democratic state machine or to the bourgeoisie in 'oppressed' nations. The marxist attitude to the national question had always recognised the primacy of the class struggle:

"Unlike the petty bourgeois democrats, Marx regarded all democratic demands without exception, not as absolutes, but as the historical expression of the struggle of the masses of the people led by the bourgeoisie against feudalism. There is not a single one of these demands that could not serve and did not serve in certain circumstances as an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie to deceive the workers. In this respect to select one of these demands, namely, the self-determination of nations, and to contrast it with the rest is radically wrong theoretically. In practice, the proletariat can preserve its own independence only if it sub-ordinates its struggle for all democratic demands not even excluding the demand for a republic, to its revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie". (Thesis 5, 1916).

Following on from this, Lenin had to codify his position on self-determination concretely to express this need to defend the international unity of the working class and to reconcile this paramount concern of revolutionaries with his theoretical division of the proletariat into two camps - in the 'oppressed' and the 'oppressor' nations. This, for him, was "the most difficult and most important task". So while the proletariat of the 'oppressor' nation must demand freedom of separation for the colonies and small nations oppressed by its 'own' imperialism.

"...the socialists of the oppressed nations must, in particular, defend and implement the full and unconditional unity, including organisational unity, of the workers of the oppressed nation and those of the oppressor nation. Without this it is impossible to defend the independent policy of the proletariat and their class solidarity with the proletariat of other countries in the face of all manner of intrigues, treachery and trickery on the part of the bourgeoisie". (Thesis 4, our emphasis).

How many times do we hear this quoted by today's 'Leninist' enthusiasts for national liberation struggles? Lenin was quite explicit: in the absence of the class unity of the proletariat, including its concrete organisational expression, the working class was unable to defend its autonomy from the enemy class. The class struggle will be subordinated to the national struggle, which in reality is only the struggle of imperialism for a slice of the world market, and the workers will become the cannon fodder for their own bourgeoisie in this struggle. In effect, the watchwords of the Communist Manifesto, "Workers have no fatherland, workers of the world unite!" would be turned on their head: "Workers of all so-called oppressed countries defend your fatherland!"

It is this reciprocal element in Lenin's position on support for self-determination that today's leftists ignore or conceal, but it is central to a defence of proletariat internationalism since it still, in however distorted and practical a way, holds a vision of the global interests of the working class.

Elsewhere in his writings, Lenin firmly rejected an abstract or uncritical approach to the support of nationalist movements: “no democratic demand can fail to give rise to abuses, unless the specific is subordinated to the general; we are not obliged to support either ‘any’ struggle for independence or ‘any’ republican or anti-clerical movement”. (The Discussion Summed Up). The general interests of the class struggle could be contradicted by support for this or that nationalist movement : “It is possible that the republican movement in one country may be merely an instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; if so, we must not support this particular, concrete movement..." (Ibid).

And from the example of Marx’s refusal to support Czech nationalism in the nineteenth century, Lenin drew the conclusion that if the proletarian revolution should break out in a few larger European countries, revolutionaries should be in favour of a ‘revolutionary war’ against those other capitalist nations which acted as the bulwarks of reaction: i.e. in favour of crushing them and all their outposts no matter what national liberation struggles might arise within their borders.

Whereas for Lenin there was a possibility of nationalist movements acting as weapons of the imperialist powers against the class struggle, for Luxemburg and Bukharin this was a generalised and inevitable phenomenon of the imperialist phase of capitalism. Without having the advantage of their coherent theoretical starting point, Lenin was still forced by the weight of argument to at least lean towards their positions – significantly, he was now forced to admit that the slogan of Polish independence was utopian and reactionary in contemporary conditions, going so far as to say that “...even a revolution  in Poland alone would change nothing and would only divert the attention of the masses in Poland from the main thing – the connection between their struggle and that of the Russian and German proletariat”. (The Discussion Summed Up). But he still refused to draw any general conclusion from this ‘specific’ example.

SOME CONCLUSIONS ON THE DEBATE IN THE ZIMMERWALD LEFT

Besides their basic method, one thing all the participants in the debate in the Zimmerwald Left were agreed on, one thing which is so often ignored or paid lip service to in discussions about the possibility of supporting national movements : only the working class struggle offers any future for the oppressed masses of humanity. Nowhere, even in Lenin’s most confused statements on this subject, is there a suggestion that decadent capitalism could be destroyed in any other way except through violent proletarian revolution. The concern which animated Lenin, Bukharin, Luxemburg and the others was whether, and to what extent, national struggles could contribute to bringing about the final crisis of capitalism and thus act in favour of the revolutionary struggle by helping to weaken the whole rotting edifice of imperialism.

Despite the overwhelming agreement on the basic framework of the debate, a sizeable part of the workers’ movement still felt that a complete break with past theory and practice on this question was not yet justified; to Lenin it seemed that workers had nothing to lose by supporting nationalist movements because they were all moving in the same direction towards the destruction of capitalism. Today we have more than enough evidence, in the countless, massacres of workers by nationalist factions, to make our own vital contribution to this debate by concluding that the class struggle and nationalism in all its forms are at no point whatsoever convergent: the latter is always a weapon in the enemy’s hands against the former.

Those revolutionaries who bravely, in a hesitant manner, suggested that the time had indeed come to make a clean break with the past, were in the vanguard of the proletariat’s attempt to understand the world it lived and fought in. Their contribution and in particular the theory of Rosa Luxemburg on the whole question of imperialism and the mortal crisis of capitalism is still an essential cornerstone of the work of revolutionaries in the decadent epoch.

As for Lenin’s position on the national question, it has, as we all know, been pillaged by the bourgeoisie in order to justify all manner of reactionary wars of ‘national liberation’. Nor is it an accident that the left of capital, in search of marxist credentials for its participation in imperialist wars, chose to regurgitate Lenin’s writings, which contain enough dangerous weaknesses to allow a back door to remain open to what has now become one of the cornerstones of the bourgeoisie’s ideology.

True, Lenin cannot be held responsible for the way in which the bourgeoisie, in the wake of the defeat of the proletarian revolution he fought so hard for, has distorted his words. Against the anarchists and libertarians, for whom Lenin was always a bourgeois politician using marxism only to justify his own struggle for power, we can point to the way in which the bourgeois counter-revolution has been forced to pervert the whole framework of the debate in which Lenin participated, and to conceal or suppress certain vital principles he defended in order to rob his contribution of its revolutionary marxist content.

But having said this, unlike the Bordigists, we have no need to remain blind to the errors of the past. From many of the above points, we can see that dangerous weaknesses and ambiguities were present in Lenin’s writings at the beginning which have to be decisively rejected in order to defend clear class positions today.

In a forthcoming article we will examine the tragic practical consequences of the Bolsheviks’ incomprehensions about the national question after October 1917, through the policies of the soviet state.

S. Ray 

Part 1: The debate on the national question at the dawn of decadence [5]

Part 3: The debate during the revolutionary wave and the lessons for today [6]

Following the defeat and the repression suffered by the working class in Poland in December 81, a discussion began in the ICC with the aim of drawing the maximum number of lessons from this experience. The main questions were:

-- why and how had the world bourgeoisie managed to isolate the workers in Poland from their class brothers in other countries?

-- why, in Poland itself, had the workers - who in August 80 had shown such combativity, such a capacity for self-organization, who had shown such intelligence in using the weapon of the mass strike against the bourgeoisie - then fallen so easily into the traps laid by Solidarnosc, which delivered them bound and gagged to the forces of repression?

-- for the world proletariat, what was the true extent of the defeat suffered in Poland? Was it a partial defeat with a relatively lim­ited impact, or a decisive defeat which meant that the bourgeoisie now had a free hand to im­pose its own response to the inexorable of the economic crisis: generalized imperialist war?

The ICC's International Review no 29 put for­ward answers to these questions in the article ‘After the repression in Poland: perspectives for the world-wide class struggle.' However, the ICC's thinking didn't restrict itself to the elements contained in this text. It led it to make a more precise critique of the thesis, sketched out by Lenin and developed by his epi­gones, that the communist revolution would begin, not in the main bastions of the bourgeois world, but in the less developed countries: the ‘capit­alist chain' would have to be broken at its ‘weakest link'. This approach led to the public­ation in IR 31 of a text whose title was a good summary of the thesis defended in it: "The prol­etariat of western Europe at the centre of the generalization of the class struggle: critique of the theory of the ‘weakest link'".

It also led in January ‘83 to the adoption by the central organ of the ICC of a ‘Resolution on the critique of the theory of the weak link,' and, in July 83 to the adoption by the 5th Congress of the ICC of a ‘Resolution on the International Situation' which affirms that:

"The other major lesson of these battles (in Poland 1980-81) and their defeat is that this world-wide generalization of struggles can only begin from the countries that constitute the economic heart of capitalism. That is, the advanced countries of the west and, among these, those in which the working class has the oldest and most complete experience: Western Europe...If the decisive act of the revolution will be played out when the working class has dealt with the two military giants of east and west, its first act will necessarily be played out in the historic heart of capitalism and of the prolet­ariat: western Europe." (IR 35)

The whole ICC agreed on the necessity to criticize the thesis of the ‘weakest link', which the degenerating Communist International turned into a dogma and which served to justify the worst bourgeois aberrations, notably that of ‘social­ism in one country'.

However, a minority of comrades rejected the idea that "the proletariat of western Europe would be at the centre of the world wide generalization of the class struggle," that "the epicenter of the coming revolutionary earthquake would be in this region of the world."

"To the extent that the debates going on in the organization generally concern the whole prolet­ariat they should be expressed publicly" (‘Report on the Structure and Functioning of the Revolut­ionary Organization', IR 33). We are therefore publishing here a discussion text written by a comrade of the minority and which to some degree synthesizes the disagreements which arose during the course of the debates on this particular question.

Since this text refers to the resolution of Jan­uary ‘83, we felt that it would be useful to precede it with this resolution even though it was not written for external publication but in order to take a position on the internal debate. This is why the language may be somewhat diffi­cult to follow for the reader who is not familiar with our analyses, and we recommend a prior reading of the texts from IR 29 and 31 already mentioned.

Finally, apart from the resolution and the dis­cussion text, we publish the ICC's response to the arguments contained in the latter.

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Resolution of the ICC

1. The ICC reaffirms the unity of the condi­tions for the proletarian revolution on a world scale. The unification of the capitalist world in the period of decadence implies that it is the entire world - whatever the degree of devel­opment of the countries that compose it - which is ripe for the communist revolution, the cond­itions for which have existed since 1914 on a world scale. It rejects the Bordigist theory of bourgeois revolutions in certain geographical areas of the Third World, which are presented as a necessary stage towards the proletarian revol­ution. The latter is not only necessary but possible for each sector of the world proletariat, for whom it is the only perspective faced with the general crisis of the system.

2. Just as the unity of the conditions for the revolution is not the sum of particular national conditions, so the world proletariat is not the sum of its parts. The marxist conception of the revolution is not a vulgar materialist one. The revolution is a dynamic process, not a static one; its forward movement implies going beyond particular geo-historic conditions. This is why the ICC rejects both the ‘theory of the weakest link of capitalism' and the theory of the ‘west European revolution'.

The first, elaborated by the Communist Inter­national in its phase of decline, implicitly affirmed that the proletariat of the backward countries could play a more revolutionary role than that of the developed countries (because of the absence of a ‘workers' aristocracy', the non-existence of the poison of ‘democracy', the weakness of the national bourgeoisie). The sec­ond, developed in Gorter's Reply to Lenin, put forward the idea that only the proletariat of Western Europe and North America were capable of realizing the world revolution, which was in fact restricted to Western Europe, which had the most favorable objective conditions (strong concentrations of workers, traditions of struggle).

The symmetrical error of these two conceptions had its origins both in the conditions of the time (the 1917 revolution was born out of a war in the periphery of industrial Europe, in a capitalist world still divided into a constell­ation of imperialisms and of private capitals) and in a confusion between the field of exten­sion and the dynamic of the revolution. In seek­ing to determine the most favorable objective conditions for the outbreak of the revolution, the revolutionaries of the time had a tendency to confuse the point of departure with the point of arrival of the whole dynamic process of the extension of the revolution.

Although both theories were not bourgeois con­ceptions and expressed the life of the revolutionary movement of the time as it searched for a coherent view, they have led to the worst kinds of aberrations: the theory of the weak link has ended up in third worldism; the theory of the west European revolution in neo-Mensh­evism.

3. The mass strike of August ‘80, limited to Poland, does not challenge the classic schema of the international generalization of the class struggle as the qualitative leap needed for the opening-up of a revolutionary period.

Poland posed very sharply the question of the objective conditions most favorable to the development of the international dynamic of the mass strike:

-- in contrast to 1917-18, the bourgeoisie is much better prepared and more united internationally to stifle any threat of generalization beyond the borders of one country;

-- a revolutionary process cannot begin in one country in the absence of a dynamic towards breaking out of the national framework; within national confines, the mass strike can only be smothered.

4. Determining the point of departure for this dynamic, and thus the best conditions for the beginning of the revolutionary earthquake does not mean denying the unity of the world prolet­ariat. It is the very process by which this pot­ential unity becomes a real one.

However, unity does not mean the identity of parts which remain subjected to different material conditions. There is no natural equality between the various organs, the heart and the brain of a living body; they carry out vital, complementary functions.

5. The ICC rejects the naively egalitarian conception which holds that any country can be the point of departure for the revolutionary dyn­amic. This conception is based on the anarchist belief that, given the example of the revolu­tionary general strike, all countries could simultaneously initiate a revolutionary process.

In reality, the uneven development of capitalism, by creating an ever-widening gulf between the big industrial countries concentrating the majority of the modern industrial proletariat, and the Third World countries, has the conse­quence that the most favorable conditions for the birth of the revolutionary framework are strictly determined by the historic and social framework.

6. The point of departure for the world revol­ution is necessarily to be found in Western Europe, where the force of numbers is supplemented by a revolutionary tradition that goes from 1848 to the first revolutionary wave, where the work­ing class has most directly confronted the counter-revolution and which constitutes the final battlefield for a generalized imperialist war.

Because Western Europe is:

-- the first economic power and the biggest con­centration of workers, where the existence of a number of nations next to each other poses the immediate question of going beyond national boundaries;

-- at the heart of the contradictions of capit­alism in crisis, contradictions that are push­ing it towards world war;

-- the Gordian knot of the most powerful bourgeois mystifications (democracy, parliament, trade unions) , mystifications that the prolet­ariat will have to settle scores with in order to make a liberating leap for the whole world working class.

It is at the very heart of the course towards revolution. The fact that the period of counter­revolution came to an end with May ‘68, the maturation of proletarian consciousness in Europe in the 1970s, the existence of a devel­oped proletarian political milieu: all these factors confirm this point.

7. Neither the countries of the Third World, nor of the eastern bloc, nor North America, nor Japan can be the point of departure for the process that leads to revolution:

-- the countries of the Third World because of the numerical weakness of the proletariat and the weight of nationalist illusions;

-- Japan and especially the US because they have not so directly been through the counter-revol­ution and world war, and because of the absence of a deep revolutionary tradition;

-- the eastern bloc countries because of their relative economic backwardness and the spec­ific form that the world crisis takes there (scarcity) obstructing the development of a dir­ect and global consciousness of the cause of the crisis (ie overproduction), and because of the Stalinist counter-revolution which has, in the minds of workers, transformed the idea of socialism into its opposite and has allowed dem­ocratic, trade unionist and nationalist illus­ions to have a new impact.

8. However, while the point of departure for the world revolution is necessarily to be found in western Europe, the triumph of the world rev­olution in the last instance depends on its rapid and victorious extension to the USA and the USSR, the heads of the two imperialist blocs, where the last great act of the revolu­tion will be played out.

During the first revolutionary wave, the countries which had the most advanced and concentrated proletariat were at the same time the most powerful and decisive military countries, ie the countries of Western Europe. Although the most advanced and concentrated battalions of the proletariat are in Western Europe, the centers of world capital's military power have shifted to the USA and the USSR, which has consequences for the development of a revolutionary prolet­arian movement.

Today, a new anti-working class Holy Alliance between Russian and American capital, going over and above their imperialist rivalries, would lead to a direct military intervention against revolutionary Europe, ie to a world-wide civil war; and the outcome of this would depend on the capacity of the proletariat in the two bloc leaders, especially the USA, to paralyze and overthrow the bourgeois state.

9. The ICC warns against a certain number of dangerous confusions:

-- the idea that ‘anything is possible at any moment, in any place', as soon as sharp class confrontations arise at the peripheries of cap­italism; this idea is based on an identifica­tion between combativity and the maturation of class consciousness;

-- the unconscious assimilation between the international mass strike and the revolution; whereas international generalization is a quali­tative step which announces the revolution; it is the beginning of a revolutionary period but cannot be mixed up with the revolution itself. The latter will necessarily take the form of a situation of dual power which will pose the alternative: dictatorship of the workers' councils or bloody counter-revolution, opening the course towards war;

-- the conception of a linear development of the internationalization of the mass strike, whereas the latter will necessarily follow a winding course, with advances and retreats, as in the example of Poland.

It is up to revolutionaries to keep a cool head and not to give in to immediatist exal­tation, which leads to adventurism, or to become depressed and demoralized with each retreat.

Although history has been accelerating since August 1980 and is providing revolutionaries with an exalted perspective, they must under­stand that their work remains a long-term one.

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Critique of some positions of the ICC on the theory of the "weak link"

The last two years have put the capacities of revolutionary minorities to the test. The sudden deepening of the crisis in the entire world, the brutality of the austerity measures the bourgeoisie has taken, the clarity of the massive war preparations, all this seemed to demand a thundering answer from the world proletariat. And yet the working class has suffered an important defeat in Poland while elsewhere on the globe the struggle has stagnated. Revolutionary organizations have remained tiny and without much of an echo. This situation has exposed the many weaknesses which existed in the revol­utionary milieu. The confusion is considerable and understandable. Revolutionaries can no longer limit themselves to the reaffirmation of lessons from the past. They have to assess and explain the defeat in Poland and the pre­sent difficulties. They have to clarify the perspectives for the workers' struggle, explain how we can get from here to there. In this context, the ICC has formulated its ‘critique of the theory of the weak link'. (‘The Proletariat of Western Europe at the Centre of the Generalization of the Class Struggle', IR 31, ‘Resolution on the Critique of the Theory of the Weak Link', in this issue). Those texts justly reject Lenin's position about a breakdown of the capitalist system starting in the weakest countries and spread­ing from there to the rest of the system. This theory has been an instrument for those who look for capitalism's gravedigger outside the proletariat. The problem with the ‘Leninists' who defend this position today is not that they have illusions about the strength of the workers in the weak countries, they just have illusions about those weak countries them­selves. For them, the proletariat is no more than cannon-fodder for the ‘anti-imperialist movement'.

But the ICC texts go beyond the rejection of this disastrous theory. They explain the defeat in Poland precisely as a result of the fact that Poland is a weaker country and state that "only in Western Europe ... can there be a full development of the political consciousness which is indispen­sible for (the proletariat's) struggle for revolution". (IR 31, p.7). There it will not be feasible for the bourgeoisie to isolate a mass strike because it will be "no longer possible to set up an economic cord­on sanitaire and a political cordon sanitaire will have no more effect." (idem, p 6-7)

This vision certainly gives a way to digest the defeat in Poland and to see more clearly a way ahead. But at the same time:

-- It obscures some of the lessons of Poland and other struggles that occurred and will occur outside Western Europe. It sees their relevance necessarily as limited, since they take place outside the area where the main capitalist mystifications - in the ICC's view - can be overcome;

-- It creates the false impression that the ability of the bourgeoisie to isolate a mass strike depends on the place where it occurs, so that a mass strike in Western Europe would not encounter the same problems as in Poland or would overcome them more easily;

-- It gives the false hope that revolutionary consciousness can come to fruition in West­ern Europe alone and then break down the cap­italist mystifications in other industrialized areas through the power of example ("When the proletariat of these countries detaches itself from the most sophisticated traps laid by the bourgeoisie...the chimes will ring for the world-wide generalization of proletarian struggle, for the revolutionary confrontation" idem, p.8).

Class forces and class consciousness

The proletarian struggle begins out of necessity, not out of consciousness. Mystifications can only be overcome because of and in the struggle. It is the potential of the struggle to grow which enables the working class to break through capitalist mystifications, rather than the other way around. Struggles develop despite the weight of many illusions which all have in common the belief that an improvement in living conditions, a victory, can only be gained within this framework of capitalism. This framework has many names and is colored by local specificities, but it is always the framework of the nation-state.

This illusion still handicaps the workers' struggle in all countries. But it has a very different effect in countries where the proletariat is only a tiny minority dwarfed by other classes as opposed to those countries where the proletariat has the potential power to paralyze the entire economy and smash the bourgeois-state, provided that it only had to confront its ‘own' bourgeoisie.

In the first case, this illusion tends to lure the workers away from their class terrain and into a front with a faction of the bourgeoisie (the Church, the left, the guerillas, ‘progre­ssive' military, etc) because their own poten­tial power within the nation-framework is so small. That's why the workers in those coun­tries need the demonstration of power of the class in the industrialized countries to find the path of autonomous struggle, to follow it in a way that goes beyond mere desperation.

It is only in the second case that this ill­usion of change within the nation, foundation of all capitalist mystifications, cannot pre­vent the development of working class struggle on its own terrain. Here, the workers are strong enough to count on themselves, even if they still see themselves only as a social category exerting pressure within the nation and not yet as the world class that has hum­anity's fate in its hands. Thus it is the key development of the workers' struggle in these countries which is the key to the growing awareness of the entire working class of its own power. And it is this growing awareness of the entire working class which makes it possible for the proletariat to break through the network of capitalist mystifications. Therefore, the major concentrations of the proletariat in the industrial heartlands of both blocs play the decisive role in the development of revolutionary class consciousness. Only there can the struggle grow despite the weight of bourgeois ideology and become the lever by which proletarian consciousness is freed from the weight of the ideology of the dominant class.

But the existence of struggle is in itself not enough. As Marx said, just as a man doesn't throw away the tool that keeps him alive before it has become totally useless and he has found something else to replace it with, in the same way, the proletariat will not destroy the existing social system before the necessity and the possibility of this historical task becomes embedded in its con­sciousness. And this process is not possible within the limits of Western Europe alone.

Becoming conscious of the necessity of generalization

In order to understand the necessity of revol­ution, the working class must be able to perceive the destruction of the objective basis of capitalist mystifications. All these mystifications are based on the belief that a prosperous economy within the framework of the nation is possible. In order to destroy this hope for all workers, its falseness must be clearly demonstrated for the whole world, not in the weakest economies, but in the strongest capitalist nations. As long as in these stronger economies a strong illusion in substantial recovery is kept alive, the belief that the capitalist nation can be a framework for survival will be kept alive among the workers in all countries, weak or strong. That implies that the revolution is not for next year. Talking about a revolutionary assault in the short-term, as some people did during the mass strike in Poland, can only lead to demoralization. But it means also that for the first time in history, this essential condition for worldwide revolution will really be fulfilled. All previous revolutionary attempts of the proletariat have broken their backs on this problem. The mobilization of the workers for the First World War and later the defeat of the first revolutionary wave, were to a large extent made possible by the limits of the capitalist crisis, by the promise of recovery in the stronger countries. The mobilization of workers for the Second World War, their defeat in countries like Spain, was made possible not only by the weight of the defeat of the first revolution­ary wave but also by the ability of capitalism to offer new hope for recovery through the launching of state-capitalism on an unpreced­ented scale (in Germany, for example, indust­rial production rose 90% between 1933-38, while unemployment declined from 3.7 million to 200,000).

Today capitalism is for the first time approach­ing the point where it will no longer have any objective economic means to keep alive any hope for recovery, to create a temporary improve­ment in the situation of ‘its' workers, even in a limited part of the globe. State capitalism has already been developed, not to its theoret­ical maximum, but to its maximum efficiency. The extension of state capitalism on an inter­national scale, and the redistribution of surplus value it allows through government aid the IMF, world bank, etc, still could be developed some more, but not by much because the foundations of the system - competition - puts an iron limit on this development. This extension has already been fully used during the post-war period to create the markets required by the high development of productive forces in the strongest countries, forging an unpre­cedented interdependency of all units of the capitalist machine.

As a result, none of them still has the means to shield itself from the crisis. Even attempting to do so would only aggra­vate its situation. For the first time, a steep decline without a creditable hope for recovery becomes unavoidable for all countries. That doesn't mean that the situation of each country becomes the same, that workers everywhere will be thrown into famine. It means some will be thrown into famine and others into barbaric exploit­ation, militarization, terror, competition between them and finally into war and global destruction, unless they can prevent it. The specific situations of all workers will not become the same; a myriad of differences will continue to exist. What will be the same everywhere is the all out attack of the bourgeoisie, the interests of the workers, the perspectives they have.

Becoming conscious of the possibility

But to become the conscious goal of their struggle, the workers must not only see the revolution as necessary, but also as possible - within the limits of their forces. The level of political conscious­ness is necessarily limited by the forces they have at their disposal. A struggle beginning on a platform of limited, economic demands can only expand its goal; can only become political, to the degree that the class forces at the workers' dispos­al grow accordingly - through extension and self-organization. But what is possible de­pends also upon the opposition the workers have to overcome. And here again we see important differences between the situation in 1917 and today. In 1917, the bourgeoisie was divided and disorganized by the war, dis­orientated by its lack of experience. Under these circumstances, there were indeed ‘weak links' in its defense which the proletariat could exploit. According to the logic of the ICC resolution, the workers in Russia should have dreamed about bourgeois democracy, since they had not directly confronted the more sophisticated mystifications of the bourgeoisie in the West. But despite the pleadings of the Mensheviks, they didn't waste their time with that. The degree of self-organization achieved; the extension of the struggle throughout Russia; the workers' unrest in neighboring countries; and the weakness of the bourgeoisie they had to confront: these made possible a goal far beyond that, it made possible the goal of a revolutionary victory in Russia with a reas­onable hope that other countries would rapidly follow.

Today, however, any fraction of the proletariat in struggle is facing a united world bourgeoisie. There are no more weak links in capitalism's defense. What was possible then isn't any long­er and since class consciousness is bound to what is objectively possible, revolutionary consciousness will require more time to mature, to allow class forces to grow much larger than was required in 1917. If class forces are not developed on an international scale beyond a limited area like western Europe, and if capit­alist mystifications succeed in keeping the struggles isolated from each other and prevent the proletariat from becoming conscious of its common interests and perspectives, then no mass strike, regardless of where it happened, could lead to "the full development of the political consciousness indispensable for revolution", because it would be impossible for the workers to see the forces required for the task of de­feating a united world bourgeoisie. Under such circumstances a mass strike would be bound to stagnate, which means to go rapidly downhill. Because the possibility of a further prolet­arian goal could not be perceived and thus be absorbed by the proletariat's consciousness, the degree of self-organization could not be maintained and would have to wither away, and a false perspective based on bourgeois mystifi­cations would inevitably take hold. The ICC didn't realize this when it wrote, more than three months after the dismantling of the auto­nomous class organization in Poland, "The move­ment, far from dying down, has become stronger" (IR 24, p 4) and when later, in the framework of its ‘weak link critique', it attributed the success of capitalist mystifications in Poland to the "specificities" of the eastern bloc and Poland in particular.

The weight of specificities

As the ICC wrote, "the idea that there are nat­ional or bloc ‘specificities' ... will be pulverized more and more by the leveling down of the economic conditions in all countries and of the living conditions of all workers." (IR 29, p 4) That does not mean that revolutionaries have to deny that there are all kinds of differences between workers of different countries, sectors and regions, which capital uses to divide them. But the power to divide does not stem from the ‘specificities' themselves but from capitalism's global ability to maintain illusions in its system. Without the progressive demystification of these illusions by the crisis and the class str­uggle, workers will remain isolated in their ‘specific' situations in the strong countries as well as the weaker ones. The powerful position of the church in Poland might be specific for that country, but there is nothing specific about the mystifications this institution uses against the workers' struggle - nationalism, pacifism, legalism, etc. In other words, those mystifications are not powerful because the church is powerful but it is the other way around: the church fulfils that left in oppos­ition role because the lack of depth of the crisis (not in Poland but on an international scale) and the immaturity of the development of the workers' struggle (again on the internation­al level) permits capital to use these mystifi­cations with success. This means that revol­utionaries have to stress again and again the worldwide unity of the proletariat's struggle and unmask the mystifications behind the spec­ificities. That means struggling against the fear that extension of the struggle and generalization are not possible because of the spec­ific differences, and its corollary - the ill­usion that a victory, a full development of rev­olutionary consciousness is possible within one country or one part of a continent alone.

Now let's take a closer look at the main spec­ificities which the ICC sees as responsible for the western European workers' lack of company on the road to revolutionary consciousness.

The ‘scarcity' in the eastern bloc

"The specific form that the world crisis takes there (scarcity), obstructing the development of a direct and global consciousness of the causes of the crisis (overproduction) ..." (‘Resolution of the critique of the theory of the weak link')

For the workers in the East as well as those in the West, overproduction and scarcity can only be understood when they leave the ‘specific' point of view and see the capitalist system as a whole. Without this global view, the manifest­ations of overproduction in the West appear as unfair distribution, lack of protection against foreign competition, etc. Overproduction cannot be located in the West alone. Indeed, the weaker countries are feeling it first, because their lower organic compositions push them earlier against the limits of the world market. Even Luxemburg, on whose economics the ICC bases it­self, was clear on the fact that overproduction is not a problem facing certain capitalist coun­tries while others merely feel the consequences, but a result of a growing disproportion built into the productive process and thus present in every country. Even in the weakest countries, workers can see how overproduction on the world market makes the prices of the commodities they produce plunge and creates hunger and unemploy­ment, while at the same time pushing ‘its' bourgeoisie to divert more and more surplus value into means of destruction. Even in a typical underdeveloped country like Ghana, industry is running at less than 15% of its capacity (New York Times, 4 February, 1983). In the same way, scarcity can only be grasped from a global point of view.

If one looks at the problem from the standpoint of a specific country, scarcity exists in every country (in different degrees but everywhere increasing):

-- scarcity of consumption goods for workers and unemployed, for whom austerity and inflation push the goods they need more and more out of reach while they remain in abundance for the ruling class;

-- scarcity of capital for the ruling class which desperately tries to squeeze more surplus value out of the workers to protect its competitive position on the shrinking world market.

This global point of view, needed to see the roots of the system and the potential of social­ist revolution, the proletariat in the western countries doesn't get as a birthright. It can only be the result of the tendency of the class struggle to become global itself and internat­ional in scope.

Lack of revolutionary tradition, culture, age

The view that there never was a strong workers' movement outside western Europe is biased, colored by the influence of bourgeois historians who had reasons to minimize the revolutionary movement. But more importantly, we must realize that these lessons from the past are dormant in the memory of the proletariat and can only be reappropriated through the struggle, with the help of the communist minority which itself is generated by the struggle. The long counter-rev­olution separated the western European workers from the traditions of the past as effectively as elsewhere. It makes no sense to say, as the ICC resolution does, that the workers in the US and Japan have not been directly enough through the counter-revolution, while those in the east­ern bloc have been confronted by it too much with the result that in their minds ‘the idea' of socialism has been transformed into its opp­osite. Everywhere on the globe, the vast major­ity of workers identify the word ‘communism' with Stalinism or its ‘Eurocommunist' or ‘Trot­skyist' variants. Not through bourgeois educa­tion and culture but through the development of the struggle, the minds of the workers are opening to the lessons of the experiences of their class brothers in other parts of the world and the lessons of the past. All the arguments about tradition, culture and age fly in the face of the historical fact that the countries where the proletariat was most successful in homogenizing its revolutionary consciousness were Russia and Hungary - where the working class was relat­ively young, without long-standing traditions and with a rather low level of bourgeois educa­tion. That doesn't mean that experience is not important, that all lessons are forgotten when there is no open struggle going on. Experience was very important for the workers in Russia but it was directly linked to the struggle. Not their geographical position, not their dir­ect confrontation with democracy, etc, but only their autonomous struggle enabled them to assim­ilate the experiences of workers elsewhere and their own, to incorporate them in the next phase of their struggle.

The lack of direct confrontation with capital­ism's most powerful mystifications

When the workers in Western Europe break through the mystifications of democracy and trade unions it will not be the result of their daily expos­ure to these traps. Only in and through the str­uggle this can happen, because the generalization of the crisis and the simultaneous struggle of the workers elsewhere create the conditions to reject the isolation that these mystifica­tions try to impose. It's the same for the wor­kers in the East. Outside the struggle, ‘free' unions and a democratic state can be seen as ex­otic and desirable products to be imported from the West. But inside the struggle they become "the institutionalization of the movement", to use the words of Andrzej Koladziej, the MKS del­egate from Gdynia who refused to be a candidate in the Solidarnosc elections. Outside the str­uggle another perspective could have been created for the Polish workers, it could have made Koladziej's position the majority one, or it could have made the numerous confrontations between the union and the workers, after the death of the MKS, more successful for the latter. The fact that it didn't happen was not a result of a lack of direct exposures to these mystifications. If this were the case, the prol­etariat's struggle would become hopeless. Capit­alism can always find new packages for its old lies unless the material basis of all mystifica­tions is destroyed by the international crisis and class struggle. If the unions in western Europe, through their daily practice, lose all credibility, there are still the rank-and-fil­ists to advance the mystification of a new unit­ary union; there is still the possibility for institutionalizing ‘workers' councils' and self-management within the state; the possibility for radical-left governments to prepare for repress­ion, etc. Revolutionary class consciousness can only develop by assimilating the experience of the class in the whole world. This is true for the workers in the East as well as in the West. Despite their lack of direct experience with ‘free' unions over an extended period, "concern­ing the need to denounce the unions, the Polish workers have travelled further in a few weeks than the proletariat in other countries has done over a period of several generations." (IR 24, p 3) But the consciousness they obtained is not a permanent acquisition that remains there outside the struggle. It will have to be reappropriated in the coming struggle, as much outside as in Poland.

We call the defeat in Poland "limited". That is correct, not because Poland is only a secondary country, but because the gains that were made for the whole proletariat, the lessons of Poland, weigh in the long run much heavier than the de­feat. Of course, it was not an orderly ‘retreat'. But then the proletariat is not an army, with a general staff and stronger and weaker battalions, engaged in tactical warfare. Its struggle is not a military one but a struggle for its own con­sciousness and organization. Never was there an ‘army' with such a continuous flow of advances and retreats, all according to the spread of class consciousness. In this battle, there are no orderly retreats. Every halt, every step backwards is a result of bourgeois control. The experience of the MKS will have to be repeated and improved in several countries before the shift in the balance of forces between the classes on an international scale (the process of internationalization) paralyses the hand of the ruling class. But the coming struggles will be able to build upon the lessons of Poland. It is crucial that these lessons - not only those of the ascendant phase of the struggle but as much those of its declining phase - are not ob­scured by attributing its strength (as the bourg­eoisie does) or its weakness (as the ICC does) to Polish ‘specificities'. The proletariat, in its next battles, must remember the power of self-organization that was demonstrated in Pol­and. It must remember how the bourgeoisie of the entire world closes ranks when faced with the proletarian danger. It must remember how the bourgeoisie, when it cannot prevent self-organization, tries to control the central organs, making them instruments to prevent the spont­aneous actions of the proletariat and to spread nationalism and legalism and other poison, and finally transforming them into bourgeois instit­utions. It must remember the confrontations bet­ween Solidarnosc and the workers, showing how every trade union, even one freshly founded, immediately becomes the mortal enemy of the struggle. It must remember how the isolation of the most radical struggle in decades has shown the necessity to break through all divisions, frontiers of sectors and countries.

To smash the main capitalist mystifications, they will have to be attacked from both sides. From within, by a struggle that, because of its self-organization and radicalization, is actively looking for the solidarity of workers of other countries; and, dialectically linked, from out­side by the explosive unrest in the rest of the class which, through the assimilation of the experiences of struggles all over the world, is becoming conscious of its commonality of inter­ests and thus capable to offer this solidarity.

To make the revolution, the proletariat has no other weapons than its revolutionary and thus international consciousness. Consequently, this consciousness must develop in the struggles be­fore the revolution. Generalization will not start with the revolutionary assault in Western Europe and spread through a ‘domino-effect', toppling country after country because the ‘strongest link' of the capitalist chain is broken or, as the ICC would put it, because its "heart and head" are smashed.

Generalization is a process, part of the ripen­ing of the proletariat's consciousness, develop­ing internationally in the struggles that pre­cede the revolutionary assault and making this assault possible precisely because it occurs. Capitalism's only (future) weak link is the worldwide unity of the proletariat.

Sander

5 April 1983

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Answer to the critique

One of the main features of comrade Sander's text is that, side by side with excellent passages in which he develops very clearly the analyses of the ICC, there are a number of assertions which are equally clear but which are unfortunately in contradiction with the views underpinning the preceding passages.

Thus, comrade Sander recognizes that it is neces­sary both firmly to reject the theory of the ‘weakest link' and to establish a very clear dis­tinction between the proletariat of the developed countries and that of the Third World as re­gards their respective capacity to constitute the decisive battalions of the future revolut­ionary confrontation. He considers that in the backward countries "the workers...need the demo­nstration of power of the class in the industrialized countries to find the path of autonomous struggle, to follow it in a non-disparate way".

We fully agree with these assertions. However, disagreements arise when he

-- considers that the workers of countries other than those of the Third World (ie North America, Japan, Western Europe and Eastern Europe) have an equal capacity to unmask bourgeois mystifications and constitute a vanguard of the world proletariat in its revolutionary struggles;

-- considers it false to say that "the bour­geoisie's capacity to isolate a mass strike de­pends on the place where it occurs";

-- rejects the idea that the world-wide generalization of struggles will follow a "domino effect" (to use his own terms), that there will be a process which gets underway in a given part of the planet and then spreads to the rest of the world;

-- fights the idea that there is a sort of "head and heart" of the world proletariat where the class is most concentrated, most developed and richest in experience.

In the final analysis, the main fault of Sander's text, and one which lies at the basis of all his other mistakes, is that it uses a method which wants to be marxist but which at certain moments moves right away from a real marxist vision.

Moving away from Marxism

The basic reasoning of comrade Sander is as follows:

1. "The proletarian struggle begins out of neces­sity, not out of consciousness"

2. "it is the development of the workers' strug­gles in these countries which is the key to the growing awareness of the entire working class of its own power"

3. "...it is this growing awareness which makes it possible for the proletariat to break through the network of capitalist mystifications"

4. "Mystifications can only be overcome because of and in the struggle. It is the potential of the struggle to grow which enables the working class to break through capitalist mystifications, rather than the other way round."

5. Capitalism is in a complete economic impasse. Everywhere in the world it is revealing its bank­ruptcy and launching a total attack on the workers' interests.

6. Everywhere in the world, therefore, there is a development of the "necessity" which is at the basis of the workers' struggle.

Conclusion: Everywhere that the proletariat is not a "tiny minority dwarfed by other classes" (countries of the Third World) the conditions for the development of revolutionary conscious­ness are arising in an equal manner.

The reasoning has the apparent rigor of a syll­ogism. Unfortunately, it's false. Certainly it's based on some general truths recognized by marx­ism but, in this particular case, they are put forward outside their real field of application. They become half-truths and end up in untruths.

If we can agree with stage 5 of the reasoning and (with some reservations) stage 6, taken by them­selves, we have to criticize and challenge the other stages, which puts the whole of his reason­ing into question.

1. "The proletarian struggle begins out of necess­ity, not out of consciousness"

Yes, if we're saying that "being precedes consc­iousness" (Marx), that in the last instance it is material interests which make classes move. But Marxism is not a vulgar materialism. It is dialectical. This is why Marx could write that "theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses."

It's because the ICC is faithful to this dialect­ical view that it was able to understand that today we are in a course towards class confrontat­ions and not towards war. Already in 1968 we were saying (Revolution Internationale, old series, no 2)

"Capitalism has at its disposal less and less mystifications capable of mobilizing the masses and leading them into a massacre. The Russian myth is collapsing; the false dilemma of bourg­eois democracy against totalitarianism is getting worn out. In these conditions, the crisis can from the beginning be seen for what it is. Its first symptoms are going to provoke increasingly violent reactions from the masses in all coun­tries."

Thus, if the ICC affirms that, in the present period, the aggravation of the crisis is going to provoke a development of the class struggle and not a growing demoralization opening the way to the imperialist holocaust as in the 1930s, it is because we are taking into account the subjective factors acting on the situation: the fact that the proletariat has not recently emerged from a profound defeat (as in the ‘20s), and the wearing out of mystifications used in the past. It was because it had this approach which we lay claim to, that the Italian Comm­unist Left was able to analyze correctly the nature of the war in Spain and did not fall into the absurdities of a Trotsky who - be­cause the objective conditions were ripe -founded a new International one year before ... the war.

Comrade Sander knows all this and he affirms it in another part of his text. The problem is that he forgets it in his argumentation.

2. " ... it is the development of the workers' struggle ... which is the key to the growing  awareness of the entire working class of its own  power": we refer again to what's just been said.

3. "... it is this growing awareness which makes it possible for the  proletariat to break through the network of capitalist mystifications."

Here again, Sander puts forward a correct idea but in a partial, unilateral way. The consciousness of the proletariat is above all a con­sciousness ‘of itself'. It includes the awareness of its own power. But it can't be reduced to this. If the feeling of being strong "makes it possible for the proletariat to break through the network of capitalist mystifications" it would be absolutely impossible to understand what happened in 1914, when a proletariat felt itself to be stronger than ever before was sudd­enly thrown into the imperialist massacre. Be­fore 1914 the working class seemed to be going from success to success. In reality, it was cap­itulating step by step to bourgeois ideology. Moreover, this is a method abundantly employed by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat throughout the 20th century: presenting its worst defeats (‘socialism in one country', the popular fronts, the ‘Liberation' of 1945) as victories, as expressions of its power. Sander's phrase needs to be completed by another: "it is in its capacity to break through the network of capitalist mystifications that the proletariat demonstrates its power, increases its power and its awareness of its power." Forgetting this point allows Sander to continue serenely with his arguments - but unfortunately they lead off the track towards a dead-end.

4. "Mystifications can only be overcome because of and in the struggle. It is the pot­ential of the struggle to grow which enables the working class to break through capitalist mystifications, rather than the other way round."

For the first time, Sander makes a small con­cession to tie dialectical method ("rather than the other way round"). However, it doesn't take him away from his unilateral and partial method, and this leads him to put forward an idea that is in contradiction with the whole experience of the workers' movement. For example, during the course of the First World War it wasn't the struggle in itself which was the only, or the main, factor in demystifying the workers in Russia or Germany. In 1914, mobilized behind bourgeois flags by the Socialist parties, the workers of the main European countries went off with ‘flowers on their rifles' to massacre each other in the name of the ‘defense of civilization' and of the ‘struggle against militarism' or ‘Tsarism'. As Rosa Luxemburg put it:

"War is a gigantic, methodical, organized form of' murder. In order to get normal men to systematically murder each other, you first have to find a suitable way of intoxicating them." (Junius Pamphlet)

As long as this intoxication lasted, the wor­kers adhered to the stupid slogans of social democracy (especially in Germany) which expl­ained that ‘the class struggle is only valid in times of peace'. It wasn't struggle which sob­ered the proletariat: it was several years of the barbarity of imperialist war that made it understand that it wasn't in the trenches fight­ing for ‘civilization'. It was only by becoming aware that it was getting massacred and mass­acring its class brothers for interests which were not its own that it began to develop the struggles that led to revolution in Russia in 1917 and in Germany in 1918.

Sander's method, based on the juxtaposition of partial truths, leads him to put forward another complete untruth: "the consciousness they (the Polish workers) obtained is not a permanent acquisition that remains there outside the struggle."

First of all we have to say that this statement contradicts what Sander himself says:

" ... the coming struggles will be able to build upon the lessons of Poland ... (The proletariat) must remember the confrontations between Solid­arnosc and the workers, showing how every trade union, even one freshly founded, immediately be­comes the mortal enemy of the struggle."

Does Sander then deny that the direct protagon­ists of the combats in Poland have a ‘memory' of their experience which the workers of other countries can conserve, despite all the deformations of the bourgeois media? Would that be be­cause in Poland (and thus in the rest of the eastern bloc) the specific conditions in which the proletariat is struggling are less favorable to the development of consciousness than in other countries (those of western Europe, perhaps)? But this is precisely the thesis that Sander is fighting against.

We thus discover another element in comrade San­der's method: the rejection of coherence.

But let's return to this idea that ‘conscious­ness is not a permanent acquisition.' We shall spare Sander and the reader a discourse on the way the proletariat comes to consciousness: this is a question which has already been dealt with in this Review and will be again. Here we shall restrict ourselves to posing the following questions:

-- why, in Poland itself, did the struggles of 1980 go further than those of 1970 and ‘76?

-- does this not prove that an acquisition of the struggle does persist?

-- this higher level of the struggle in 1980, was it solely due to the aggravation of the economic crisis?

-- should we not also see it as the product of a whole process of maturation in the consciousness of the proletariat which carried on after the struggles of 1970 and ‘76?

-- more generally, what is the significance of the basic marxist idea that the proletariat draws the lessons from its past experiences, that it draws benefit from the accumulation of its experiences?

-- finally, what is the function of revolutionary organizations themselves, if not precisely to systematize these lessons, to use them to develop revolutionary theory so that it can fertilize the future struggles of the class? Doesn't the struggle itself secrete these organizations for this very reason?

Comrade Sander knows the right answers to all these questions. He knows has marxism as well as the positions of the ICC but, all of a sudden, he ‘forgets' them. Are we to conclude that he tends to attribute to the development of the consciousness of the proletariat the same fre­quent bouts of amnesia which appear in his own approach?

Wanting to be ‘materialist', Sander's view fin­ally falls into positivism, it tends to reject marxism and fall into the grossest sophistries of councilism, the ones which deny that the organization of revolutionaries has any func­tion in the class struggle.

"Horizontal" councilism

The distinguishing feature of the councilist conception (we're talking about the degenerated councilist conceptions, notably as developed by Otto Ruhle, and not Pannekoek's conception which doesn't fall into the same aberrations) is that it denies that there is any heterogen­eity in the way the class comes to conscious­ness. It refuses to admit that certain elements of the class can, before the others "understand the conditions, the line of march and the gen­eral goals of the movement" (Communist Mani­festo). This is why, for councilism, the only organization that can exist for the proletariat is its unitary organization, the workers' coun­cils, within which all the workers advance at the same pace along the path of consciousness. Obviously we shall not insult Sander by attrib­uting such a conception to him. In any case his text proves that it isn't his view - if it was he wouldn't be in the ICC in the first place.

However, the same unilateral, non-dialectical approach which led Sander to open the door involuntarily to classical councilism leads him this time to enter with both feet, and voluntarily, into another variety of councilism. If we can use the term ‘vertical' to describe Otto Ruhle's councilism which denies that, on the road to revolution, certain elements of the class can raise themselves to a higher level of consciousness than others, we can say than San­der's councilism is ‘horizontal' since it puts an equals sign between the levels of conscious­ness of the proletariats of different countries or regions of the world (except for the Third World). Alongside the whole ICC, Sander admits that, even at the moment of revolution, there will still be a great heterogeneity in the consciousness of the proletariat - this will be expressed in particular by the fact that, when the class takes power, communists will still be in a minority. But why then shouldn't this heterogeneity exist between various sectors of the proletariat who have different histories and experiences - who are subject to the same crisis, of course, but in different forms and to a different degree.

Sander tends to throw aside the elements cited by the ICC to explain the central role of the west European proletariat in the future generalization of struggles, in tomorrow's revolu­tion. Actually, he doesn't take the trouble to examine each of these elements one by one be­cause he poses the unity and homogeneity of the proletariat a priori. Significant of this is the way he refutes the idea that the workers of the West can understand more easily than those of the East that the crisis of capitalism is a crisis of overproduction:

"For the workers in the East as well as those in the West, overproduction and scarcity can only be understood when they leave the ‘specific' point of view and see the capitalist system as a whole ... This global point of view needed to see the roots of the system and the potential of socialist revolution, the proletariat in the western countries doesn't get as a birthright. It can only be the result of the tendency of the class struggle, to become global itself and international in scope."

Comrade Sander's "global point of view" is with­out doubt the analysis made by revolutionaries of the nature of capitalism and its contradic­tions. Revolutionaries can acquire this "global point of view" whether they find themselves in advanced countries like Britain, where Marx and Engels lived, or whether they come from backward countries, as did Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin. This derives from the fact that the political posi­tions and analyses of revolutionary organizations are not the expression of the immediate conditions their militants find themselves in, nor of the particular circumstances of the class struggle in this or that country, but are the secretion, the manifestation of the emergence of consciousness in the proletariat as a historic being, as a world class with a revolutionary future.

Since they have at their disposal a theoretical framework which makes them much more capable than the rest of their class of going rapidly beyond appearances and seeing the essence of phenomena, they are far better placed to see in each and every manifestation of capitalism's life the operation of the underlying laws which govern the system.

On the other hand, what is true for the revolu­tionary minority of the class is not generally true for the broad masses. In this society "the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class." The great majority of workers are subjected to the influence of bourgeois ideology. And though this influence will gradually weaken, it will last up until the revolution. However, the bourgeoisie finds it more and more difficult to maintain this influence as the reality of the system increasingly contradicts the images which the bourgeoisie drapes over it. This is why the open crisis of capitalism is the condition for the revolution. Not only because it compels the proletariat to develop its struggles, but also because it makes plain to see what a total impasse has the system reached. The same goes for the idea that communism is possible, that capitalism can be replaced by a society based on abundance, allowing the full satisfaction of human needs, a society "in which the free dev­elopment of each is the condition for the free development of all." Such an idea can be grasped more easily by those workers to whom the cause of the crisis - generalized over­production - is revealed more clearly. In the East as in the West, the workers are being thrown into a growing poverty and are being forced to engage in more and more powerful struggles. But becoming conscious that this poverty is the absurd result of an over­production of commodities will be much easier in countries where there are millions of un­employed alongside shops filled to bursting point than in countries where there are queues in front of empty shops - a situation which can be presented as the result of insufficient pro­duction or of bad management by irresponsible bureaucrats.

Just as he refuses to recognize the weight of economic specificities on the process whereby the class becomes conscious, comrade Sander is very shocked by what we say about the importance of a whole series of social and historical fac­tors in this process:

"All the argument is about tradition, culture and age fly in the face of the historical fact that the countries where the proletariat most succ­eeded in homogenizing its revolutionary consciousness were Russia and Hungary, where the working class was relatively young, without long-standing traditions and with a rather low level of bourgeois education."

However, in his apparent rage against coherence, he has already given us the answer to this: "But what is possible (in terms of struggle and the development of political consciousness) depends also upon the opposition the workers have to overcome. And here again we see important differences between the situation in 1917 and today. In 1917 the bourgeoisie was divided and disorganized by the war, disorientated by its lack of experience. Under these circumstances, there were indeed ‘weak links' in its defense which the proletariat could exploit."

This is precisely one of the great differences between the present situation and the one which existed in 1917. Today, educated by its exper­ience, the bourgeoisie is able, despite its imperialist rivalries, to constitute a united front against the class struggle. It has shown this on numerous occasions, especially at the time of the great struggles in Poland 1980-81 when East and West had a remarkable division of labor against the proletariat, a fact that we have often-written about in our press.

Faced with the struggles in Poland, the specific task of the West was to cultivate, via its propaganda in Polish-language radio and its trade unionist envoys, illusions about free trade unions and democracy. This propaganda could have an effect as long as the workers in the West, especially Western Europe, hadn't through their own struggles denounced trade unionism as an agent of the class enemy and dem­ocracy as the dictatorship of capital. On the other hand, the very fact that, in the eastern countries, and as an expression of the terrible counter-revolution which descended on this region (cf IR 34, ‘Eastern Europe: the weapons of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat'), the system cannot tolerate the long-term exist­ence of ‘free trade unions', regularly allows the latter to take on the martyr's halo and polish up their image in front of the workers. While the struggles of the workers in Poland dealt a decisive blow against surviving illus­ions in the West about ‘socialism' in the Russ­ian bloc, they left trade unionist and demo­cratic illusions virtually intact, both in the East and the West.

In the reciprocal aid that the bourgeoisies of both blocs gave each other in the face of the working class, it was the strongest bourgeoisie that was able to give the most. This is why the capacity of the world proletariat to generalize its struggles and embark upon a revolutionary struggle is fundamentally determined by the blows it can direct against the strongest sec­tors of the bourgeoisie.

This is also why, in the period to come, the elements which, for marxism, are at the basis of the proletariat's power, will have such a determining effect on its capacity to develop its consciousness:

-- its number, its concentration, the associated character of the proletariat's labor;

-- the culture which the bourgeoisie is obliged to dispense to it in order to raise the productivity of its labor[1];

-- its daily confrontation with the most elabor­ate forms of bourgeois traps;

-  its historical experience.

All these things exist to a greater or lesser extent wherever the proletariat labors, but they are most fully developed in the region where capitalism historically emerged: western Europe.

The unity of the proletariat

For comrade Sander, the key phrase is "the unity of the proletariat": "Capitalism's only (future) weak link is the worldwide unity of the proletariat." We fully agree. The problem is that he's not entirely convinced of this. Because we point to something that's obvious - the differences that exist between the diff­erent sectors of the working class - and be­cause we deduce from this some of the charact­eristics of the process towards the worldwide generalization of workers' struggles, he imag­ines that we are ignoring the unity of the world proletariat. As the resolution of January ‘83 says:

" ... unity does not mean the identity of parts, which remain subjected to different material conditions. There is no natural equality between the various organs and the heart and the brain of a living body; they carry out vital, comple­mentary functions ..."

"Determining the point of departure for this dynamic (the internationalization of the mass strike), and thus the best foundations for the beginning of the revolutionary earthquake does not mean denying the unity of the world prolet­ariat. It is the very process by which this potential unity becomes a real one."

This view is based on a dialectical and dynamic method which, to use Marx's terms, poses the abstract (the potential unity of the world prol­etariat) and then raises itself to the concrete (the real process whereby this unity develops). Sander starts with the first stage but, in line with his unilateral and partial approach, he forgets the second. Thus he remains locked in his abstractions and these prevent him from seeing the horizon, from grasping how the real process towards the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat will develop.

FM

---

[1] For comrade Sander there's black and there's white and never the twain shall meet. For him, it seems there's no such thing as grey. He admits readily that there is a considerable difference between the strength of the proletariat in the advanced countries and that of the proletariat of the Third World, a difference connected to objective material factors. How­ever, the fact that intermediate situations can exist escapes him completely. Thus, when one takes into consideration a certain number of the elements that mark the degree of economic devel­opment of a country and the strength of the proletariat (see the table) , one is struck by the fact that the USSR and the countries of the eastern bloc display a considerable backwardness in comparison to the USA, Japan and western Europe.

If one takes factors such as:

-- Gross National Product per inhabitant, which allows one to see the average productivity of labor and its degree of association;

-- the proportion of the population living in the towns, which is one of the components of the level of concentration of the working class;

-- the proportion of the active population occup­ied in the agricultural sector, which illus­trates the weight of rural backwardness and is in inverse proportion to the level of agricult­ural labor's dependence on the industrial sector;

-- the proportion of the population which has kept up its studies to college level, which is an indication of the technical sophistication of the population;

-- infant mortality, which is a very clear expr­ession of economic and social backwardness; the USSR and the countries of eastern Europe are much nearer a country like Greece, which is a long way behind the situation of the most advan­ced countries.

	USA	JAPAN	WESTERN EUROPE (a)	USSR	EASTERN EUROPE (b)	GREECE	MEXICO
Population (millions)	230.8	118.5	309.9	267.6	110	9.8	71.9
Number of inhabitants per sq. km.	24.8	319	149	11.6	110	74	36.4
Urban population (%)	73	82.8	78.4	63.4	61	62	67
Agricultural sector (% of the active population	1965	5.6	33	13.2	39.8	41.4		55
1981	2.2	10.3	6.4 (c)	20.2	26.3 (d)		33.4
GNP per inhabitant (in dollar)	12675	9511	8745	4550	4222	3918	2364
Students in tertiary education (% of population)	53.8	29.3	24.2	21.3	17.2	19	11.8
Infant mortality (%)	13.8	9.1	12	28	22.3	20.3	60
(a) Principal countries: West Germany, France, UK, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Spain (b) except USSR: Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania. (c) West Germany, France, UK, Italy (d) Poland

 

 

 Extracts from a text by H. Canne-Mejer

 

The certitude of the coming of communism

Marx never actually gave a description of communist society. He simply demonstrated that production organized on the basis of private property would become an unbearable burden to the vast majority of the population, so that they would put the means of production in common and eliminate exploitation due to social classes. To Marx, describing the future society would be falling into utopian­ism. According to him, a new society would emerge from the bowels of the old because of the actions of the real forces governing social labor. Marx noted that private owner­ship of the means of production developed a process of collective work by gathering together thousands and thousands of workers. These workers would then become the grave­diggers of the private ownership of the means of production because while misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploit­ation increased, the revolt of the working class, unified and organized by the process of work itself, would also increase.1

“The centralization of the means of production and its social character has reached a point where they are incompatible with the capitalist envelope. This envelope will burst. The last hour of private prop­erty has sounded”.2 According to Marx the capitalist mode of production produces its own negation “with the inev­itability of a law of nature”.3

This formulation of Marx with its allusion to the “inevitability of the laws of nature” caused a lot of misunderstanding.

It led many marxists to a mechanistic inter­ference of social development. They believed in an automatic collapse of the capitalist system, either because of crises, or because of the decline in the profit rate or because of a lack of markets to realize surplus value. In a time of collapse, the working class would simply take over the means of production for themselves. It would be enough for the working class to observe what Marx called “the inevitable and increasingly visible decomposition....”4 of the system. The changes that the intellectual capacities of the working class would have to undergo during a continuous struggle to make it capable of politically and economically dominating social life seem superfluous in this approach.

But this conception of a definitive collapse is in contradiction with Marx’s method of thought. For him, this ‘inevitability’ is not a necessity outside of mankind, an imminent necessity which happens despite men in the sense that certain bourgeois thinkers, for example, often speak about the immanent development of the idea as the motor force of the world. For Marx, inevita­bility is imposed by men themselves as a result of their experience of social life. Marx was convinced that workers must const­antly and violently resist the oppressive tendencies of capitalism and that this struggle carries on until they have defeated capitalism. Thus the ‘inevitability’ Marx talked about flowed from the natural necessity to struggle against capitalism.

Marxism as social psychology

Marx not only developed a theory which identified the material motor forces of the capitalist system, he also gave a theory of social psychology which predicted changes in the ideas, the will, the feelings and the actions of workers. The concentrated pressures of capitalist domination would be counteracted by organized struggle where solidarity and the spirit of sacrifice would be forged and the working class would form a solid unity of purpose, thought and action. The development of the individuality of a worker would be possible only as a part of an active and larger whole, as a part of his organization of struggle. The idea of right and wrong in social life would be redefined in accord with the necess­ities of this struggle. These new ideas, which could be called ‘ethical values’, would in turn serve as a motor force for new struggles. Each struggle would become an ethical value and these new ethical values would lead to new struggles. The new ethic would be both mother and daughter of the struggle.

The birth of the new society

Marx founded his certitude in the coming of a society without exploitation or classes in the certitude of a fierce struggle against capitalism. Through this struggle the new society would emerge from the bowels of the old. This struggle would be carried out by means of unions improving working conditions and the socialist parties developing class consciousness. On the practical level, to begin this process, there had to be a struggle for the improvement of the bourgeois parliamentary system (universal suffrage) and a struggle for social reforms.

Marx did not expect great practical successes from the parliamentary and union struggle. For him, the movement of wages was a prime function of the accumulation of capital. In a period of prosperity, the economy developed a growing need for labor, and the unions could obtain higher wages. But if wages rose to a point where production would cease to be profitable, accumulation would decrease with its concomitants of unemployment, ‘overpopulation’ and decline in wages. Subsequently, the profit base would grow again5. “Thus the increase in the price of labor not only remains restricted within limits which do not touch the foundations of capital, but these limits also provide the certitude of an extension on a greater scale.”6. For Marx, the meaning of class struggle was to be found above all in the development of the intellectual characteristics which would lead to the fall of capitalism.

Marx thought that unions by themselves could never defeat capitalism as long as the capitalist class held the state. The cardinal point in the political struggle must be looked for in the conquest of state power, either via parliament (Marx considered this possible for Britain and Holland) or revolutionary methods. But after the Paris Commune he was convinced that the state had to be destroyed not conqu­ered. In any case, the task of the revolution­ary government would not be to ‘establish’ communism, for example by statification of the means of production (although the nationalization of some sectors was not excluded). Marx did not prescribe what revolutionaries should do in the case of revolution. He thought that developments should be decided by the revolut­ionary forces at work in society. “When a genuine revolution breaks out”, he said, “we will see the conditions appear at that time (no doubt not idyllic ones) that will allow the most urgent immediate measures to be realized”.7

Many marxists of this period held the opinion that the task of a revolutionary government was basically not to hinder in any way the struggle of the workers against the capitalists. Its duty was in fact to extend this struggle. Unions would thus have a free rein to arrange social life as they wished. Capitalists would be expropriated not via nationalizations but because profits would not be paid. Thus capital would lose all value and at the same time the management of social life would fall into the hands of the association of free and equal producers. On the one hand the birth of the new society within the old is linked to the flowering of political consciousness which leads to political power in one form or another. On the other hand, it is linked to the process of development of the forces fighting against the capitalists and, at the same time, preparing and building the new instruments of social organization.

As an illustration of the above, we can quote a historical fact cited by the well-known marxist, A.Pannekoek. In 1911 there was a strike in Germany and the strikers tried to prevent strikebreakers from coming in. The bourgeois press called this action ‘terrorism’. The courts intervened and tried to charge some strikers with kidnapping. According to the accusation, the strikers forced the strikebreakers to follow them before the strike committee where they were cross-questioned as though they were before their judges. After a warning, they were released. But when they went before ‘official justice’, the strikebreakers declared that there was no question of kidnapping.

They followed the strikers of their own free will. The judge was astonished and said, “So you admit that this organization which is hostile to you is such a competent authority that you dare not disobey the strikers’ order to follow them?”

For Pannekoek in 1911 this anecdote was an example of the way workers’ organizations would function later as independent bodies opposed to the old organs of the state. It would be enough to break the power of the state and then autonomous workers’ organizations would flourish.

A miscalculation

What Marx expected from the development of capitalism has, generally, come about in reality. But his predictions about class struggle have up to now proved false. The concentration of capital and the centralization of economic (and political) life has been accomplished. The class of wage earners became preponderant. Thousands of workers were grouped in factories, millions of them were organized into unions. Economic crises kept coming faster and faster until in 1939 they showed their greatest destructive power. The First and then the Second World War, the consequences of capitalist competition were responsible for the death of millions of workers and brought European production to its knees. Although these predictions of the old marxists came true, we cannot say as much for the prediction about the pauperization of the laboring classes, at least if we look at the question from the angle of consumption and social security. The quantity and diversity of articles of consumption have increased over the years. Social security dealing with unemployment, disablement, sickness, old age, etc, has become a meaningful support for existence. The reduction in hours of work, the introduction of vacations, the radio, the cinema and TV as well as the poss­ibility of travel have provided leisure activ­ities that the old marxists could not have dreamed of.

But this increase in the standard of living and this greater security are not the only reasons why workers’ perspective for a society without classes and exploitation has disapp­eared. The reason lies in the way this im­provement was obtained. If this improvement had been gained over the years by mass stru­ggles of workers faced with fierce resist­ance from the capitalists, the process of developing the new mental characteristics mentioned above would have come about. The certitude of communism, its inevita­bility, was to be found in the need for a permanent, fierce struggle to realize the force of labor at the level of the value of labor, with as a psychological consequence, the will to realize communism. The workers’ conceptions of solidarity and a solid class discipline, the expression of new social values, of a new moral consciousness, all of this was linked to an active struggle of the workers themselves, as had been the case in Marx’s time.

Herein lies Marx’s mistake. He underestimated the consequences of the prodigious increase in productivity which opened the way to a rise in the standard of living. Especially after the First World War, the character of class stru­ggle changed. Collaboration between capital and labor through parliaments and unions became possible on the basis of the increased productivity of labor and provided an answer; to the situation without the masses being forced to intervene. The violent struggle of the masses themselves has not been absolutely necessary and it follows that the predictions of a social-psychological nature were not realized.

Mental and manual labor

Before ending this section, we would like to say that the increase in the standard of living is not contrary to the law of the value of labor power formulated by Marx. At first sight this increase, epitomized in radios, cinema, tele­vision, possibilities for travel, etc, seems to contradict the law. But this is only appearance. This law says that the value of labor is determined by the cost of reproducing labor power including reproducing the next generation. In the old days, these costs were limited to the cost of miserable housing, clothing and food. The tavern and the Church took care of distraction anal relaxation there was. Today, reproduction demands much more and this is because of the change in the nature of work.

Machines are responsible for this. As long as work was done with uncomplicated machines or none at all, work had mostly a physical, manual aspect. Muscles were what counted; intellectual effort or nervous energy played a secondary role. Thus, the costs of reproducing labor power were limited to restoring physical capa­cities and to the physical education of children. With the widespread development of mechanized work, of more and more complicated machines, intellectual effort, a constant attention span, led to a change in the nature; of work (among drivers, railway men, in clothes factories, an assembly lines, in offices, etc). Instead of physical labor exhausting only the body, both mind and body were now exhausted. This led to a shortening of the working day and the growth of entertainment like cinema, radios, vacations, etc. In other words: mental and physical exhaustion led to an increase in the value of labor which was expressed in an increase in the cost of reproducing of labor. The rise in the standard of living far from being in contradiction to the law of the value of labor power is its confirm­ation.

But it certain that, today, the working class has not managed to realize the new value of its labor power despite the so-called power of the unions and parliamen­tary socialist parties. In relation to the pace of economic life, there has been a regression which is not expressed in con­sumer goods but in general stress and ner­vous disorders. That is not what Marx expected.

As a complement to the article ‘The Conception of Organization in the German and Dutch Lefts' in this issue, we are publishing below part of a text by Canne-Mejer, a theoretician and one of the most active militants of this political current, especially in the GIC of the thirties. This text, written at the end of the 50s, is called ‘Socialism Lost'. It illustrates inhere some of the errors contained in the theoretical and political conceptions of ‘council communism' ended up by putting marxism into question and doubting the overall significance of proletarian struggle past and present. With a belief that capitalism can live forever. A capitulation to the bourgeois ideology of the post-war recon­struction period -- the ‘consumer society' that became all the rage in the 60s.

This text is prefaced by introductory remarks from our Current.

A socialist lost

When this text was written, the few survivors of the Communist Left were mostly isolated and dispersed. The long period of counter-revol­ution had exhausted their energies. The Second World War had not led to an upsurge of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat as in 1917. What remained of the Italian and the German-Dutch Lefts which had resisted for more than 20 years as small minorities, was now dislocated and very reduced in size or suffering from extreme political confusion. In this situation, political errors that had not been overcome in the past, began to lead to growing aberrations about the very foundations of revolutionary theory, about the understanding of what marxism basically is.

In the Italian Left, the Internationalist Communist Party was formed in confusion in Italy in the middle of the Second World War with the upsurge of workers' struggles in 1943.[1] It rejected the legacy of the International Left Communist group which was the most coherent in the thirties: Bilan. The criticisms and repeated appeals of the Gauche Communiste de France (Internation­alisme) to take up the profound political issues involved, fell on deaf ears. A little later, in the International Communist Party (a split from the Internationalist Communist Party), Bordiga increasingly theorized a monolithic marxism through a dogmatic and one-sided fidelity to Lenin and the Russian revolution.

As for the German-Dutch Left, their disloc­ation and incapacity to draw the lessons of the Russian revolution in the ‘30s acceler­ated their degeneration. In hammering home a rejection of the Russian revolution Canne-­Mejer in the ‘50s ended up by completely putting marxism and class struggle into question. The process leading to such incompre­hensions about marxism was not identical in these two currents and did not come from the same source. The origin of the failure of the groups of the Italian Left is to be found in their inability to assure a contin­uity with the theoretical and political ela­boration carried out by the GCI before the war. On the one hand, the pressure of the war and the post-war period led to the dissol­ution of the GCF in 1953 and all the political work organized on the basis of this continuity. On the other hand, the other tendencies of the Italian Left went from political concessions to tactical compromises, maintaining their organizations but regressing on political positions and becoming fossilized. The consequences can be seen today in the decom­position of the PCI (Programme Communiste) and the political errors of the PCI (Battaglia Comunista).

The origin of the failure of the German-Dutch Left, however, is to be found in an earlier period. In the ‘20s, they represented the most advanced attempts to understand the fundamental contributions of the new period which started with the First World War and the revolutionary wave: the impossibility of revolutionary parliamentarism; the counter­revolutionary nature of unions; the rejection of national liberations struggles; the rejection .of the ‘mass party' and any attempt to join with Social-Democracy and its ‘left' currents as well as the tactic of the ‘united front'. But in the ‘30s, because it not only rejected the Bolshevik Party but more and more even the very class nature of the October revol­ution, the heir of this Left, the ‘council communist' current, was not able to integrate the new political positions into a theoret­ical and organizational coherence. This current kept itself on a class terrain, but without really advancing beyond a repetition of undeveloped positions.

In fact, only Bilan at this time was capable of taking up the lessons of the revolution and providing the basis for today's under­standing of these questions, even though they did not carry this elaboration out to its logical conclusions. Bilan can seem unclear in its theoretical formulation of certain positions and particularly the relationship between party and class. But by rooting themselves in history, they were able to understand much more clearly the dynamic of both the revolution and the reflux and the tasks of revolutionaries. Bilan offered a more global framework, a more coherent one, in continuity with the workers' movement. At the basis of ‘councilism', however, there was a rejection of the global historical framework. The non-rec­ognition of the Bolshevik Party as a party of the proletariat prevented this current from developing a methodical and systematic criticism of the positions expressed in the Russian revolution. On the theoretical level, this current began by first under­estimating the active and indispensable function of the revolutionary political organization in the proletarian revolution and finished by negating this role at altogether. In fact, this conception shows incomprehension of the process of coming to consciousness of the class itself despite their constant but purely formal insistence on this question.

‘Council communism' continued to follow this conception. On this basis, in the period of reconstruction when it seemed, that capitalism had got a new breath of life and that the proletariat no longer had the means to carry on its struggle for class aims, Canne-Mejer, who all his life had been a devoted militant of the cause of the proletariat, ended up by spouting all kinds of nonsense about "leisure time" and "the improvements possible in the standard of living on the basis of class collaboration"!

In future articles we will return more fully to this council communist concept­ion, which is still around today.

Today, there is no longer any danger of taking the reconstruction period for any real renaissance of capitalism. But the danger of abandoning class struggle because of the difficulties of today's period does indeed exist. The under­estimation of the tasks of revolution­aries in class struggle -- as an active, organized, integral part of the struggle capable of providing clear orientations -- the irresponsibility and sectarianism reigning among groups in the ‘anti- Lenin­ist' line, are as harmful as the ridiculous megalomania of groups attached to ‘Leninism'. It can sometimes even be more harmful. The bankruptcy of the conception of ‘monolithic marxism' and the party injecting class consciousness into the class is obvious in the resounding failure of all the ‘tactics' of the groups who defend this conception. The ‘councilist' conception, however, is more diffuse, and today, when the bourgeoisie is trying to take advantage of the hesitations of the workers to disorientate and immobilize them, councilism is an ideology whose logic goes in exactly the same direction. Just as Canne-Mejer ended up by singing the same tune as the bourgeoisie in a past period. The text we are publishing has little interest in its own right but it shows the logical conclusion of a profoundly erroneous method and conception of class struggle. In rejecting marxism, it rejects all perspective for the struggle of the working class.

The point is not to take marxism as a bloc like the Bordigists do, word for word, ‘by the book', but to understand that marxism is histor­ical materialism. If the historical and political dimension of marxism is just "an old-hat rigor valid for the 19th century", and only the analysis of phenomena is preserved then the terrain of class struggle and the communist revolution is left behind, and you end up jumping into the arms of the bourgeoisie.

In this text, Canne-Mejer sees the working class as a mere economic category in society. He deals with the tasks of the proletariat only in relation to the taking over of the means of production and consumption. Class struggle is considered as a simple "rebellion" unconnected to any objective, historical necessity of the impasse inherent in the internal contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Neither capitalism's entry into decadence nor the over­all conditions and future of the class are dealt with, only "work itself". Canne-Mejer still has some memories left: he refers to the criticism marxists have always made, to the effect that there is no "automatic link" between class struggle and the mechanisms of capitalism. But the factors determining class struggle still have to be developed: the consciousness and action of the class. In Canne-Mejer, this simply becomes a question of "social psychology" or "ethics", and is just as mechanical, whether in parallel to or alter­nating with "rebellion". Nothing could be more alien to marxism. Canne-Mejer nowhere raises the real issues: what are the political tasks of the working class?; what is the nature and role of communists within the working class?; etc. The marxist conception of class struggle is reduced to the struggle for reforms through the unions and parliaments of the 19th century without any reference to the study of historical conditions. Marxists have always placed their struggle in this context, indicating its limits in rela­tion to the general goal of class struggle: communism through the destruction of the capit­alist state. This whole aspect is reduced to a vague notion of "fierce struggle" outside of any historical context, of the material cond­itions of the revolution, And since, according to the ‘councilist' vision the Russian revol­ution is not a workers' revolution, for Canne­Mejer this "fierce struggle" never took place in the 20th century. Even the workers' councils are forgotten. Because there has been no "fierce struggle", Marx was mistaken. The massacre of generations of workers in the counter-revolution and wars is ignored. Although "attention is drawn to two primordial phenomena of economic life during this century", the war economy is also ignored.

One ends up by joining the bourgeoisie in the study of the ‘increase in capital investment' and the ‘enormous increase in the productivity of labor'. The working class is assimilated to the unions and its present living conditions become ‘leisure'. This is what is supposed to prove Marx's miscalculations according to Canne-Mejer. Such is the sad end of councilism.

---

[1] See especially the articles on the early years of the PCI (Internationaliste et Internationale) in International Review no. 32 and 36.

For discussion groups and individuals emerging into revolutionary politics today, it's necessary that their work towards clarification involves the reappropriation of the positions of the communist left, including those of the German and Dutch lefts. The latter, in particular, were often the first to defend a whole series of ess­ential class positions: the rejection of trade unionism and parliamentarianism, rejection of the substitutionist conception of the party, denunciation of frontism, the definition of all the so-called socialist states as state capital­ist.

However, it's not enough merely to reappropriate class positions on the theoretical level. With­out a clear concept of revolutionary organization, all these groups and individuals are con­demned to the void... It's not enough to pro­claim yourself a revolutionary in words and in a purely individual manner; you have to defend class positions collectively, in an organized framework. The recognition of the necessity for and organization that has an indispensible fun­ction in the class and that operates as a coll­ective body is the precondition for all militant work. Any hesitation or incomprehension about the necessity for organization will be severely punished and result in a disintegration of pol­itical forces. This is particularly true for the ‘councilist' groups today.

Drawing the lessons of the history of the Ger­man and Dutch lefts means demonstrating the vital necessity of an organization for whom theory is not pure speculation but a weapon that the proletarian masses will take up in the rev­olution of the future.

The main contribution of the German left -- and mainly the KAPD - wasn't that they recognized the necessity of the party in the revolution. For the KAPD, which was formed as a party in 1920, this went without saying. Its fundamental contribution was that it understood that the function of the party was no longer the same in the period of decadence. It was no longer a mass party, organizing and assembling the class -- but a party/nucleus regrouping the most active and conscious proletarian fighters. As a select part of the class, the party had to intervene in the class struggle and in the organs that the class gave rise to: strike committees and work­ers' councils. The party was a party fighting for the revolution and no longer for gradual reforms in organs that the proletariat no longer had anything to do with (unions, parliament), except to work for their destruction. Finally, because the party was a part of the class and not its representative or its chief, it could not substitute for the class in its struggle or in the exercise of power. The dictatorship of the class was the dictatorship of the councils, not the party. In contrast to the Bordigist vision, it wasn't the party that created the class but the class the party.[1] This did not mean -- as in the populist or Menshevik view -- that the party was in the service of the class. It was not a servant that passively adapted to each hesitation or deviation of the class. On the contrary, it had to "develop the class consciousness of the proletariat even at the price of appearing to be in contradiction with the broad masses." (Theses on the Role of the Party in the Revolution, KAPD, 1920.)

The KAPD in Germany and Gorter's KAPN in Holland had nothing to do with the views of Ruhle from whom today's ‘councilists' claim descent. Ruhle and his tendency in Dresden were expelled from the KAPD at the end of 1920. The KAPD had nothing in common with the semi-anarchist tendencies who proclaimed that any party was counter-revolut­ionary by nature, that the revolution was not a question of the party but of education. The conceptions of the pedagogue Ruhle were not at all those of the KAPD. For the latter, the party wasn't made up of the individual wills of each member: it was "a programmatically elabor­ated totality, founded on a unified will, organized and disciplined from top to bottom. It has to be the head and arm of the revolution." (Theses on the Role of the Party). The party, in fact, played a decisive role in the proletarian revolution. Because in its program and its action it crystallized and concentrated the conscious will of the class, it was an indispen­sible weapon of the class. Because the revolut­ion was first of all a political act, because it implied a merciless combat against the bourgeois tendencies and parties that worked against the proletariat in its mass organs, the party was a political instrument of struggle and clarification. This conception had nothing to do with all the substitutionist views of the party. The party was secreted by the class and consequently was an active factor in the general development of consciousness in the class.

Nevertheless, with the defeat of the revolution in Germany and the degeneration of the revolut­ion in Russia, some of the KAPD's weaknesses came to the surface.

Voluntarism and dual organization

Constituted at the very point when the German revolution was entering a reflux after the defeat of 1919, the KAPD ended up by defending the idea that you could make up for the decline in the proletariat's revolutionary spirit through putschist tactics. During the March Action in central Germany in 1921, it pushed the workers of the Leuna factories (near Halle) to make an insurrection against their will. Here it showed a profound incomprehension of the role of the party and one which led to its disintegration. The KAPD still retained the idea of the party as a ‘military HQ' of the class, whereas the party is above all a political vanguard for the whole proletariat.

Similarly, faced with the collapse of the work­ers' councils, and imprisoned in its voluntarism, the KAPD came to defend the idea of a permanent dual organization of the proletariat, thus add­ing to the confusion between unitary class organs that arise in the struggle and for the struggle (assemblies, strike committees, workers' coun­cils) and the organization of the revolutionary minority which intervenes in these unitary organizations to fertilize their thought and action. Thus, by pushing for the maintenance of the ‘Unions' -- factory organizations born in the German revolution and closely attached to the party -- alongside the party itself, it found itself incapable of determining its own tasks: it either became a propaganda league[2], a simple political appendage of the factory organizations with their strong economist tendencies, or a Leninist-type party with its transmission belts to the class on the economic terrain. In other words, in both cases, not knowing what was what and who did what[3].

There can be no doubt that the KAPD's erroneous conceptions largely contributed to its disap­pearance in the late ‘20s. This should be a lesson to those revolutionaries of today who, disorientated by activism and immediatism, try to make up for their numerical weakness by creating artificial ‘workers groups' linked to the ‘party'. This is the conception of Battaglia Comunista and the Communist Workers' Organization for example. There is however a considerable historic difference: whereas the KAPD found it­self confronted with organs (the Unions) which were artificial attempts to keep alive workers' councils that had only just disappeared, the present conception of the revolutionary organizations that have an opportunist leaning rests on pure bluff.

The Genesis of the Party

Behind the KAPD's errors on the organizational level, there was a difficulty in recognizing the reflux of the revolutionary wave after the fail­ure of the March Action, and thus in drawing the correct conclusions about its activity in such a situation.

The revolutionary party, as an organization with a direct influence on the thought and action of the working class, can only be constituted in a course of rising class struggle. In particular, the defeat and reflux of the revolution do not make it possible to keep alive a revolutionary organization that can fully assume the tasks of a party. If such a retreat in the workers' struggle is prolonged, if the way is opened for the bourgeoisie to take the situation in hand, either the party will degenerate under the pressure of the counter- revolution, and from within it will emerge fractions who carry on the theoretical and political work of the party (as in the case of the Italian Fraction), or the party will see a reduction in its influence and membership and become a more limited organization whose essential task is to prepare the theoretical framework for the next revolutionary wave. The KAPD did not understand that the revolutionary tide had ceased to rise. Hence its difficulty in drawing up a balance-sheet of the preceding period and adapting itself to the new period.

These difficulties led to the false and incoher­ent responses from the German-Dutch left:

-- voluntaristically proclaiming the birth of a new International, as with Gorter's Commun­ist Workers' International in 1922.

-- not constituting itself into a fraction but proclaiming itself to be the party after various splits: the term ‘party' became a mere label for each new split, reduced to a few hun­dred members, if not less.[4]

All these incomprehensions were to have dramatic results. In the German left, as the Berlin KAPD grew weaker, three currents co-existed:

-- those who rallied to Ruhle's theory that any political organization was bad in itself. Sinking into individualism, they disappeared from the political scene;

-- others - in particular those in the Berlin KAPD who were fighting against the anarchistic tendencies in the Unions - had a tendency to deny the workers' councils and see only the party. They developed a ‘Bordigist' vision before the word existed;[5]

-- finally, those who considered that organizing into a party was impossible. The Communist Workers Union (KAU), born out of the fusion be­tween a split from the KAPD and the Unions (AAU and AAU-E), didn't really see itself as an organization, but as a loose union of diverse, decentralized tendencies. The organizational cent­ralism of the KAPD was abandoned.

It was the latter current, supported by the Dutch GIC (Group of International Communists) which emerged in 1927, which was to triumph in the Dutch left.

The Dutch Left: The GIC, Pannekoek and the Spartacusbond

The trauma of the degeneration of the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik party left deep scars. The Dutch left, which took up the theor­etical heritage of the German left, did not inherit its positive contributions on the question of the party and the organization of revolutionaries.

It rejected the substitutionist vision of the party as the HQ of the class, but it was only able to see the general organization of the class: the workers' councils. The revolutionary organization was now seen merely as a ‘propag­anda league' for the workers' councils.

The concept of the party was either rejected or emptied of any content. Thus, Pannekoek considered either that "a party can only be an organization that aims to lead and dominate the prol­etariat" (Party and Working Class, 1936) or that "parties -- or discussion groups, propaganda leagues, the name doesn't matter -- have a very different character from the type of political party organizations that we've seen in the past" (The Workers Councils, 1946).

Starting from a correct idea -- that organization and the party had a different function in decadence -- a false conclusion had been reached. Not only was it no longer seen what distinguished the party organization in the period of ascendant capitalism from that of a party in a revolution­ary period, in a period of fully maturing class consciousness: there was also an abandonment of the marxist vision of the political organization as an active factor in the class struggle.

1. The indissoluble functions of organization -- theory and praxis -- were separated. The GIC saw itself not as a political body with a program, but as a seam of individual consciousnesses, a sum of separated activities. Thus the GIC called for the formation of federated ‘working groups' out of fear of seeing the birth of an organization united by its program and impos­ing organizational rules:

"It's preferable that the revolutionary workers work towards the development of consciousness in thousands of small groups rather than activity being subordinated into a large organization which tries to dominate and lead" (Canne-Mejer, The Future of a New Workers' International, 1935). Even more serious was the definition of the organization as an ‘opinion group': this left the door open to theoretical eclecticism. According to Pannekoek, theoretical work was aimed at personal self-education, at "the intensive activity of each brain". From each brain there came a personal thought or judgment "and in each of these diverse thoughts we find a portion of a more or less wider truth." (Pannekoek, The Workers' Councils). The marxist view of the collective work of the organization, the real point of departure for "an intensive activity of each brain", gave way to an idealist vision. The point of departure was now the individual consciousness, as in Cartesian philosophy. Pannekoek went so far as to say that the goal was not clarification in the class but "one's own knowledge of the method for seeing what is true and good" (ibid).

If the organization was just a working group in which the opinion of each member was formed, it could only be a ‘discussion group' or a ‘study group', "giving itself the task of analyzing social events" (Canne-Mejer, op cit). There had certainly been a need for ‘discussion groups' carrying out political and theoretical clarification. But this corresponded to a primary stage in the development of the revolutionary movement last century. This phase, dominated by sects and separate groups, was a transitory one: the sectarianism and federalism of these groups generated by the class were an infantile dis­order. These disorders disappeared with the emergence of centralized proletarian organisat­ions. As Mattick noted in 1935, the views of the GIC and Pannekoek were a regression:

"A federalist organization can no longer maintain itself because in the phase of monopoli­stic capital in which the proletariat now finds itself, it simply doesn't correspond to anything ... It would be a step backwards in relation to the old movement rather than a step forward" (Rte-Korrespondenz no.10-11, Sept, 1935).

2. In reality, the functioning of the GIC was that of a federation of "independent units" incapable of playing an active political role. It would be worth citing an article by Canne-Mejer in 1938 (Radencommunisme no 3):

"The Group of International Communists had no statutes, no obligatory dues and its ‘internal' meetings were open to all the comrades of other groups. It followed that you could never know the exact number of members in the group. There was never any voting -- this wasn't necessary because it was never a question of carrying out the politics of a party. One discussed a problem and when there was an important difference of opinion, the different points of view were published, and that was all. A majority decision had no significance. It was up to the working class to decide".

In a way, the GIC castrated itself out of fear of raping the class. Out of fear of violating the consciousness of each member through rules of organization, or of violating the class by ‘imp­osing' its positions on it, the GIC negated it­self as a militant part of the class. In effect, without regular financial means, there is no possibility of bringing out a review and leaf­lets during a war. Without statutes, there, are no rules enabling the organization to fun­ction in all circumstances. Without centralization through elected executive organs, there is no way of maintaining an organization's life and activity in all periods, particularly in periods of illegality, when the need to face up to repression demands the strictest centralization. And, in a period of rising class struggle like today's there is no possibility of inter­vening in the class in a centralized, world-wide manner.

These deviations of the councilist current, yes­terday with, the GIC, today with the informal groups who claim adherence to council communism, are based on the idea that organization is not an active factor in the class. By ‘letting the class decide', you fall into the idea that the revolutionary organization is ‘at the service of the class' -- a mere roneo and not a political group which sometimes, even in the revolution, has to swim against the stream of the ideas and actions of the class. The organization is not a reflection of ‘what the workers think'[6]: it is a collective body bearing the historical vis­ion of the world proletariat, which is not what the class thinks at this or that moment but what it is compelled to do: carry out the goals of communism.

It was thus not at all surprising that the GIC disappeared in 1940. The theoretical work of the GIG was carried on by the Spartacusbond which was born out of a split in Sneevliet's party in 1942 (cf the article in IR 9, ‘Breaking with the Spartacusbond').Despite a healthier view of the function of the revolutionary organization -- the Bond recognized the indispensible role of the party in the revolution as an active factor in the development of consciousness -- and of its mode of operation -- the Bond had statutes and central organs -- the Spartacusbond ended up being dominated by the GIC's old ideas about organization.

Today, the Spartacusbond is moribund, and Daad en Gedachte -- which left the Bond in 1965 -- is a meteorological bulletin of workers' strikes. The Dutch left is dying as a revolutionary current. It's not through the Dutch left itself that its real theoretical heritage will be passed on to the new elements arising in the class. Under­standing and going beyond this heritage is the task of revolutionary organizations and not of individuals or discussion groups.

‘Councilist' ideas of organization have not how­ever disappeared, as we can see in various coun­tries. Making a critical balance-sheet of the concept of organization in the German and Dutch lefts provides us with proof not of the bank­ruptcy of revolutionary organizations, but on the contrary of their indispensable role in drawing the lessons of the past and preparing for future combats.

Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement, but without revolution­ary organizations, there can be revolutionary theory. Failing to understand this can only lead individuals and informal organizations into the void. It opens the door to a loss of con­viction in the very possibility of a revolution (see the text by Canne-Mejer in this IR).

CH

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[1] "... it is not even possible to talk about the class as long as there is no minority within it tending to organize itself into a political party" (Bordiga, Party and Class)

[2] An idea defended by Franz Pfemfert, Ruhle's friend, director of the review Die Aktion and a member of the KAPD.

[3] Micahelis, an ex-teacher of the KAPD and a member of the KAU in 1931, said "In practice, the Union became a second party ... the KAP later on regrouped the same elements as the Union."

[4] In 1925, in Germany there were three KADs: one for the Berlin tendency and two for the Essen tendency. This error, which was a tragedy for the proletarian camp at the time, repeated itself in the form of farce in 1943 in Italy with the proclamation - in the midst of the counter-revolution - of the Internationalist Communist Party led by Damen and Maffi. Now there are four ‘parties' in Italy claiming descent from the Italian left. This megalomania of small groups calling themselves the party only serves to make the very notion of the party look ridiculous and is a barrier to the difficult process of the regroupment of revolutionaries, which is the main subjective condition for the emergence of a rest world party in the future.   

[5] The same Michaelis said in 1931: "Things even reached the point where, for many comrades, the councils were only considered possible if they accepted the KAP's line".

[6] In the same issue of Radencommunisme it says "when there was a wildcat strike, the strikers often brought out leaflets via the group; the latter produced them even if they weren't in absolute agreement with their content". (Our emphasis)

The capitalist economy of the 1980s is plunging deeper and deeper into a complete dead-end. History is accelerating. Dec­adent capitalism's most fundamental and deep-rooted characteristics are being laid bare. In this sense, the 1980s are indeed the ‘years of truth', where the stakes of social life appear ever more openly: world war, and the destruction of humanity, or international communist revolution.

The two terms of this alternative have existed within social life ever since the onset of decadence - "the era of wars and proletarian revolutions", as the Communist International called it. But they are not posed symmetrically, and do not, at each moment, have the same weight on the unfolding future. Since 1968, the proletariat, the only class that bears a historical solution to capitalist decadence, has re-entered the historic scene and in so doing has opened a course towards class confr­ontations. This does not mean that inter-imp­erialist confrontations have come to an end. On the contrary, they have never ceased, and the 1980s are witnessing the exacerbation of these antagonisms: the growing subordination of the whole of economic life to military imp­eratives, the continued and worsening barbarism of capitalism, with its destruction and its mounds of corpses, of which the endless fighting in Lebanon and the renewed war between Iran and Iraq are only the most recent examples. But it does mean that the proletariat, through its combativity, through the fact that it has not adhered to the dominant ideology, nor surrendered to the capitalist class, prevents these conflicts from generalizing into a third world holocaust[1].

To say that the proletarian struggle is all-­important in the present situation may seem like empty optimism when we look at the sorry picture, presented by the bourgeois media. But in understanding the major tendencies that characterize a situation and its dynamic, we cannot content ourselves with the super­ficial and mystified appearances presented by the dominant class. The proletariat is an exploited class, and its struggle cannot follow a straight line and develop its strength grad­ually. The class struggle is the expression of a balance of forces between antagonistic classes, and it follows an uneven course, with advances and retreats, during which the dominant class attempts to wipe out all trace of the previous advance.

This tendency is still greater in the decadent period where the bourgeoisie's state-capital­ist form of politico-economic domination constantly tends to absorb every aspect of social life. The class struggle is nonethe­less still the motor of history, and it is impossible to understand why the accelerated decomposition of society continues, without culminating in a generalized butchery, if it is not understood that the proletariat remains the determining barrier to capitalism's warlike tendencies.

The struggle is beginning again in every country

Since 1968, we have witnessed two advances of the international proletariat: from 1968 to 1974, when the bourgeoisie was taken unawares by the re-emergence of a social force that it had thought definitively buried, and from 1978 to 1980, when the movement culminated in Poland, with a mass strike developing all the characteristics of the class struggle in the decadent period[2]. Since mid-1983, the tendency towards a recovery in prolet­arian struggle, whose perspectives we had already announced after two years of confusion and paralysis following the partial defeat of the world proletariat in Poland[3], has come to the surface: in Belgium, Holland, Germany, Great Britain, France, the United States, in Sweden, Spain, Italy, etc, strikes have broken out against the draconian austerity measures imposed by the bourgeoisie and affect all the countries at the heart of the industrial world where humanity's historic destiny will be decided[4]. Strikes and riots have exploded in secondary countries such as Tunisia, Morocco and Rumania. The resistance to the infernal logic of the capitalist crisis is once again emerging internationally.

The ‘Theses on the Resurgence of Class Struggle' that we publish below point out the general lines of the proletarian advance during the last two waves of struggle, and trace the characteristics of the one that is just beginning.

While none of the struggles in the above-mentioned countries, taken individually, is in itself profoundly significant as a great step forward for the international proletariat, the context of deepening crisis, social decomposition, exhaustion of myst­ifications, the growing gulf between State and civil society, the acceleration of history, is favorable ground for the development of the consciousness of the revolutionary proletariat. The key to the perspectives opening up before the proletariat, and which already exist potentially in this renewed combativity, lie in the international and historic nature of these reactions, and in an under­standing of the process by which class consc­iousness develops through an accumulation of experience, and of the evolution of the class struggle and its dynamic.

Signs of the future

None of the struggles since the massive September ‘83 strike in the Belgian state sector has really forced the bourgeoisie to withdraw the measures it wanted to impose on the working class. Not one has had even a momentary success, whether it be the state sector strikes in Holland or the Greyhound strike in the US against wage reductions, the Sagunto steel-workers' struggle in Spain, or the Talbot-Poissy car-workers' struggle in France against redundancies, or even the postal workers' struggle in France against increased working hours. However, the fact that the pro­letariat has not let these measures pass without resistance, as we have seen in the US, for example, where for 4 years the workers in many sectors have passively accepted wage cuts, is in itself a positive sign of its combativity, its refusal to submit to the interests of the national economy. And the first victory of the struggle is the struggle itself.

It is true that none of these struggles has managed to develop any of the characteristics that the historical situation of capitalist decadence is going to impose on the working class -- extension and self-organization of is its combats, a radical confrontation with the union apparatus, and with all the bourgeoisie's democratic and trade-union mystifications, the politicization of the movement. However, we should examine the various movements more closely, in the light of these characteristics:

-- as regards the need to extend the struggle (ie an awareness that the proletariat cannot fight as an isolated minority, that it can only create a favorable balance of forces by mass participation in the combat) we have witnessed in Belgium, a spontaneous attempt by the Charleroi railway workers to spread the movement immediately going beyond the community/linguist­ic divisions between Flanders and Wallonia, that the bourgeoisie bias used extensively in the past to divide the proletariat. The trade unions were forced to ‘spread' the strike to the whole state sector, in the hope of drowning it in less combative fractions of the class, and of creating a division between the state sector and private industry. And yet the strike was only brought to an end after 3 weeks involving up to 900,000 workers in a country with only 9m inhabitants. Hardly was it over than another state sector strike the first since 1903 -- broke out in the Welfare state ‘paradise' of Holland, and continued for 6 weeks. This one began under the pressure of the railway workers' and bus drivers' combativity, and ‘order' was restored with considerable difficulty, despite the close collaboration between Dutch and Belgian trade unions, between all the left, right and union fractions of the bourgeoisie, and despite the organization of a ‘pacifist' campaign in the midst of the movement.

In the US, workers from other industries supp­orted the Greyhound strikes by taking part on the picket-line; the unions were forced to organize their ever-ready ‘financial help' in the form of ‘Christmas presents' for the Greyhound strikers, in answer to the feeling of popular solidarity, and to prevent the expression of the only real class solid­arity possible - the extension of the struggle.

-- as regards the need to organize the struggle ourselves, mass assemblies took place during most of these movements. But the question of self-organization poses and contains the problem of confronting the unions, which is a step that the proletariat has yet to take, and that implies a degree of awareness and self-confidence that is only at its beginning today. However, the union question was posed frequently in all these first movements of the recovery. Most of the strikes either broke out spontaneously without waiting for orders from the unions, or were taken in hand from the start -- as in Holland and Italy -- only because the unions knew that they were going to break out anyway. In Belgium, the move­ment started outside the unions, and was only ‘under control' 3 days later; in Holland, we saw many cases of mass assemblies refusing to follow union recommendations. In Britain, 1200 shipyard workers came out on strike against the maneuvers of the union.

Even in Sweden the one-day miners' strike at Kiruna was followed by the whole workforce, against the union's recomm­endation that only a fraction take part. Everywhere, in Italy, France, Spain, Holland, Belgium, the union leadership is being obeyed less and less, or not at all, and the dirty work left in the hands of the rank-and-file unionism. The exhaustion of the union mystif­ication is beginning to make itself felt, and is laying the basis for the class' ability, in the future, to take its destiny in its own hands and organize itself.

-- as regards the movement's politicization, ie the creation of proletarian strength against the state, as we saw it developed in Poland in August 1980, this question is bound up with the proletariat's ability to spread and organize its own struggle. We have not yet reached this point. But the question of the state is already posed in the strikes of state employees, who are less and less mystified by the state's supposed ‘social' nature, and in the resistance to the austerity measures that the crisis is forcing all states to take against the workers. It is clearly posed, for example, in the confrontations between workers and the ‘Socialist' police at Sagunto in Spain. The demystification of the trade unions' reactionary nature as cogs of the state machine is another stepping-stone in this development of political consciousness.

These few elements bring us to the conclusion that today, at the beginning of this recovery in the class struggle, the proletariat is already coming up against the same barriers that broke the wave of 1978-80: faced with the need to extend the struggles, the unions propose a fake extension by trade or industry; faced with the need for self-organization, the shop-stewards propose ‘rank-and-file' strike committees; faced with the need for active solidarity, the unions propose a useless ‘material' support; faced with the problem of politicization, the unions propose the fraudulent verbal radicalization of ‘fighting' unionism, fervently urged on by the leftists. Thus, all the ingredients of the previous wave are already there in the present one.

The left taking its place in opposition in the face of the 1978-80 wave of struggles, the sudden ‘radicalization' of unions and left-wing parties after years of ‘responsible' language in the hope of coming to power, the renewed importance of rank-and-file unionism, and of the leftists within it, are all so many bourgeois anti-bodies against the proletariat, which momentarily diverted it. Today, these anti-bodies are already present right from the start of the struggle, but at the same time, they are losing their effect­iveness.

In this sense, this third renewal of the class movement will be more difficult at the beginning, as the western proletariat is confronting the oldest and most experienced bourgeoisie in the world -- unlike Poland 1980. This difficulty will slow down the movement, but the lessons it contains are all the more profound.

When a wave of class struggle begins at an international level, we cannot expect a qualitative step forward right from the beginning. Before advancing, the proletariat must often relive in practice the difficulties confronted previously; its consciousness will be able to develop further thanks to the dynamic of the struggle itself, combined with an accumulation of experience under the impulse of the accelerating crisis.

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At the outset of the workers' movement, Marx and Engels defined the conditions for the communist revolution: international economic crisis, and the internationalization of the struggle. Today, the conditions are gathering for the generalization of the workers' combats, which contains the perspective of revolution. There are ups and downs still to come. The chips are down in the great game of history, but the results are not settled in advance. Revolutionary organizations must be able to recognize the dynamic of the historical perspective if they are to fulfill the decisive function for which the class has created them.

CN

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[1] See ‘Inter-imperialist Conflicts and Class Struggle: the Acceleration of History' in IR 36.

[2] See all the articles on the class struggle in Poland, its lessons and its applications, IR nos 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29.

[3] See ‘Where is the Class Struggle Going?: Towards the End of Post-Poland Retreat' in IR 33.

[4] See ‘The Proletariat of Western Europe at the Heart of the Generalization of the Class Struggle' in IR 31.

1. The 5th Congress of the ICC, in its resol­ution on the international situation, affirmed that "the crisis which is now hitting the metropoles of capitalism with full force will compel the proletariat of these metropoles to express the reserves of combativity which have not as yet been unleashed in a decisive way" and that "the crisis is showing itself to be the best ally of the world proletariat". What was only put forward at the time of the Congress, without sensing how imminent it was, has now become a reality. Since the middle of 1983 the working class has come out of the retreat mar­ked by the defeat in Poland and has embarked upon a new wave of battles against capitalism. In less than six months, countries like Belgium, Holland, France, the USA, Spain and to a lesser extent Germany, Britain and Italy have seen important or significant class movements.

2. The present resurgence of struggle expr­esses the fact that, in the present period of an inexorable and catastrophic aggravation of the crisis of capitalism, in a context of a historic course towards class confrontations, moments of retreat by the proletariat are and will more and more be short-lived. What is being shown by this resurgence is that today partial defeats and the momentary disorientation that they permit or provoke cannot decisively hold back the capacity of the proletariat to respond in a growing manner to the increasingly violent attacks mounted by capital. It shows once again that since 1968 it is the working class which holds the historic initiative, which on a global level has gone onto the offensive against a bourgeoisie which, despite a step by step defense of its interests and a massive deployment of its anti-working class arsenal, does not have a free hand to put forward its own response to the crisis: generalized imperialist war.

3. The present wave of struggles has already announced that it is going to be broader and more important than the two waves which pre­ceded it since the historic resurgence of struggle at the end of the ‘60s: that of 1968-74 and 1978-80.

The main characteristics of the first wave were:

-- that it announced in a loud and spectacular manner (notably with May ‘68 in France, ‘rampant May' in Italy, the confrontations in Pol­and) the end of the period of counter-revolution, the beginning of a new period dominated by the confrontation between the two major classes in society;

-- that it surprised the bourgeois class, which had lost the habit of seeing the proletariat as a major actor in the life of society,

-- that it developed on the basis of an economic situation which, relatively speaking, had not deteriorated very much, leaving space for many illusions in the proletariat, notably that of the existence of a ‘left alternative'.

The second wave had the following distinctive elements:

-- it was based on a much more advanced degrad­ation of the capitalist economy and on much more severe attacks on the living conditions of the class;

-- it took place at the transition between two moments in the development of the historic situation: the ‘years of illusion' and the ‘years of truth';

-- it saw the bourgeoisie of the advanced countr­ies reorientate its strategy in the face of the proletariat, replacing the card of the left in power with that of the left in opposition;

-- with the struggles of Poland 1980, it saw the emergence for the first time in more than half a century of that decisive weapon of the class in the period of decadence: the mass strike;

-- it culminated in a country on the periphery belonging to the most backward bloc, which demonstrated the capacity of the bourgeoisie of the metropoles of capital once again to put up considerable lines of defense against the workers' struggle.

The present wave of struggles has its source in the wearing out of the factors which led to the post-Poland retreat:

-- the vestiges of illusions from the 1970s which have been swept away by the very deep recession of 1980-82;

-- momentary disarray provoked by the move of the left into opposition and by the defeat in Poland.

It is emerging:

-- after a long period of austerity and mounting unemployment, of an intensification of economic attacks against the working class in the central countries;

-- following several years of using the card of the left in opposition and all the mystifica­tions associated with it.

For these reasons, it is going to carry on with increasingly powerful and determined battles by the proletariat of the metropoles of capital, the culminating point of which will be at a higher level than either of the first two waves.

4. The characteristics of the present wave, as have already been manifested and which will be­come more and more discernable are as follows:

-- a tendency towards very broad movements in­volving large numbers of workers, hitting entire sectors or several sectors simultaneously in one country, thus posing the basis for the geograph­ical extension of the struggle;

-- a tendency towards the outbreak of spontaneous movements, showing, especially at the beginning, a certain bypassing of the unions;

-- the growing simultaneity of struggles at an international level, laying the basis for the world generalization of struggles in the future;

-- a progressive development, within the whole proletariat, of its confidence in itself, of its awareness of its strength, its capacity to opp­ose itself as a class to the attacks of the capitalists;

-- the slow rhythm of the development of strugg­les in the central countries and notably of their capacity for self-organization, a phenom­enon which results from the deployment by the bourgeoisie of these countries of a whole arsen­al of traps and mystifications, and which has been shown again in the most recent confront­ations.

5. In contrast to 1968 and in continuity with what happened in 1978, the present revival is in no way faced with an unprepared bourgeoisie. It is going to come up against the complete gamut of responses that the bourgeoisie has already made to the combativity and consciousness of the proletariat, responses which it will be contin­ually perfecting:

-- the international solidarity of the bourg­eoisie, which has been manifested particularly in the use of the black-out or distortion of the meaning of struggles by the media;

-- organization of campaigns of diversion of various kinds (pacifism, scandals, etc) ;

-- division of labor between different sectors of the bourgeoisie: right and left, left and leftists, union leaders and base unionism;

-- the posing of bourgeois demands during str­uggles (defense of the national economy or of this or that sector of the economy, or of unions ‘threatened' by the bourgeoisie) ;

-- false calls for extension and generalization through the unions, aimed at preventing a real extension;

-- selective and ‘intelligent' use of repression with the aim both of demoralizing workers and creating points of fixation that derail combat­ivity from its initial objectives.

6. The need to take into consideration and to denounce the considerable means and obstacles set in motion by the bourgeoisie should not, how­ever, lead to a lack of confidence in the capac­ity of the proletariat to confront and overcome them. These obstacles are the reason for the slow and progressive development of struggles in the metropoles (which does not exclude the poss­ibility of sudden accelerations at certain mom­ents, notably in cases where the bourgeoisie has not been able to put its left forces in oppos­ition, as in Spain and especially in France). Because of this, the central countries will con­tinue to differ from the countries of the peri­phery (Eastern Europe and, above all, the Third World) which may go through explosions of anger and despair, violent and massive ‘hunger' rev­olts which don't have their own perspective and which will be subject to ferocious repre­ssion. However, the permanent and increasingly intensive and simultaneous use by the bourg­eoisie of the advanced countries of all these means for sabotaging struggles will necessarily lead to them being used up:

-- black-outs and falsifications will lead to a absolute lack of confidence in the bourgeois media;

-- campaigns of diversion will more and more show their real face in the light of the reality of social struggles;

-- the most radical contortions of the left and the leftists, the unions and base unionists, by leading struggles to impasses and defeat will result in a growing distrust towards these for­ces of capital, as is already being shown in the present period, notably through a clear ten­dency towards de-unionization (in terms of mem­bership and of the involvement of workers in the life of the unions);

-- the use of repression, even if it will be ‘moderated' in the advanced countries in the coming period, will in the end lead to a growing consciousness of the need for a direct and mass­ive confrontation with the state.

In the final analysis, capitalism's total econ­omic impasse, the growing misery into which the system plunges the working class, will progress­ively wear out all the mystifications which up to now have allowed the bourgeoisie to maintain its control over society, notably the mystification of the ‘welfare state'. While it would be false to expect in the coming period to see sudden ‘qualitative leaps' or the immediate, emergence of the mass strike in the central countries, it is on the other hand necessary to underline the tendency towards confrontations which have already begun to take on a more and more massive, powerful and simultaneous char­acter.

In this sense, as has already been said, "the crisis is showing itself to be the best ally of the proletariat."