In the previous issue of the International Review there appeared a discussion article signed by JA and entitled ‘The ICC and the Politics of the Lesser Evil', expressing the positions of a certain number of comrades who have recently constituted themselves into a ‘tendency'. Due to lack of time (the article only came to us a few days before the Review was due to be published), we weren't able to respond to this article at the time it appear­ed: we therefore propose to do this in this issue. However, this response won't be an ex­haustive one in that comrade JA raises a whole number of diverse questions which couldn't be dealt with seriously in one article. The fact that we are not replying to all the arguments and questions contained in the text in no way implies that we want to avoid these issues (we will be returning to them at a later date), but simply that we prefer to give the reader a clear and precise view of the positions of the organization, rather than sowing confus­ion by mixing everything up together, as com­rade JA unfortunately does in her article.

JA's text has the characteristic of bringing confusion rather than clarity to the issues in debate. The uninformed reader runs the risk of getting completely lost in it. In fact this text merely expresses in a particul­arly significant (one could almost say caricat­ured) way the confusion in which the comrades who have formed themselves into a ‘tendency' are conducting the debate. This is why, before responding directly to comrade JA's article, it is necessary - and it's our responsibility - to present to the reader certain elements of the way this debate appeared in our organization, if only to rectify and clarify what is said about this in JA's text.

The origins of the debate

The ICC's Difficulties in 1981

As for all communist organizations, the 1980s, the ‘years of truth' (see IR 20, ‘The 80s: Years of Truth'), have been a real test for the ICC. The considerable aggravation of the cris­is of capitalism in these years, the intensif­ication of rivalries between imperialist blocs, the growing weight and significance of workers' struggles, are a challenge to revolutionary groups to be equal to their responsibilities. In the proletarian milieu this challenge has resulted in major convulsions, going as far as the disintegration of organizations like Programma Comunista (accompanied by an evolution towards leftism on the part of the debris), the complete disappearance of other groups like Pour Une Intervention Communiste, and the flight into all sorts of opportunist practices (the flirtation of the Battaglia Comunista-Communist Workers' Organization tandem with Kurdish and Iranian nationalist groups; the participation of the Nuclei Leninisti Internazionalisti in all sorts of ‘collectives' with leftists ard in the referendum in Italy (see IR 39 and 40). For its part the ICC was not spared by this:

"Since its Fourth Congress (1981), the ICC has been through the most serious crisis in its existence. A crisis which...profoundly shook the organization, very nearly making it fall apart, resulting, directly or indirectly in the departure of forty members and cutting in half the membership of its second largest sect­ion. A crisis which took the form of a blind­ness and disorientation the like of which the ICC has not seen since its creation. A crisis which demanded the mobilization of exceptional methods if it was to be overcome: the holding of an extraordinary international conference, discussion and adoption of basic orientation texts on the function and functioning of the revolutionary organization, the adoption of new statutes." (IR 35, ‘The 5th Congress of the ICC')

An Effective but Incomplete Redressment:  Councilist Deviations

Along with the Extraordinary Conference of January 1982, the 5th Congress of the ICC (July ‘83) was to represent an important moment in the recovery of the organization after the difficulties it encountered in 1981. However, despite the adoption of reports and resolutions (see IR 35), which were perfectly correct and which have retained their validity, the debates at this Congress revealed the existence within the organization of a certain number of weaknesses on three essential questions:

- the evolution of imperialist conflicts in the present period;

- the perspectives for the development of the class struggle;

- the development of consciousness in the proletariat.

On the first point, there was a certain tend­ency to underestimate the scale of these con­flicts, to consider that, because the historic course is today towards generalized class con­frontations (and not towards world war as in the ‘30s - see IR 18), we would see a progress­ive attenuation of the tensions between imper­ialist blocs.

On the second point, in the debates at the Con­gress the thesis was developed that the reflux in workers' struggles which the ICC had noted in 1981 would last a long time and that there would have to be a ‘qualitative leap' in the consciousness and struggles of the proletariat before there could be a new wave of class com­bats. A few months after the Congress this thesis - which, it should be said, didn't fig­ure either in the report or the resolution on the international situation - was to show its pernicious and dangerous character when it prevented a number of comrades and several sect­ions of the ICC from recognizing the importance of the struggles in the public sector in Belg­ium and Holland in autumn ‘83 as the first manifestations of a general resurgence of workers' struggles.

On the third point, both at the Congress and in internal texts, and without receiving a clear refutation from the organization as a whole, there emerged councilist views about the way the consciousness of the proletariat develops, as can be seen from the following extracts:

"...the formulation ‘subterranean maturation of consciousness' is to be rejected. First because the one and only crucible for class conscious­ness is the massive, open struggle...

Furthermore, in moments of retreat in the struggle there is a regression in consciousness.

The formulation ‘subterranean maturation of consciousness' expresses a confusion between two processes which, even if closely linked, are different: the development of the object­ive conditions and the maturation of conscious­ness.

The proletariat, especially its central fractions, is placed at the centre of capital­ism's historical process and can thus under­stand the maturation of the objective condit­ions and transform this into the development of consciousness, but it can only do this in the struggle, ie. in the confrontation with capitalism...

Class consciousness doesn't advance like a university course... as a global phenomenon, it necessarily implies a global vision, and the only crucible for this is the massive, open struggle...

This formulation (subterranean maturation of consciousness) underestimates a phenomenon which occurs in moments of reflux: the regress­ion which takes place in the class, the regress­ion of consciousness. And we should not be afraid to recognize this because just as the workers' struggle follows a jagged course, so consciousness doesn't develop in a linear way but through advances and retreats...There are two factors which determine the level and dev­elopment of consciousness: the ripening of capitalism's historical crisis and the balance of class forces. In each period of class struggle, these two factors, taken on a world level, determine the class' clarity as to its historical goals, its confusions, its illusions, even its concessions to the enemy...This happ­ens through new struggles replying to the problems posed by the previous ones."

The comrades who identified with this analysis thought that they were in agreement with the classic theses of marxism (and of the ICC) on the problem of class consciousness. In particular, they never explicitly rejected the nec­essity for an organization of revolutionaries in the development of consciousness. But in fact, they had ended up with a councilist vision:

- by presenting consciousness as a determined and never a determining factor in the class struggle;

- by considering that the "one and only cruc­ible of class consciousness is the massive, open struggle", which leaves no place for rev­olutionary organizations;

- by denying any possibility of the latter carrying out the work of developing and deepen­ing class consciousness in phases of reflux in the struggle.

The only major difference between this vision and councilism is that the latter takes the approach to its logical conclusion by explic­itly rejecting the necessity for communist organization whereas our comrades did not go as far as this.

The Resolution of January ‘84

In the face of various difficulties which had appeared within the ICC, its central organ adopted in January ‘84 a resolution on three themes (imperialist conflicts, perspectives for the class struggle, development of cons­ciousness). Here we reproduce the last two points of this resolution (points 7 & 8).

"7. The aggravation of the crisis and the economic attacks on the working class are thus the main motive force behind the development of its struggles and consciousness. In particul­ar, this is why the counterattack to the on­slaught on working class living conditions, and not to the threat of war, will be for some time to come the mobilizing factor, even though the economic struggle is in fact an obstacle to this threat. However, we must not give this elementary materialist observation, this reject­ion of the idealist vision criticized above, a restrictive and unilateral interpretation foreign to marxism. In particular, we must avoid the thesis which sees the maturation of class consciousness as a mere result or reflect­ion of the ‘maturation of the objective condit­ions', which considers that the struggles prov­oked by this maturation of objective conditions are the only crucible for forging this consc­iousness, the latter supposedly ‘regressing' with each retreat in the struggle. Against such a vision, the following points must be put forward:

a) Marxism is a materialist and dialectical approach: the class' practice is praxis, ie. it integrates class consciousness as an active factor. Consciousness is not only determined by objective conditions and the struggle, it is also determining in the struggle. It is not a mere static result of the struggle, but has its own dynamic, and becomes in its turn a "material force" (Marx).

b) Even if they are part of the same unity, and interact reciprocally, it is wrong to ident­ify class consciousness with the consciousness of the class or consciousness in the class, that is to say, its extent at a given moment. Just as the latter derives from a great number of factors, both general-historical and contin­gent-immediate (especially the development of the struggle), so the former is a self-knowledge, not only in the class' immediate, present existence, but also in its future, in its becoming. The condition for coming to consciousness by the class is given by the historic existence of a class capable of app­rehending its future, not by its contingent, immediate struggles. These, their experience, provide new elements to enrich it especially in periods of intense proletarian activity. But these are not the only ones: the conscious­ness arising from existence also has its own dynamic: reflection and theoretical research are also necessary elements for its development.

c) The periods of retreat in the struggle do not determine a regression or even a halt in the development of class consciousness: all our historical experience, from the theoretical deepening following the defeat of 1848 to the work of the lefts in the midst of the counter­revolution prove the contrary. Here again, we must distinguish between the continuity in the proletariat's historic movement - the progressive elaboration of its political positions and its program - and what is tied to circumstantial factors - the extent of their assimilation and impact in the class as a whole.

d )The questions and problems posed in past struggles will not be answered solely in the course of future struggles. Not only do revol­utionary organizations make a large contribution, in the period between struggles, to draw­ing and propagating the lessons of the class' experience, there is a whole work of reflect­ion carried out throughout the working class, to appear in new struggles. A collective class memory exists, which also contributes to the development of consciousness and to its extension in the class, as we could see, once again, in Poland, where the struggles of 1980 revealed an assimilation of the experience of those of 1970 and 1976. On this level, it is important to emphasize the difference between a period of historical retreat of the proletar­iat - the triumph of the counter-revolution - where the lessons of its experience are moment­arily lost for the vast majority, and periods like today where the same generations of work­ers take part in the successive waves of combat against capitalism, and progressively integrate into their consciousness the lessons of these different waves.

e) Massive and open struggles are indeed a rich source for the development of conscious­ness, and above all for the speed with which it spreads in the class. However, they are not the only one. The organization of revolut­ionaries is another forge for the development and grasp of consciousness, an indispensable tool in the immediate and historical struggle of the class.

f) For all these reasons, there exists, in the moments between the open struggles, a ‘subterranean maturation' of class consciousness (the "old mole" so dear to Marx), which can be expressed both in the deepening and clarif­ication of the political positions of revolutionary organizations, and in a reflection and decantation throughout the class, a disengage­ment from bourgeois mystifications.

g) In the final analysis, any conception which derives consciousness solely from the objective conditions and the struggles that they provoke is unable to take account of the existence of an historic course. If the ICC since 1968 has pointed out that the present historic course is different from that of the 1930s, that the aggravation of the economic crisis will cul­minate, not in world imperialist war but in generalized class confrontations, this is pre­cisely because it has been able to understand that the working class today is nowhere near as open to the bourgeois mystifications - esp­ecially on anti-fascism and the nature of the USSR - which has made it possible to derail its discontent, to exhaust its combativity and to enroll it under the bourgeois flag. Even before the historic renewal of the strug­gle at the end of the ‘60s the consciousness of the proletariat was thus already the key to the perspective for the life of society at the end of the 20th Century."

The development of the debate and the constitution of a ‘tendency'

The ‘Reservations' on Point 7 of the Resolution and How They Were Characterized in the ICC

When this resolution was adopted, the ICC com­rades who had previously developed the thesis of ‘no subterranean maturation', with all its coun­cilist implications, acknowledged the error they had made. Thus they pronounced themselves firmly in favor of this resolution and notably of point 7 whose specific function was to reject the analyses which they had previously elaborated. But at the same time, other comrades raised dis­agreements with point 7 which led them either to reject it en bloc or to vote for it ‘with reserv­ations', rejecting some of its formulations. We thus saw the appearance within the organization of an approach which, without openly supporting the councilist theses, served as a shield or umbrella for these theses by rejecting the organization's clear condemnation of them or atten­uating their significance. Against this approach, the ICC's central organ was led in March ‘84 to adopt a resolution recalling the characteristics of

" - opportunism as a manifestation of the pene­tration of bourgeois ideology into proletarian organizations, and which is mainly expressed by:

* a rejection or covering up of revolutionary principles and of the general framework of marxis t analyses

* a lack of firmness in the defense of these principles

- centrism as a particular form of opportunism characterized by:

* a phobia about intransigent, frank and decisive positions, positions that take their implications to their conclusions

* the systematic adoption of medium positions between antagonistic ones

* a taste for conciliation between these positions

* the search for a role of arbiter between these positions

* the search for the unity of the organization at any price, including that of confusion, concession on matters of principle, and a Zack of rigour, coherence and cohesion in analyses"

Next, the resolution "underlines the fact that, like all other revolutionary organizations in the history of the workers' movement, the ICC must defend itself in a permanent manner against the constant pressure of bourgeois ideology and the danger of it infiltrating its ranks." It consid­ers "that, as for all the other organizations, the tendency towards centrism constitutes one of the important weaknesses of the ICC, and is one of the most dangerous ... that this weakness has been manifested on a number of occasions in our organization, notably ...

- at the time of the development of a councilist approach in the name of the rejection of the ‘sub­terranean maturation of consciousness', through a clear reticence about rigorously rejecting this approach

- (in January 1984) through a difficulty in pro­nouncing clearly, through hesitations and ‘reser­vations' that were not explicit ... with regard to the resolution on the international situation."

Then the resolution "warns the whole ICC against, the danger of centrism." It "calls on the whole organization to be fully aware of this danger in order to combat it with determination each time it appears." Finally, the resolution "considers that one of the main dangers of the present time is constituted by a slide towards councilism - a slide illustrated by the analysis rejecting ‘subterranean maturation' - and which, in the coming period of massive struggles by the prolet­ariat in the central countries of capitalism, will constitute, for the whole class and for its revolutionary minority, a real danger, having a more important and pernicious influence than the danger of falling into substitutionist concep­tions." And the resolution concludes "that within the ICC at the moment there is a tendency towards centrism - ie towards conciliation and lack of firmness - with regard to councilism."

The Tendency Towards Centrism vis-a-vis Councilism

The tendency towards ‘centrism vis-a-vis council-ism' was to be illustrated in the ‘explanations of votes' requested from the comrades who voted for point 7 of the resolution ‘with reservations' or rejected it. While certain comrades recognized their own doubts and lack of clarity, others att­ributed this lack of clarity to the resolution itself, raising the accusation that it:

- "cuts too close to conceptions which defend the idea of two consciousnesses in the revolutionary struggle" (like socialist consciousness and trade union consciousness as distinguished by Kautsky and Lenin);

- "develops formulations that leave the door open to ‘Kautsky-Leninist' interpretations of the pro­cess of development of working class consciousness", or has "a very Hegelian ring to it", or that it "says nothing different from what the Bordigist say, for example";

- "flirts with Leninist conceptions" and "constitutes a regression" with regard to the "going beyond of Leninism" which the ICC had previously achieved;

- is "closed into an approach which makes it seem that class consciousness is an already achieved entity ... It implies that class consciousness is there somewhere in the hands of a minority and that the historical contribution of the class as a whole is simply to accept it, ‘assimilate' it ..."

One of the characteristics of the ‘reservations' was thus to attribute to the resolution ideas which aren't in it and which are even explicitly rejected by it (as can be seen by re-reading it). In particular, it was seen to contain ‘Bordigist' or ‘Leninist' conceptions, which is the classic accusation of the councilists against the posi­tions of the ICC (just as ‘Bordigist' or ‘Lenin­ist' groups see the same positions as councilist). The concessions to councilism were all the more flagrant when the ‘reservations' tended to put the councilist analyses which had appeared pre­viously, and their critique in point 7, on the same level, by considering that while the for­mer was "led to cite a correct idea ... in order to demonstrate a false one", the latter "is led clumsily to combat what is correct ... in order to put forward ideas that are right."              

These concessions were also expressed in another ‘reservation' which considered that these coun­cilist analyses "stem more from acute exaggera­tion in the debate about the maturation of con­sciousness ... than from a deliberate desire to pass off councilist conceptions when no-one was looking."               

These are clear examples of the ‘centrist attitude towards councilism' identified by the ICC, in that they:

- posed as an arbiter between two conflicting positions;

- came to the aid of the councilist position by refusing to call it by its name;

- created smokescreen to obstruct the clarification of the debate (eg, the introduction of term like ‘deliberate' and ‘when no-one was looking' which had never appeared in the debate).

We also find this approach in the text by comrade JA (IR 41) when it tries to present the 'origins of the debate': 

" ... even though subterranean maturation is explicitly rejected by both Battaglia and the CWO, for example ... because this is perfectly consistent with the ‘Leninist' theory of the trade union consciousness of the working class ... and by the theorizations of degenerated councilism... the ICC decided that the rejection of subterranean maturation was ipso facto the fruit of councilism in our ranks."             

It is enough to reread the above extracts from the analyses rejecting the notion of subterranean maturation to see that the approach behind this rejection is quite clearly of a councilist nature (even if those other than the councilists, and with other arguments, also reject this notion). Of course in order to see this it's necessary not to be the victim of a councilist vision yourself. The comrades who criticized point 7 fixated on this question of subterranean maturation without seeing that the rejection of it was based on a councilist approach, and the reason they didn't see it was that in the final analysis they were in agreement with such an approach even if they didn't follow to the end all of its implications (another characteristic of centrism). This is why point 7 of the resolution doesn't deal with ‘subterranean maturation' until its sixth and final paragraph, after refuting all the chains in the reasoning which leads to the rejection of this notion. For the ICC, as for marxism in general, it's important to attack the roots of the conceptions it is combatting, rather than pruning this or that twig. This is the difference between the radical marxist critique and the superficial critiques put out by all the viewpoints alien to marxism, notably by councilism.

The Avoidance of the Problem by the ‘Reservationist' Comrades

This incapacity of the ‘reservationist' comrades to refute seriously the councilist conceptions which had been introduced into the organization was illustrated in the fact that they have never proposed another formulation of point 7 despite repeated requests by the ICC and even though they set about doing this in April ... 1984. There's nothing mysterious about this. When you yourself have fallen victim of a councilist vision, you're not very well armed to condemn councilism. What's more, this was understood by certain of these comrades: having failed in their efforts to reformulate this point, they became aware of their councilist errors and in the end came to support point 7 without reservations, as had, in January ‘84, the comrades who had elaborated the councilist thesis of ‘no subterranean maturation'. The other comrades, on the other hand, chose to avoid the problem: in order to mask their incapacity to condemn councilism clearly, they began to raise a whole series of other questions foreign to the original debate. Thus, amongst other objections (we'll save the reader an exhaustive list), it was said that:

1. "nothing authorizes (the central organ) to unilaterally decide, without proof, that the ICC is, in this debate, in the presence of a councilist tendency or a tendency of conciliation towards councilism", and that the organization was "laun­ching a quixotic campaign against councilist and centrist windmills";

2. that the March 1984 resolution gives a "psychologizing and behavioral definition of centrism", "a purely subjective definition of centrism in terms of behavior and no longer in political terms."

3. that in any case, you couldn't talk about centrism in the ICC because centrism, like opportunism in general, are specific phenomena of the ascendant period of capitalism, an idea which can be found in JA's text;

4. that, because of this, we can in no way con­sider that the USPD, given in the debate as an example of a centrist party, belonged to the working class; that it was, from the beginning, "an expression of the radicalization of the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie, a first expression of the phenomenon of leftism, the extreme barrier of the capitalist state against the revolutionary threat." (IR 41)

In this article we won't enter into the refutation of these objections, but a few precisions have to be made here.  

1. We can understand quite well why comrades who have themselves become imprisoned in a centrist attitude towards councilism should consider   that the ICC's conduct against this approach is nothing but "a quixotic campaign against councilist and centrist windmills." Everyone knows the story of the knight who couldn't find the horse he was sitting on. However, myopia and distrac­tion, as well as ignorance (as Marx said against Weitling) are not arguments.

2. Their attempt to define centrism in ‘polit­ical terms' rather than ‘behavioral terms' show that they haven't understood one of the basic elements of marxism: in the class struggle, behavior, comportment, is an eminently polit­ical question. Hesitations, vacillations, indecision, the spirit of conciliation, lack of firm­ness, all of which affect the class or the revolutionary organization during the course of the struggle, are in no way reducible to ‘psychology' but are political facts expressing capitulations or weaknesses in the face of the pressure of bourgeois ideology and in the face of the tasks which await the proletariat, tasks whose scale has no precedence in history. Marxists have always posed the problem in these terms. This is why Rosa Luxemburg, in her polemic against opp­ortunism, could write:

"... The political ‘on the one hand - on the other hand', ‘yes - but' of the bourgeoisie of today resembles in a marked degree Bernstein's manner of thinking, which is the sharpest and surest proof of the bourgeois nature of his con­ception of the world." (Reform or Revolution)

Similarly, when she was explaining the shame­ful capitulation of social democracy on 4th Aug­ust 1914, she talked not only about "objective causes" but also about "the weakness of our will to struggle, of our courage, of our conviction." (The Crisis of Social Democracy)

This is also why Bordiga defined the revolutionary party as "a program and a will to action" and why the platform of the ICC defines revolutionaries as "the most determined and combative elements in the struggles of the class."

3. The idea that opportunism and centrism are constant dangers for revolutionary organizations, and not specific to the ascendant period of cap­italism, is in no way a "new orientation" of the ICC as comrade JA writes in her article. On the contrary, this is an acquisition of the organization which can be found not only in many articles in our press, but also in the official texts of the ICC, such as the resolution on proletarian political groups adopted by the ICC at its Second Congress, where it says:

"Any errors or precipitation here... could lead to deviations either of an opportunist or a sectarian nature which would threaten the very life of the Current." Similarly, "communist fractions who appear as a reaction to the degeneration of a proletarian organization ....base themselves not on a break but on a continuity with a revolutionary program which is being threatened by the opportunist policies of the organization." (IR 11)

These notions were also acquisitions for comrade JA herself when she wrote in IR 36 (concerning the approach of Battaglia Comunista):

"At the beginning of the twenties, the centrist majority of the Communist International, led by the Bolsheviks, chose to eliminate the Left to join with the Right (the Independents in Germany, etc) ... Although history repeats itself as farce, opportunism always remains the same."  (IR 36: ‘In Answer to the Replies')

This couldn't be clearer. It has to be said there­fore that as well as being myopic and a bit distracted the comrades of the minority also have a short memory ... and a lot of cheek.

4. All the insistence of the rninority comrades on the class nature of the USPD (an insistence found in JA's article even though it's not on the subject) is simply a diversion. Even if one cons­idered that the USPD was a bourgeois organization (as was written wrongly ten years ago in the IR, and as JA is pleased to recall), this in no way would invalidate the idea that opportunism and centrism are today still dangers for proletarian organizations, are "always the same", as JA said so well a year and a half ago.

The Heterogeneity of the Critiques of the ICC's  Orientations

In addition to the previous remarks, it must be said that the various objections raised against the ICC's orientations do not all come from the same comrades who have defended divergent views in the organization for over a year.

Thus, among the comrades of the minority, some voted against point 7 of the January ‘84 resolu­tion, others voted for with reservations and others voted for without reservations and ex­plicitly rejected the arguments of the ‘reser­vationists'. Similarly, the thesis of the non­existence of the phenomena of opportunism and centrism in the period of the decadence of cap­italism was for a long time only defended by certain minority comrades (in fact, by the ones who were in agreement with point 7), whereas others considered that opportunism and centrism:

- either had never been diseases of proletarian organizations but were direct expressions of the bourgeoisie (like the Bordigists who qualify bourgeois organizations like the CPs and SPs as ‘opportunist');

- or that they could manifest themselves within the workers' movement in the period of decad­ence, but not in the ICC;

- or that they could exist (and had already man­ifested themselves) in the ICC, but not with regard to councilism.

It should also be pointed out that the different positions weren't necessarily defended by different comrades: some defended them in succession and even simultaneously (!)

Finally, the position on the danger of councilism as expressed in JA's text was also for a long time not the position of all the minority comrades.

A ‘Tendency' With No Coherent Basis 

Up until the end of 1984, this heterogeneity between the positions of different minority comrades was expressed in the debate and was also recognized by the comrades themselves. Thus, the constitution of a ‘tendency' at the beginning of 1985 by these same comrades was a surprise for the ICC. Today these comrades affirm that they share the same analysis on the three main questions which have provoked disagreements since January ‘84:

- point 7 of the resolution

- the danger of councilism

- the menace of opportunism and centrism in proletarian organizations.

Comrade JA puts it in these terms:

"When reservations were expressed on this form­ulation, the new orientation on councilism the greatest danger, and on centrism were introduced into our organization. The present minority has formed a tendency in relation to all of this new theory in that it represents a regression in the theoretical armory of the ICC." (IR 41)

For its part, the ICC does not consider that this is a true tendency presenting a positive alternative orientation to the organization, but an agglomeration of comrades whose real cement is neither the coherence of their posit­ions, nor a profound conviction in these positions, but an attitude of being ‘against' the orientations of the ICC in its combat against councilism, as can be seen from the above citation from JA's text.

However, while the ICC considers that the con­stitution of the ‘tendency' is simply the continuation of the politics of evasion in which the comrades have been stuck for over a year, it still accords them the rights of a tendency - as recognized in our principles of organization, which are explained for example in the ‘Report on the Structure and Functioning of the Organization of Revolutionaries' (IR 33). The minority comrades think they are a tend­ency; the ICC thinks to the contrary but pref­ers to convince the comrades of their error rather than prevent them from functioning as a tendency. But it remains the ICC's respons­ibility to say clearly, as it does in this article, what it thinks of the approach of these comrades, and of JA's article which is an illustration of this approach.

 Comrade JA's article: an illustration of the approach of the minority comrades

We've seen that the centrist slidings towards councilism on the part of the comrades in disagreement have been expressed throughout the debate by a tendency to avoid the real problems under discussion. This is still the approach of comrade JA's article when it proposes to reply to the article in IR 40 and to the ICC's analysis of the ‘danger of councilism'. We can't deal with all the examples of this approach here: we could easily get lost in details. Here we will restrict our­selves to some of the more significant examp­les.

The ICC's So-called ‘Politics of the Lesser Evil'

The title and various passages of JA's article suggest or even affirm openly that the ICC's analysis amounts to the ‘politics of the lesser evil'.

"This whole idea of having to choose between ‘under' or ‘over'-estimating the party, this new variation of the politics of the lesser evil that the ICC had always rejected on a theoretical level, is being reintroduced on a practical level under the pretext of wanting to present a more ‘concrete' perspective to the class: we have to now agree to say to the workers that the danger of councilism is great­er than that of substitutionism - otherwise the workers won't have any ‘perspective'." (IR 41)

We are obliged to say that either comrade JA doesn't know what she's talking about, or she's falsifying our positions in a deliberate and unacceptable way. The ‘politics of the lesser evil' consists, as its name implies, in choosing one evil against another. It was in particular illustrated in the 1930s, especially by Trotskyism, in the choice between the two capitalist evils, bourgeois democracy and fas­cism, to the benefit of the former. It led to calling the workers to put a priority on the struggle against fascism to the detriment of other aspects of the struggle against the capitalist state. It resulted in supporting (and even participating directly in) the drag­ooning of the workers into one camp in the imperialist war. In politics words have the meaning that history has conferred on them: the essence of the ‘politics of the lesser evil', as illustrated by history, is the sub­mission of the interests of the proletariat to the interests of one capitalist sector and thus of capitalism as a whole. To apply this notion to the ICC's positions is to suggest that the ICC has embarked upon the same path as the one which led Trotskyism, for example, into the bourgeois camp, We dare to hope that it is more out of ignorance than out of any deliberate policy that comrade JA has allowed polemical argument to be replaced by more grat­uitous insults, even though one could think the opposite when she writes:

"When an organization starts to dabble in the politics of the lesser of two evils, it doesn't necessarily realize that it's going to end up distorting its principles. The process has its own logic." (IR 41)

But even if this does come from ignorance, ignorance is no more an argument today than it was in Marx's time.

Concerning the way the ICC poses this problem, it's clear that it in no way calls for a choice between the councilist evil and the substitut­ionist evil: both of them, if the proletariat doesn't go beyond them, are mortal dangers for the revolution.

The question posed by the ICC is not, there­fore, ‘which one is preferable to the other?', but ‘which one will have the most influence in the period ahead?', so that the organization and the class as a whole are as well-armed as possible against the pitfalls that lie ahead. When you go for a walk, you could for example be bitten by a poisonous snake or run over by a car. Both dangers are fatal and are to be avoided equally. But if you're walking down a forest path you'd better watch out for the first danger, and this doesn't mean you'd ‘prefer' to be run over by a car. This image, already used in internal debate, must have seemed a bit ‘simplistic' to comrade JA. She prefers to ascribe to the ICC positions which it doesn't hold: it's obviously much easier to fight such positions, but it doesn't take the debate a flea-hop further, unless to reveal the poverty of the arguments of the ‘tendency' comrades and their propensity for eluding the real questions.

‘The Greatest Danger is the Bourgeoisie'

"The divergence is not on whether councilism represents a danger but...over the new unilateral theory of councilism, the greatest danger:

- because it is accompanied by a dismissal of substitutionism as a ‘lesser danger';

- because it turns its back on the essential danger for the proletariat coming from the capitalist state and its extensions in the working class (the left parties, leftists, rank and file unionism etc, the mechanism of capitalist recuperation in the era of state capitalism) and focuses instead on a so-called inherent councilist defect of the ‘proletariat of the advanced countries'...This new theory mistakes the way the real danger for the work­ing class - the capitalist state and all its extensions - will operate and vitiates the denunciation of substitutionism by presenting it as this ‘lesser evil'." (IR 41)

As we can see, the falsification of the ICC's positions is not restricted to the question of the lesser evil. Comrade JA also has the ICC saying that councilism is the great danger threatening the working class. She thus shows either her bad faith, or her incomprehension of the difference between a superlative and a comparative, even though this is on the primary school syllabus. To say that in the present period ahead councilism will be a greater dan­ger for the working class than substitutionism is quite different from saying that councilism is the greatest danger in the absolute. Fur­thermore, with the same elementary lack of rigor, JA has us ‘dismissing substitutionism as a lesser danger'. Is it worth explaining to comrade JA that if, in a group, you say that ‘Peter is the tallest' or that ‘Peter is taller than Paul', this doesn't necessarily mean that Paul is the smallest, unless the group is red­uced to these two elements. In the context of the ICC's debate this would imply that the ICC sees only two dangers for the working class: councilism and substitutionism. Comrade JA doesn't go to this absurd length but it is the implicit accusation contained in her strenuous insistence on "the essential danger for the proletariat coming from the capitalist state and its extensions in the working class." Frankly, if JA wrote her article to teach us that the greatest danger for the proletariat comes from the enemy class and its state, she needn't have bothered: we know this already. And here again the debate hasn't been advanced very much, except to show that alongside the falsification of the ICC's position, there's another way of evading the real problems: kicking open doors.

Caricature As a Way of Not Going to the Root of the Debate

To evade the real questions, it's not always necessary to kick open doors or falsify the positions you claim to be fighting. You can also caricature them. Comrade JA doesn't miss her chance. Thus, the article in IR 40 on ‘The Danger of Councilism', in the part on the conditions for the appearance of councilism and its characteristics, describes how councilism was a gangrene in the German Left which made it slide towards the rejection of central­ism, towards localism, neo-revolutionary syndicalism, factoryism, ouvrierism, individ­ualism. It shows that while these are not specific characteristics of councilism, councilism is led to fall into traps of this kind through a whole logical process which starts off from the negation or underestimation of the role of the revolutionary party. Similarly, it tries to show how in the period after 1963, the weight of councilism led many groups to fall into modernism, immediatism and activism, particularly under the pressure of the ideology of the rebellious petty bourgeoisie.

When comrade JA seeks to tell us what she has understood of this argumentation, she shows either that she hasn't understood, or that she hasn't taken the trouble to do so. Judge from the following:

"What are these so-called ‘councilist reflexes' of rising class struggle, how can they be identified? According to the article they are everything from ouvrierism, localism, tail-ending, modernism, any apolitical reaction of workers, the petty bourgeoisie, immediatism, activism and... indecision. In short, the ills of creation...‘councilism' is indeed the new leviathan.

Through this trick of ‘definitions', all the subjective weaknesses of the working class become councilist reflexes and the remedy is... the party. In other words, the ICC, the prol­etarian political milieu and the entire working class will be protecting itself from any immed­iatism, petty bourgeois influence, hesitation and so on by recognizing that the number one enemy is ‘underestimating', ‘minimising' the party." (IR 41)

It suffices to re-read the article in IR 40 to see that what is described there is a process and the causal links between the different stages of this process, and that this has nothing in common with the chaotic photography presented by comrade JA. This way of caricat­uring the ICC's positions may be effective for convincing those who are already convinced or for whom rigorous thought is an intolerable prison. But it's not very effective for clar­ifying the real debate.

To conclude this part, we should say that the ICC pamphlet Communist Organizations and Class  Consciousness, which the comrades of the ‘tendency' are always referring to, deserves the same reproaches that JA directs against the article in IR 40, in particular when it says:

"It is logical that this immediatist conception of class consciousness leads the councilists to topple into workerism and localism...But pushed to its final conclusion, the councilists' apology for the strictly economic struggle of the proletariat ends in the pure and simple self-destruction of all revolutionary organizations."

The Non-Responses of Comrade JA

The different techniques for evading the debate which we've just seen (and which is much more widely used in JA's article than we can point to here) are completed by an even simpler tech­nique: purely and simply ignoring the most important arguments of the analysis you claim to be fighting.

Thus, the following arguments of the text on ‘The Danger of Councilism' don't get the slightest response in JA's article:

- the weight of substitutionism in the past was linked to the social democratic conception of the party as the ‘educator', ‘representative', or ‘general staff' of the class;

- these conceptions were able to gain ground in a period when the proletariat was growing and thus immature (this is particularly true in more backward countries with a young and weak proletariat);

- these conceptions will have much less weight in the proletariat after the experience of the Stalinist counter-revolution and all the theor­etical reflection of the Communist Left on this question and on the role of the party in the revolution;

- the fact that the next revolutionary wave will necessarily begin from the advanced count­ries; from the oldest and most experienced part of the proletariat, will further lessen the weight of substitutionism in the working class as a whole: in this sense, the experience of the revolution in Germany between 1918 and 1923 - where the main difficulty affecting the most advanced elements of the class was not substitutionism but councilism - is much more significant for the next revolution than the experience of the revolution in Russia where substitutionism played such a negative role;

- the weight of councilism in the coming rev­olution will be all the greater in that the struggle will be directed against the Stalinist and social democratic parties. The workers' distrust for these parties will tend to express itself, as it does already, in a distrust for all political organizations which claim to be fighting for the interests of the working class, including the genuine revolutionary ones;

- nearly half a century of counter-revolution and the resulting organic rupture in its communist organizations will not only lead to a giant number of the most combative workers not to understand the necessity to commit themsel­ves to these organizations but also makes it extremely difficult for the militants of these organizations to understand the whole importance of their role, the absolutely indispensab­le character of the revolutionary party and the organizations which prepare it, the enorm­ous responsibility which lies on their should­ers - all of which are expressions of council­ist deviations.

The fact that comrade JA evades responding to these arguments (of which we've only reproduced the main threads here), which are central to the defense of the ICC's analysis, is characteristic of the inability of the ‘tendency' to mount serious arguments against this analysis. The most ironic thing in all this is the fact that one of the few serious arguments contained in JA's text, probably the most important in the defense of the ‘tendency's' position, is hardly used. It's as though comrade JA would rather attack a fortress with a catapult when she's already got a cannon at her disposal (even if it is of insufficient caliber).

A Serious Argument

One has the impression that the following phrase finds its way into the text almost by accident:

"By reducing substitutionism, the ideological expression of the division of labor in class society, to a negligible quantity, the new ICC theory ends up by minimizing the danger of state capitalism, the political apparatus of the state and the mechanism of its ideological functioning." (IR 41)

Let's leave aside the cavalier way that JA talks about the ICC seeing substitutionism as a "negligible quantity". This is not the pos­ition of the ICC. The fact is that substitut­ionism is incontestably an "ideological express­ion of the division of labor in class society". In this sense, one could be led to the conclus­ion that because thousands of years of class society impregnate society today, including the revolutionary class, the proletariat will have the greatest difficulty in ridding itself of the ideological burden created by the hierarch­ical division of labor which has prevailed for millennia and which is expressed in substitutionism. In fact, this was particularly true in the past when substitutionism manifested itself in the Babouvist and Blanquist sects which were directly influenced by the schema of the bourg­eois revolution in which a party (for example the Jacobins) necessarily had to take power on behalf of the whole of its class. This model of the bourgeois revolution continued to exert a very strong influence on the working class - which tended to see it as the only possible model for the revolution - as long as it itself had not yet engaged in massive struggles against capitalism and in attempted revolutions. But the accumulation of these positive and negative experiences (such as the degeneration of the revolution) on the one hand and on the other hand the distance in time between the bourgeois revolutions and the revolution in Russia, have allowed the proletariat to disengage itself gradually from the weight of the past. Does this mean that substitutionism can no longer threaten the working class or its political minorities? Obviously not, and the ICC has always been clear about this, as can be seen from the article in IR 40. Rather, the quest­ion posed is: with what impact and in what way will this weight continue to make itself felt? Marx gives us the key in The 18th Brumaire when he says that while bourgeois revolutions necessarily drape themselves in the costumes of the past, "the weight of dead generations which weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living" will tend to lessen with the proletar­ian revolution, "which draws its poetry from the future." The proletarian revolution can only take place on the basis of a radical break with centuries of capitalist domination and millennia of class divisions, and by taking up the perspective of a communist society (the ‘poetry of the future'). In particular, this implies a break with substitutionism. On the other hand, one element will weigh for a very long time on the proletariat, as it has already weighed considerably in the past; an element which, even though permanently exploited and activated by bourgeois ideology results from a specific characteristic of the working class which it doesn't share with any previous revol­utionary class. This is the fact that the prol­etariat is the only class in history which is both an exploited and a revolutionary class. This element has led to great difficulties for the class - and for its revolutionary minority - to grasp the relationship between these two aspects of its being, a relationship which is neither one of identity nor of separation. This difficulty is to a large extent concretized in councilism's rejection of the role of communist organizations: it's a difficulty in conceiving the proletariat as a class with a revolutionary future, one of whose expressions is precisely the existence of these organizations. This is why councilism tends to meet up with anarcho-­syndicalism, for whom the organs of struggle of the proletariat as an exploited class - the unions - had to be the organs for running the future society. This is why councilism falls ineluctably into economism or factoryism, which also express this incapacity to conceive the struggle of the proletariat as anything more than a struggle strictly limited to the work­places where the workers are exploited, and which turn their back on a general, social world-wide, political vision of the revolution­ary process.

Thus, when we attempt to examine the difficult­ies the working class will encounter on the road to revolution, it's important to take into account all the historical elements which lie behind these difficulties, and not just some of them. Otherwise, the perspective we develop will be distorted and of little use to the proletariat in the battles that lie ahead . But obviously we have to start off with the idea that the proletariat does require a pers­pective for its struggle and not fall into the view of the CWO-Battaglia, for whom the analysis of the historic course (towards world war or towards generalized class confrontations) is of no interest. Comrade JA does seem to doubt this when she says ironically: "we now have to agree to say to the workers that the danger of councilism is greater than that of substitutionism - otherwise the workers won't have any ‘perspective'." What she prop­oses instead is: no perspective!

The basis of JA's approach: slidings towards councilism

In reality, and in a contradictory manner (since towards the end of her text she seems to say that neither substitutionism nor councilism will be a danger, what with the bankruptcy, after 1968, of the currents descending from the Italian Left and the German Left), what JA's arguments amount to at root is that subs­titutionism is a much greater danger than coun­cilism.

This is why she spends so much time in her text identifying substitutionism with leftism, substitutionism with the counter-revolution, whereas the article in IR 40 shows precisely that substitutionism is, of course, a "fatal error", but that it applies to the relation­ship between the class and its own organizations and not those of the bourgeoisie. This is why she writes:

"The fact that giving a bourgeois role to the party does not defend the real function and necessity of the party any more than rejecting all parties, seems to be fading out of our press." (IR 41)

In fact, the debate on the role of the party has since the last century taken place within marxism, which has always defended the necess­ity of the revolutionary party, whereas the rejection of any party is alien to marxism and had its first advocates amongst the anarchists. In order to be able to say that the role of the party is not to take power, you first have to recognize that it has a role.

In the final analysis, what the thesis of the ‘tendency', as defended by JA in her article, is trying to show, even if it doesn't say so openly, is that there is no councilist danger, notably for revolutionary organizations and most particularly for the ICC. So the comrades of the ‘tendency' can be at peace: they can in no way be the victims of slidings towards councilism and the ICC is just tilting at windmills.

For the ‘tendency', there is no real danger of councilism. For the ICC, this danger is very real. The proof: the whole approach of the ‘tendency'.

FM

Presentation

The proletariat's effort to come to conscious­ness is necessarily expressed in the constant emergence of groups, minorities, that organize to take part in the development of this effort throughout the class. The more the class strug­gle develops, the more consciousness ripens in society's entrails, the more numerous are the elements and groups that emerge. The appearance of a new grouping in India, within the framework of the fundamental principles of the proletarian struggle in our epoch, is an expr­ession of this permanent tendency within the proletariat to arrive at an awareness of its revolutionary being, and of the present maturation in class consciousness.

This group has taken the name of Communist Internationalist[1] and has just published the first issue of a bulletin that aims to participate in "the clarification and regroup­ment of elements and individuals in search of revolutionary clarity." We are publishing here the basic principles that define the group for the moment.

The fact that this group has emerged in India is a striking demonstration of the proletariat's unitary nature as a worldwide class, defending the same interests and engaged in the same fight, whatever the diversity of the conditions in which it lives, Even if the proletariat of the under-developed countries lives in conditions of national and international isolation such that it is unlikely to be able to unleash the dynamic of the world revolution[2], it is none­theless a totally integral part of the world working class. Revolutionary minorities are the product of the class' worldwide historical being. This is why the proletariat's revolu­tionary minorities are not immediately depend­ent on the experience of the proletariat in the countries where they exist, and can appear in under-developed countries. The ICC is itself an expression of this: its oldest section was born in Venezuela.

As the reader will realize, the ICC's positions have been a crucial factor in the clarification of the group in India. In particular, they have made it possible for the group to tie itself to the class' historical experience: the experience of the Internationals and the Left Communists. Without this tie, and a critical understanding of the class' historical experience, no revolutionary group will be able to take root.

The break with leftism

The ICC's positions have served as a pole of clarification for the elements of this group, which has been engaged since 1982 in a more or less confused process of breaking with a Mao­ist group[3]. Our positions have helped them to take this process to its conclusion and to make this break complete - a precondition for any positive evolution towards communist posi­tions. Many of the ICC's analyses have helped them, but we want to emphasize the touchstone, of this real break: the national question.

In the under-developed countries, the bourgeoi­sie's most important mystification, which finds an echo in the wretched situation of the popula­tion and the proletariat, is nationalism, in all its forms, against ‘imperialism'. The national bourgeoisies of the under-developed countries plundered by the great powers try to use this slogan to create a unity of discontent. Look at Poland, where the proletariat has repeatedly fought magnificent battles, and remember the strength of anti-Russian nationalism. In Latin America during the 1970s, ‘yankee imperialism' was one of the great themes of confusion used by leftists, defending ‘national liberation struggles'. In India, the idea of the ‘oppres­sed nation', with all the national divisions that this relatively recently constituted state is shot through with, weighs very heavily. The myth of the ‘Indian nation', ‘independent' of the great imperialist powers, is the spear­head of the bourgeoisie's mystifications serv­ing to hide the characteristics of our epoch - the impossibility of any national independence or development - and the proletariat's real enemy - the worldwide and the national bourgeoisie.

The ‘national question' is not new: it has posed the workers' movement a lot of problems, and led it into plenty of mistakes[4]. The Commu­nist Internationalist group's understanding that the proletarian terrain includes the break with all forms of nationalism is one of the major criteria that today allow us to salute its emergence as an expression of the proletariat, as a communist grouping.

Sadly, certain groups of the revolutionary move­ment - Battaglia Comunista and the Communist, Workers' Organization - do not share the same clarity as the new energies emerging from the class struggle. In their press, they give us news of an Indian group, the Revolutionary Proletarian Platform (RPP); the comrades of Communist Internationalist have this to say about the RPP:

"We think that (the RPP's) efforts to break with leftism are not blocked: in fact they have never begun (... ), on the national ques­tion, they have not even tried to break with the fanatical nationalism of their parent organization. For them, the slightest inter­nationalism is an aberration. Developing their hysterical attack against the ICC's positions, in their Hindi press, they put forward the ideas of ‘socialism (as a ‘first stage' of course) in one country', ‘proletarian natio­nalism', and other perfectly leftist positions (...). The CWO's enthusiasm and its relations with the RPP and the UCM only show the CWO's confusion." (Letter, 1.4.85)

On this question, BC and the CWO justify their concessions to ‘national movements' by ... the ‘national' specificities of the under-developed countries[5]; they don't realize that by doing so, they are playing the game of one of the most dangerous mystifications in the under-developed countries - nationalism. And in the end, they themselves become its plaything. But BC and the CWO don't want to believe us. The ICC, they say, is indifferentist, wants a pure prole­tariat, is out of touch with reality ...

This is the strength of the new Communist Internationalist group. It is a concrete, emin­ently real argument against BC/CWO's justifica­tions of their opportunism towards the leftism of the RPP, UCM, and co. The arrival of new forces on communist positions strengthen the whole proletarian milieu, not only in numerical terms, but also as a concrete, practical argumentation.

Perspectives

As we have said above, the political clarity of elements who have separated from leftism, and gone through a process of evolution from this starting-point, depends on a clear break with their past and especially on understanding the bourgeois nature of leftism. In the advanced capitalist countries, the major mystification that must be unmasked in leftism is above all the question of partiamentarism and increasingly of unionism. In the under-developed countries, it is first and foremost nationalism.

The Communist Internationalist group has carried out this break and adopted the proletariat's fundamental positions in the period of capita­lism's decadence, The perspectives for discussion to clarify communist positions that they adopt in their declaration, the aim of regroup­ment with emerging revolutionary elements, and the orientation towards intervention in the class struggle - stated, and already concretized in two leaflets on events in India( the assass­ination of Indira Gandhi, then the elections) - are characteristic traits of a true expression of the proletariat. As they say themselves, these comrades still have some ground to cover in developing a complete coherence. But their appearance is a new contribution to the historic struggle of the proletariat, a step towards the formation of its world party, in the perspective of coming class confrontations. For our part, we will contribute with all our strength - as we have done since our beginnings - to the clari­fication and regroupment of emerging revolutio­nary forces.

We salute Communist Internationalist!

ICC

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"What we stand for"    

After decades of counter-revolution, the world-wide resurgence of the proletariat began in the1960s with the reappearance of the open crisis of decadent capitalism. Since then, on the one hand, capital has been hurtling down the abyss of deepening crisis and, on the other, the struggles of the working class have become more and more fierce and conscious.

In a perspective opening towards world proletarian revolution political expressions of the class, its revolutionary minorities, have emerged and continue to emerge. These groups are products of the effort of the class to become conscious; and this has been true at an even more rudimentary level with regard to our own efforts.

Although there is a long tradition in India of heroic struggles of the working class, these were the thrusts of the world-wide resurgence of the class that started pulling down the mask of Stalinism and smashing the myth of Russian-Chinese socialism. In the reflection of these struggles of the class, under their direct and powerful impact, some elements here (including ourselves) tried to shake ourselves free of leftism, of Stalinism-Maoism (Naxalbari) and to take the first tentative steps towards communist positions. Unlike Europe where newly emerging revolutionary elements and groups had the treasure of analyses of Left Communists to fall back on, our initial efforts were the result merely of proletarian instincts.

But simple class instincts are not enough. For the development of these initial efforts, it was essential that they were firmly based on the solid ground of long historical experience of the class and its synthesis - marxism. The analyses of the ICC have been of great help to us in this direction.

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

These efforts have convinced us that a communist position can only start from a firm rejection of capitalist currents like Stalinism, Trotskyism and Maoism, and by linking up with the rich heritage of the First, Second and Third Internationals.

But again, this is not sufficient. We are living in the epoch of capitalist decadence, which had only recently begun in 1917-18. All its implications for proletarian tactics were not yet clearly understood. But today, after an experience of 70 years, these cannot be overlooked without abandoning communist positions.

By 1914, the capitalist system had entered its phase of decadence because of the saturation of world markets. The tendency towards state capit­alism developed in all countries to keep this decadent capital alive. The state started taking on a bloated, monstrous form, absorbing and int­egrating all spheres of life within itself. In this process, the monstrous, capitalist state integrated all the old reformist organizations of the class within itself and turned them into its own appendages. All the old tactics regarding unions, parliaments, fronts and national liberation lost their proletarian character.

Positions of the Left (fractions) of the Third International represented the initial efforts to reject old tactics in the light of changed conditions and to adopt new ones in their place. Afterwards, with the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and of the Comintern, the Left Fractions not only fought against the Stalinist counter­revolution and, later, its Trotskyist supporters but deepened their understanding of the counter­revolutionary character of unions, parliamentary activity, frontism, national liberation and of all nationalism by a profound analysis of the decadence of capitalism and developed their tac­tics accordingly.

We feel that the experience of the last decades has demonstrated the correctness of these posi­tions again and again. It is our firm conviction that keeping these positions in view, understand­ing and assimilating them is essential for any fruitful intervention in the struggles of the class.

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

Our efforts have been geared to this end for some time. We have tried to understand the experience of the class between its first great revolution­ary wave and its resurgences in the ‘60s, and to assimilate its lessons. We have had valuable help from the ICC's analysis in this effort also.

But this is not a one-time effort. This is a long and continuous process. This bulletin is aimed towards keeping this process going and to carry it forward on a higher and broader basis. Therefore, we would like to have a debate on the long historical experience of the class with the emerg­ing revolutionary elements, with a view to draw­ing lessons from the experience for the current struggles of the class. We commit ourselves to keep the pages of this bulletin open for elements and groups adopting communist positions and inter­ested in holding an honest debate on them.

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

But this work of understanding the experience of the class and of learning lessons from it is not, in itself, our aim. As revolutionaries, our aim is to enrich our understanding of communist positions, to put our defense of these positions on a firm footing and to base our interventions in the class on them. In fact, most important for us is this intervention, to make it fruitful and through it to reappropriate to the class all the lessons of past experience so that, by assimil­ating them, the class could realize all the poss­ibilities latent in its present and future str­uggles.

All this necessitates systematic and organized effort. In view of the decisive role of revolutionaries in the struggles of the class it is essential that debates of the bulletin be directed towards helping the elements and individuals in search of revolutionary clarity, and towards developing a point for their regroupment. The bulletin will keep this extremely important aim constantly in view.

We have mentioned the important contribution of the ICC in our development towards communist pos­itions. Even though our positions are a result of our efforts to understand and assimilate the an­alyses of the ICC, we think it necessary to clar­ify the form of our current relations with the ICC.

In spite of being sympathetic towards the ICC, this bulletin is not, in any way, a part of the ICC's publications or of its organizational framework. The bulletin itself bears all political responsibility for the idea express in its pages.

Communist Internationalist

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[1] Address: Post Box no. 25, NIT Faridabad 121001, Haryana State, India

[2] See the article ‘The Proletariat of Western Europe', IR 31.

[3] In a forthcoming issue, we will publish an article on these comrades' evolution and the lessons of their experience.

[4] See the article in this issue ‘Communist and the National Question' part 3, as well as IR 34 and 36.

[5] See ‘The Formation of IBRP: Bluff of a regroupment' in IR 40-41.

From Britain to Spain, from Denmark to Brazil and South Africa, the open struggles of the working class have slowed down in one country only to ex­plode still more violently in another. Unlike the defeat of the Polish workers, that of the British miners has not been followed by a period of reflux at an international level.

The whole foundation of the capitalist social order continues, slowly but surely, to be undermined by the affirmation of a profound proletar­ian movement. A movement which, as the recent great workers' strikes has shown is tending increasingly to hit the major industrial centers (often still relatively untouched) in each coun­try. A movement which, through repeated conflicts with the union apparatus - with their strategies of demobilization and demoralization, and their ‘radical' and ‘rank and file' forms - is making its way, pushing its combats more and more to­wards extension and self-organization.

Perspectives of the third wave of class struggle

Many workers, many revolutionary groups, thought that the defeat of the miners' strike in Britain marked the end of the present international wave of struggle that started with the state sector strike that paralyzed Belgium for two weeks in September 1983. They did not see the difference between the defeat suffered in Poland in 1981 and the defeat of the miners' strike in Britain. Not all defeats are alike. The 13th December 1981 marked the beginning of a period of international withdrawal in the struggle. Today, nothing could be less true. Moreover, this miners' strike in the oldest of capitalist coun­tries has dealt a serious blow at the corporat­ist illusions peddled by the unions. In our leaflet on the lessons of the miners' strike, distributed in ten countries, we emphasized that "the length of the struggle is not its real strength. The bourgeoisie knows how to organize against long strikes: they have just proved it. Real solidarity, the workers' real strength, is the extension of the struggle." (ICC, 8.3.85) The strike movements in Denmark and Sweden show us that the workers are drawing the lessons straight away.

These workers and revolutionaries have thus been victims, both of the media's almost total silence on the existence of movements and strikes throughout the world, and of the deliberate prop­aganda by all the national bourgeoisies on the supposed absence of workers' combativity today.

This propaganda is a lie. We refer the reader to all our 1984 issues of the International Review as well as to the ICC's different territorial papers and reviews. Even if it must be recognized that in some countries, like Italy and France, the workers have not really given expression to their discontent since spring 1984. We'll come back to this.

We have already denounced the almost complete silence, censorship, and black-out, of the bourgeois press on the workers' strikes. Increasingly, one of the jobs of revolutionary organizations will be to spread this vital news in their press. To do so, these organizations must know how to recognize the existence of this third wave of str­uggle and get information about it. These are political questions. For the first, we refer the reader to the article on method published in the previous issue of this Review. The second de­pends on the political ability of revolutionary groups to be real centralized and international organizations (IR 40: ‘10 Years of the ICC'). Never in the history of the proletariat has there been such an international simultaneity of str­uggle. Never. Not even during the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. In the last year, every country in Western Europe (except perhaps Switzerland) has witnessed the workers' defensive struggles against the generalized attack of capitalism. These workers' struggles break out at the same time. Repeatedly, in the same country, even in the same sectors. Their causes, and even their demands, are the same. They confront the same obstacles mounted by the different ruling classes: isolation and division.

From this international similarity and simultan­eity of workers' struggles emerges the perspect­ive of their conscious generalization in the major European countries. A perspective that was so cruelly lacking in 1980-81, leaving the work­ing class isolated in Poland. On its ability to generalize its combat, depends the proletariat's future ability to go onto the offensive against the different capitalist states, to destroy them and impose its class dictatorship and communism.

We've not reached that point yet. Far from it. However, even if few workers are aware of it, the journey has already begun. Not yet in an inter­national generalization, but in the different and still timid attempts at extension and self-organization. Or rather, in the attempts of different struggles to organize extension in the effort to break the isolation and division kept up by the unions between factories, corporations, towns, regions, between young and old, workers still in employment and those already out of a job. This is the inevitable and necessary road that leads to the conscious international generalization of workers' struggles.

In the IR 37, we were able to recognize the reco­very in the class struggle that was just beginn­ing. We pointed out its significance in relation to the proletariat's defeat in Poland 1981 and the international reflux in the class struggle that followed. We also highlighted its character­istics which have since been amply verified. In recent months, and especially in April:

1. The tendency towards an upsurge in spontan­eous movements has not slowed down. In Spain - in Valencia (Ford), in the post office in Barcelona, in Madrid - movements broke out that have sur­prised the unions. In Britain, in the post office and once again in the coalfields, wildcat strikes have broken out ‘illegally', against the advice of the unions.

But this tendency towards the upsurge of spontan­eous movements has been most clearly expressed in the strike by 500,000 workers in ‘little' Denmark with its 5 million inhabitants. Despite the union LO's call to return to work, 200,000 workers re­mained on strike until mid-April.

Another confirmation of this characteristic is the spontaneous upsurge of unemployed demonstra­tions in Barcelona, and of unemployed committees in France. They are still few and far between, but we know that they will increase.

These spontaneous movements always appear against or outside the unions. And all this, in spite of their care and ‘far-sightedness', one and a half years after the recovery in the struggle.

2. The tendency towards large-scale movements that hit every sector is also present. The best illustration is obviously the strike in Denmark which paralyzed every sector of the productive apparatus. At the same time, in Spain, strikes broke out in the car industry (Ford and Talbot), in the railways, the shipyards, the post office, amongst farm workers, etc.

In Sweden, in May 20,000 state sector workers went out on strike. One month after Denmark 80,000 are locked out. A great part of the country is paralyzed. At the same time, though quickly stifled, small movements break out in the car industry.

In Brazil during March, April, May, 400,000 wor­kers took part in strike movements in the car and engineering industries of Sao Paulo, as well as in the public service and transport sectors.

These few recent examples follow the movements in Belgium and France last year, in Britain last summer, etc ................................

At the time of writing some 150,000 building workers are on strike in the Netherlands, while Schipol-Amsterdam airport is blocked by a strike of flight controllers and ground crew. Traffic is being re-routed to Zaventem-Brussels where strike action is also threatening to break out.

More and more, the question posed for the prolet­ariat in every country is how to organize and co­ordinate these massive struggles which tend to go beyond all corporatism and all divisions.

3. The tendency towards self-organization and extension is firmer on each occasion. In Spain, workers in the Barcelona post office, and the Sagunto farm workers, managed to hold sovereign general assemblies open to all, and especially to revolutionary organizations. But when these ass­emblies have been unable to carry out their ess­ential function - extending the struggle - the unions have emptied them of their lifeblood, the reason for their existence, their class character as organs of struggle. It was the CNT (the anar­chist union) and the Comisiones Obreras (CCOO, the CP-controlled union) that finally got the Barcelona strike committee under control. They were the ones who finally managed to exclude the ICC from the general assembly, as we were defend­ing the need to spread the strike. They were the ones who sabotaged the strike by stifling it in isolation.

It was the same problem that the miners and dock­ers failed to solve during the dock strikes in solidarity with the miners in Britain. It was the unions that kept control of the assemblies and the strike's organization. Or rather, its disorganization.

Unless it succeeds in spreading the struggle, self-organization loses its meaning and its major function today, and the unions empty the assem­blies of their content.

By contrast, in Denmark the proletariat was faced with the opposite problem. The strike was spread, sometimes by workers' meetings at different fac­tories. Just before the strike broke out in every sector, the ICC's section in Sweden wrote (17th March) on the accelerating events in Denmark: "faced with a terrible attack on their living conditions, with falling wages and rising unem­ployment (about 14%, but much higher in the Copen­hagen region), the workers in Denmark are ready to fight. The fact that the dockers and bus-driv­ers, who have already fallen victim to the bourg­eoisie with its social-democracy in opposition during the strikes of 1982-84, have not been de­feated and on the contrary are in the front line of the present situation confirms our analysis of the present period and, still more important in today's situation, confirms the potential for ex­tension expressed in the different strikes of re­cent weeks and even in the fact that the bourg­eoisie is preparing to call a general strike to obscure the more and more general awareness with­in the working class of the need to take up and spread the struggle." It would be hard to fore­see things better!

In Denmark, unlike Spain, the extension and uni­fication of the strike succeeded at first. The workers then came up against the difficulty of coordinating the struggle, controlling and organizing it through general assemblies and strike committees. They left the ruling class with its hands free and especially the rank-and-file unionists, the ‘tillidsmen' controlled by the CP (ie ‘men of confidence', equivalent to the shop stewards in Britain), to disorganize the movement, to divert it, to replace the initial wage demands with those for "'the 35-hour week" and "the resignation of the (right-wing) Schuter government" - to the point where they could halt and then destroy the promising beginnings of the struggle's unification.

This is why the ICC's leaflet distributed at the massive demonstration in Copenhagen on 8th April called the workers to "take the initiative so as to push back the ruling class which wants to the growing unity of workers' struggles.

The only way to do this is to organize the struggle yourselves:

- by calling mass assemblies in the workplace, which elect strike committees responsible solely to the assembly and revocable if they don't apply the assembly's decisions;

- by sending delegations to other workplaces, to call on other workers to join the strike by taking the initiative of discussions on the demands and needs of the struggle."

Unless the workers in struggle control their fighting weapons - their mass meetings, strike pickets, delegations and committees - regroup and unite all the workers, the ruling class and unions will occupy the battleground and empty the struggle's organizations, aims and demands of ­their proletarian, unifying content. Without self-organization and a real and lasting extension, unification of the proletariat's combat is impossible.             

4. We have already emphasized the simultaneity of the proletariat's struggles today and its importance: between January and May 1985, there have been dozens of struggles against redundan­cies in Britain, Spain and the Netherlands; more than 200,000 on strike in Greece and Portugal; 500,000 in Denmark, strikes in Norway and Sweden following Iceland in October when the whole island was paralyzed for several weeks by a gen­eral strike in the state sector.

We cannot cite here all the European countries that have witnessed important movements, a great tension and combativity. But, despite the bourg­eoisie's silence, let us not forget the workers' strikes in South Africa, Chile and Brazil.

We could make the list longer yet, especially if we started with September ‘83. Through this international simultaneity, the proletariat is finding the response to the problem posed in 1981 by the isolation of the proletariat in Poland. "The bourgeoisie will try to isolate the struggle of the workers in Denmark, just as they did in Poland." (ICC leaflet in Danish, 8.4.85) The simultaneity of workers' strikes "expresses the class' growing awareness of its interests and is a step towards the ability to unite and fight inter­ nationally." (IR 40) This international simul­taneity makes the extension and organization of the struggle directly and concretely possible. This is why the bourgeoisie, with its left part­ies in opposition and its trade unions, is try­ing to occupy the social terrain so as to nip in the bud the slightest effort by the workers to unify their struggles. This combat against the unions and the left, for the extension and the unification of the workers' struggles, is going determine the development of the perspective of their international generalization. This sim­ultaneity is highly favorable ground for generalization.­

5. Some of the above-mentioned characteristics of the third wave have become more clear-cut. In particular:

- increasingly, strikes are hitting key indust­ries, large working class concentrations and the big towns;

- the demands are tending to become more general. 

They deal essentially with wages and, above all, with unemployment. As our local section pointed out in a communiqué on the class struggle in the Netherlands, "the question of unemployment is the essential element, crucial for the development of the workers' combat. The constant announcements of new redundancies unceasingly urge the workers into struggle."

6. Finally, the last characteristic that we have highlighted has also been fully confirmed: this is the slow rhythm in the development of the struggle.

The workers in Europe are at the centre of this third wave of struggle. This is not to say that the struggles of the proletariat in other continents are unimportant, both now and for the future, or that they are not an integral part of this wave; but it is the workers of Western Europe who set it off, and they determine its rhythm. They are faced with the full range of bourgeois mystifications, especially democracy and parliamentarism. It is in the old European countries that the bourgeoisie has best prepared itself to attack the proletariat. To do so, it has ranged its major left forces (‘Socialist' and ‘Commun­ist' Parties have joined the Trotskyists and other leftists) in opposition, free from govern­ment responsibility - so making it possible for them to mislead and sabotage struggles from the inside by presenting themselves as the workers' protectors (see IR 26).

This is why we could not, and still cannot, expect abrupt upsurges of the mass strike, as we did in Poland in 1980. No. On the contrary, only at the end of a long and difficult process of confrontation with the unions and the left in opp­osition that the proletariat will be able to dev­elop mass strikes and the international generalization of its combat.

In this third wave, the struggle is thus developing at a slow pace. This shouldn't worry us. Quite the contrary: although the pace is slow, the depth of reflection, the ripening of consciousness and of the eventual confrontation is all the surer. Through this confrontation with the left and trade unionism that is going on during the struggle, the working class is discovering the way forward in its fight against capitalism; it is beginning to recognize its enemies, and above all its false friends, to learn how to fight, to exhaust the democratic and union mystifications throughout the whole international proletariat. Its class consciousness is getting wider and deeper.

Unionism: The spearhead of the capitalist attack on the working class

1. A strategy of demobilization

One of the unions' major weapons today is the ‘day of action'. Oh, not to mobilize workers around trade union mystifications as they did during the 1970s. That doesn't work anymore anyway. No, the bourgeoisie's unions simply intend to occupy the battleground, to deprive the workers of any initiative, to confuse and demoralize the workers by stuffing their heads with the idea that ‘struggle definitely doesn't pay'.

To do so, the unions are using ‘days of action' to the hilt, whether by factory, town or region - as long as these do not include any large work­ing class concentrations: as soon as the slightest discontent, threat of lay-offs or tension appears, the unions propose a ‘day of action' to ‘mobilize', ‘prepare' and ‘spread' the struggle - but for a date well in the future because ‘it must be prepared seriously'; and sometimes they even plan a demonstration, or even a march on the capital, but there again the date is not fix­ed, and once it is ... it is put off once, twice, etc ... They call the ‘day' on the basis of cor­poratist demands, or they call the demonstration, and above all the ‘marches' on capital cities, by taking great care not to mention (or to mention only at the last minute) the time and place! They take care that no workers from other sec­tors come to join the demonstration. This is how they insure themselves against any danger of wor­kers coming together, of struggles and demon­strations spreading and uniting. So, in the first place they immobilize the working class and in the second place pretend that the workers are apathetic, uncombative. With this strategy, they are trying to maintain the working class' lack of confidence in its own strength, and passivity which will make it possible to carry out the att­acks on its living conditions. And when the str­uggle does break out in spite of them, they fore­stall the mass movement with a ‘general strike' or a ‘day of action', which are parodies of extension and give a sanction to the demobilization of the workers.

Some examples?

In Spain during the shipyard and post office str­ikes, the CP's CCOO used this tactic of demobilization very effectively. So also in France, in the 10th May demonstration of Renault workers threatened with unemployment.

Sometimes it doesn't work: like in Denmark where the union LO, after ‘promising a general strike' and putting it off several times, finally called the strike once the workers' combativity had made it inevitable. This weapon, closely linked to the tactic of the left in opposition, has been part­icularly effective up to now in France. The unions have thus succeeded in confusing and demoralizing the workers; they use the workers' growing suspicion of the left and the unions to reinforce their apathy and passivity. These tac­tics have managed temporarily to paralyze the proletariat in France, despite a growing discon­tent full of danger for the bourgeoisie.

In Italy, the tactic is still more subtle. The bourgeoisie is concentrating attention on the organization by the unions, the CP and the left­ists, of a referendum on the sliding scale of wages. The first campaign of confusion is based on gathering signatures necessary for the refer­endum to take place, the second on the organization of the referendum itself.

Only the Internationalist Communist Party (Batt­aglia Comunista), ‘I1 Partito' of Florence, and the ICC have been capable of denouncing this maneuver against the working class. But it will not be able to conceal indefinitely from the wor­kers both the deepening crisis and the develop­ment of workers' struggles in other countries.

2. We have already on many occasions denounced the danger of rank-and-file unionism within the working class.

It was thanks to his radical talk, ‘in opposition' to the ‘moderate' leaders of the Trade Union Congress, that Arthur Scargill, leader of the miners' union (NUM) managed to keep the strike within corporate bounds - which led to its defeat. And to do so, he did not hesitate to use the ‘violence' of the flying pickets against the Brit­ish police, as long as these pickets did not try to break the isolation that was stifling the strike. He even went so far as to get beaten up -though not too badly - and arrested - but not for very long either.

It was the ‘tillidsmen', the rank-and-file deleg­ates, who succeeded in bringing the strike in Den­mark back onto the unionist and bourgeois ground and so extinguishing it. It was the anarchist CNT that sabotaged the extension of the Barcelona post office strike.

Thanks to its radical, leftist, sometimes violent language; thanks to its control over the strugg­le's organization that the workers create for themselves; one of the dangers of rank-and-file unionism for the proletariat lies in its ability to carry out what has become one of today's prior­ities for the bourgeoisie: prevent by any means the politicization of struggles, and prevent revolutionary organizations as well as the most combative workers from intervening in them.

This is why the unions used violence to prevent the ICC speaking at the assembly in the Jaguar car plant in Britain. This is why the Danish CP, which controls the ‘tillidsmen' tried to spread the rumor that the ICC's militants were CIA agents. This is why the CNT and the CCOO, after several days' effort, finally expelled us from the postal workers' general assembly in Barcelona.

This is why the Trotskyists of the Fourth Inter­national ended up preventing the ICC from gaining access to the unemployed committee at Pau in France - threatening, amongst other things, to call the police on us!

Finally, the last aspect of the dirty work done by rank-and-file unionism and the leftists is the attempt to bring the unemployed under control by reinforcing the role of unemployed unions where these exist, and creating them where they do not: in Belgium, where unemployment has been particul­arly widespread for a long time they work within the unions' unemployed organizations (those of the FGTB and other unions); in France, it is essentially the leftists and the CP that are try­ing to get control of the unemployed committees that are beginning to appear, so as to prevent them from becoming committees open to all, so as to prevent them becoming places where workers gather and talk politics; above all, so as to sabotage any attempt at the unification and centralization of those different committees; lastly, so as to isolate the unemployed from the rest of their class, and render them powerless in their daily fight for demands simply to eat and survive.

What is to be done?

Despite all these obstacles set by the ‘left in opposition' and the unions, the proletariat has an ‘ally' in the catastrophic deepening of the capitalist economic crisis. Capitalism has noth­ing more to offer humanity but more misery, more famine, more repression and, to end it all, a third world war.

The proletariat has not been beaten. The dynamic of this third wave of struggle is proof enough. Subjected to a terrible attack, the proletariat must develop an answer that will terrify the bourgeoisie, that will overturn today's unfavorable balance of forces, that will let the workers oppose effectively the universal and absolute impoverishment imposed by capitalism, that will open up the perspective of an inter­national generalization of the struggle. This is why the proletariat needs to recognize thor­oughly who are its enemies, how to fight them, and where the fight is going. This is what the ‘politicization' of its struggles means.

The proletariat must not leave the initiative to the bourgeoisie, to its left parties and trade unions which will organize isolation and defeat. It's up to the workers to take the initiative. "But to carry out a mass political action, the workers must first of all come together as a mass; to do so, they must leave the factories and the workshops, the mines and the blast-furnaces, and overcome this dispersal and scattering to which they are condemned under the yoke of capitalism." (Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Mass Strike, Party and Unions') It is up to the workers to take the initiative in strikes, assemblies, delegations to other factories, unemployed committees, to unite them, in demonstrations and workers' meetings to spread and unify their struggles. As we have seen, the bourgeoisie won't abandon the battleground; the fight will increas­ingly become day-to-day and permanent. This fight is already going on before our eyes.

It is up to the most conscious and combative ele­ments, beginning to emerge in every country, to take up and propose the initiative of proletarian combat to their class as a whole.

To revolutionary organizations falls "the duty, as always, of going on ahead of the course of events, trying to hasten them", as Rosa Luxemburg said, for they are increasingly called on to take up the "political leadership". This is why the most combative workers, and the communist groups, must conduct this political battle daily in the factories, assemblies, committees and demon­strations. This is why they must stand up to the maneuvers of the unions. This is why they must put forward and defend concrete and immediate demands and propositions that lead to the exten­sion, regroupment and unification of struggles.

The result of this battle will determine the proletariat's ability to "carry out a mass political action" which will temporarily push back the bourgeoisie's attack and which (thanks to the combat's international generalization) will above all open the way to the proletariat's revolutionary assault on capitalism, its destruction and the arrival of communism. Nothing less.

RL

26.5.35

Unemployment today pitilessly mows down mill­ions of working lives, and has become the most important and marked phenomenon of social life in all countries. The months and years to come cannot but confirm this bloodletting.

Massive redundancy waves nourish this increase of unemployment, arriving on a labor market overflowing with the young generations who, a few years ago, in the industrialized countries, were still its principal source. These massive waves of lay-offs don't spare any sector of the working population: industrial workers and office workers, technicians or qualified manual workers, youngsters or adults, men and women, immigrants and non-immigrants. In this way, unemployment penetrates the whole of social life. Millions of people are struck by its blows. Millions more are threatened by it in their daily lives. Everyone suffers its press­ure.

This situation of mass unemployment which, far from being reduced in the months and years to come, will develop at a heightened pace, leads irresistibly to an absolute pauperization of the entire working class. This mass unemployment is the most acute and direct expression of the historic crisis of capitalism. It expresses in a clear and open manner its nature and its causes. The overproduction crisis, bringing with it the overproduction of labor power, is a crisis in which the capitalist relation of wage labor shows itself to be too narrow to contain all the riches produced by the labor of the past and present generations, and which therefore promises also the destruction of ‘labor power', the source of all wealth.

The most glaring expression of the historic crisis of capitalism, this massive and chronic unemployment whose gangrene has reached the whole breadth and depth of social life, is not something ‘new' in history . Before being ‘absorbed' by the death of millions upon millions of people during World War Two, it also profoundly marked the whole period of the ‘20s up until the end of the ‘30s. Contrary to all the ideas handed down and twisted by the dominant ideology, the profound demoralization, demobilization and final submission of the working class to the fascist, Stalinist or democratic brigands was not the fault of the unemployed being ‘prepared to throw them­selves into the arms of the first dictator to come along'', but was caused by the profound counter-revolution and by the betrayal of the political organizations of the proletariat which accompanied this powerful counter­revolution. Even during these years, unemploy­ment led, despite everything, to big struggles, for example in France and the USA. But the period was no longer one of revolution but of war, so that these struggles could finally be derailed thanks to the Stalinist and social democratic political organizations, a develop­ment greatly facilitated by a gigantic develop­ment of state capitalism with the policies of public works and massive rearmament.

Today, mass unemployment has made its reappear­ance, but in a totally different context. And in this situation, radically different to the ‘30s, where the yoke of the counter-revolution no longer crushes the working class, the strug­gle of the unemployed which begins to stir up threatens to accelerate the gigantic convulsions of the entire established social order. And the clumsiness with which the first slogans and the first demands of this struggle are ex­pressed should certainly not lead us to think the contrary since, as Karl Marx said, in draw­ing the balance sheet of 1848:

"In the first project for a constitution drawn up before the June days, one still finds the right to work, the first clumsy formulation summarizing the revolutionary demands of the proletariat, which was transformed into the right of welfare support. And so, where is the modern state which doesn't feed its needy one way or the other? The right to work is, from the bourgeois point of view, nonsense, a vain, pitiful desire. But behind the right to work, there is the power over capital; behind the power over capital, the appropriat­ion of the means of production, their subordin­ation to the associated working class, in other words the suppression of wage labor, of capital, and of their reciprocal relations. Behind the right to work was the June insurrection." (The Class Struggles in France)

The impact of unemployment

Unemployment is a particularly distinctive characteristic of the capitalist mode of prod­uction. In one way or another, at each stage of its historical evolution, it imposes itself as a situation inherent to the conditions of being a worker: since the appearance of capit­alism, coming out of the feudal mode of product­ion, through its subsequent development until the completion of the world market, throughout the period of decadence, the epoch of great crises, world wars and revolutions in which we live.

But if unemployment is inherent to the workers' conditions, where work takes the form of the commodity ‘labor power' being bought and sold in exchange for a wage according to the condit­ions of the market, we cannot conclude from this general truth that at all times unemploy­ment has the same significance, the same impact and the same determination on the working class, its consciousness and its struggle.

The unemployment of hundreds of thousands throughout Europe at the end of feudalism, when serfs, peasants and artisans were torn out of their previous conditions, losing their means of work and subsistence through the arrival and development of machinery and manufacturing - this did not have the same significance and the same impact as the unemployment which imposed itself with the advance of mechanization and of big industry in this historical period extending roughly from 1850 to 1900. This period certainly saw a permanent unemploy­ment, constantly augmented by the pauperization of the peasants and artisans, but on a much more limited scale than at the beginning of the 19th century, since unemployment was limit­ed to certain corporations or industrial bran­ches, due to the passing and contingent crises limited to these industrial branches.

With the First World War, the generalized and permanent crisis of the entire capitalist mode of production, sparing no country, corporation or industrial branch, gave rise to another kind of unemployment within the working popul­ation. This unemployment, the characteristics of which are peculiar to our epoch of decadence, is more different again than were the previous forms of unemployment from each other.

The unemployment given birth to by the shudder­ings of the world crisis of capital tends first of all to become permanent. Leaving aside periods of war in which the workers, like the rest of the population, are occupied with either killing each other or with produc­ing the arms necessary for the massacre, massive unemployment dominates the workers' conditions: from 1920 to 1940, 20 years of generalized unemployment in all the industrialized countries. The immense butchery of the Second World War, with its 50 million dead and more, and the employment of those hands which hadn't been maimed during the post-war recon­struction of a world ravaged by destruction, merely allowed the question of unemployment to be postponed for a dozen years, hardly more. From the end of the ‘60s on, unemployment made its reappearance as a fundamental question. And it could only be contained and limited to young people throughout the ‘70s through economic escapism - the inflationist policy of generalized debt which marked the ‘years of illusion'.

Today, the crisis assumes its full dimensions, imposing itself, and new waves of unemployment, in a literally explosive manner.

It's under these conditions that the question of unemployment acquires a different significance for the development of class consciousness and the class struggle, a very different significance to that prevailing in the last cent­ury.

Last century, the consciousness which could be determined by unemployment within the working class could only be very limited. Never, in this epoch, did unemployment appear to be an irreversible situation. Unemployment is very cruel for the working class whenever it strikes, but the period itself was totally different. Capitalism was constantly overturning the cond­itions of production. From each crisis it drew new energy, emerging reinforced to contin­ue its triumphal march across the world. It was the epoch of colonization, during which hundreds of millions of people emigrated to­wards gigantic continents: America, Africa, Asia. Alongside the massive emigration of the populations of Europe, the social origin of the unemployed - serfs, peasants, or artisans - permitted the bourgeoisie to use this mass of the unemployed to put a general pressure on the whole working class, its conditions of work and existence, and on its wages; often enough the unemployed were used by the emp­loyers as ‘blacklegs' and strike-breakers. Even if we are dealing with an unemployment produced by a crisis in a key industrial branch, the mutual exclusiveness or else the opposition reigning between the different branches of industry made the impact of unemp­loyment on the whole working class and its consciousness very limited. Moreover, the existence of an ‘industrial reserve army', with the resulting pressure on wages, didn't play a particularly positive role in the unif­ication of the class and the development of its consciousness. Apart from the great crisis of 1847 which spared no category or sector of workers, and the Luddite movement during the very first developments of mechanization, the unemployed and unemployment in general did not play a particular role in the advancement of the class struggle of the last century.

This situation changed radically with the beg­inning and uncontrollable advance of the decadence of capitalism. The unemployed, in their immense majority, are no longer peasants or artisans, but workers or employees who over generations have been integrated into industrial production. It's no longer one category or one particular corporation where the workers are victims of unemployment, but all of them, as is the case for every town, region or count­ry. This unemployment is no longer conjunct­ural, but irreversible, without a future. This unemployment which concentrates within itself all the characteristics of the decadence of capitalism and is one of its principal manifestations can't help but determine, with­in the working class, qualitatively different reactions to those of the last century.

And so, in the aftermath of World War One, in Germany for example, the unemployed were often in the avant-garde of the revolutionary move­ment. Whereas the unions of the last century did not include the unemployed in their ranks, again in Germany, or in Russia, with the work­ing class advancing towards the international revolution, we find a strong proportion of the unemployed in the revolutionary organizations.

By profoundly and indiscriminately penetrating all the ranks of the working class, unemployment creates a situation common to the whole working population, in which all the barriers of category, corporation, factory, locality, region and nation disappear, in order to show up what the entire working class has in common - its situation, conditions, interests - thereby pushing aside all specificities in the face of the conditions and perspectives which the crisis of capitalism imposes. It's a situation in which the working class becomes conscious that "it doesn't suffer a particular wrong, but every wrong." In this way, even outside periods of open struggle, the development of generalized unemployment acts to upset, like the joker in the pack, all the little measures through which the bourgeoisie and its states, try to tie down and slow up the class, without even daring to hope that they can stop it al­together. It tends to rapidly dissolve the entire corporatist spirit transmitted and cul­tivated by the unions for years.

Not only does unemployment tend to dissolve the corporatist spirit, but in the same movement it faces the entire working class with fundamental questions which urgently call for fundamental solutions.

In order that the social revolution be possible, Rosa Luxemburg had already declared at the beg­inning of the century: "The social terrain must be laboriously ploughed over, so that that which is at the bottom appears on the sur­face, while what is on the surface is buried deeply." (The Mass Strike, the Party and the Unions)

Mass unemployment, generalized, chronic and with no way out, is in the process of carrying out this work. There is nothing more powerful to today than the development of unemployment to profoundly dash all the illusions of the past, to bridge over separations and bring to the surface all that unites the working class in the face of the generalized crisis of capital­ism.

Unemployment and the question of state capitalism

We have affirmed here the fact that, in our epoch, the development of unemployment has played and will play an extremely important role in the development of class consciousness and in the class struggle in general. In the introduction to this article, we also said that even in one of the blackest periods of the workers' movement, in the ‘30s, one of the last surges of the working class before being mobilized for the Second World War, was based on the struggle against unemployment. It must be understood that at this time, the smashing of any revolutionary perspective by the great wave of the counter-revolution and the react­ionary work of the parties who had betrayed the proletariat didn't permit the working class to trace a revolutionary perspective, so that all its struggles ended in defeat. That's the essence of the question.

But to get a better grasp of what distinguishes our period even within this period of decadence, and in particular what makes it differ­ent from the ‘30s, we must take into consider­ation the immense development of state capital­ism which accompanied and facilitated the drag­ging of the working class into the war.

During the years which preceded the Second World War, the different national states eng­aged all their economic resources, disregarding the debts they ran up, in order to finance pub­lic works and massive armaments build-ups under the direction of the state. By the eve of the war, these projects had soaked up a large part of the unemployment. Thus, in the USA for example:

"The gap between production and consumption was attacked from three sides:

1. Based on growing debts, the state carried out a series of vast public works (...)

2. The state raised the mass purchasing power of the workers:

a) through introducing collective labor ag­reements with minimum wage guarantees and the limitation of the working day while at the same time strengthening the position of the workers' organizations, the unions;

b) through creating unemployment insurance and other social measures in order to prevent a further fall in the living standards of the broad masses;

3) The state attempted, through a series of measures, such as the limitation of agricultur­al production through subsidies, to raise the agricultural income high enough so that the majority of farmers could again achieve a middle class income." (Fritz Sternberg, The Conflict of the Century)

One must not on the other hand forget that this intervention of the state meant at the same time an extremely powerful enmeshment and policing of the population. To continue with the example of the USA, we ,can point out: "It was one of the most decisive transformat­ions in the American social structure, that under the New Deal a complete change (in the situation of the unions - ICC) took place. Under the New Deal, the formation of unions was encouraged through all means (...) In a short space of time between 1933 to 1939 the number of union members more than trebled. It was now more than double what it had been during the best years of prosperity before the crisis. It was greater than at any previous moment in American history." (ibid)

The perspective of mass unemployment

One cannot grasp the decisive impact of unemp­loyment on the social situation of the industrialized countries if one isn't clearly consc­ious of the fact that, far from being conjunctural, it is irreversible. Neither can one do so without having understood that, far from being at its height, it's still only at its beginning. Before responding to the question ‘Will unemployment continue to develop, and if so, how?', we can consider what conditions would have to come into being in order simply to maintain it at its present level. Even when counting on a recovery of the world econ­omy which today is already running out of steam, the OECD, which never shies away from optimistic affirmations, concluded in 1983, in its report on economic perspectives:

"In order to maintain unemployment at its pres­ent level, in the light of the expected inc­rease in the working population, 18 to 20 million jobs would have to be created from now ‘til the end of the decade. Moreover, 15 million additional jobs would be needed if we want to return to the unemployment level of 1979, when 19 million people were out of work.

This would amount to creating 20,000 jobs daily between 1984 and 1989, whereas after the first oil shock, between 1975 and 1980, the 24 member countries haven't managed more than 11,500 respectively." (OECD Report 1983)

So we see already that any return to the past is impossible. And in relation to the present situation, we can say that:

"There are already more than 2.5 million unemp­loyed in France according to official figures, 2.7 million in Spain, 3.2 million in Britain, 2.5 million in West Germany, and in the world's leading economic power, the USA, 8.8 million. Already 17.1% of the active population is unem­ployed in Holland, 19.3% in Belgium, 25% in Portugal, according to the same official fig­ures." (Manifesto on the problem of unemploy­ment, Revolution Internationale, May 1985)

There you have the simple, clear and terribly tangible result. Unemployment accounts presently for 10 to 12% on average of the active population of the industrialized countries. It is irreversible, and worse still, the new recession now looming will in the coming months and years sweep an even greater mass of people into the pool of unemployment.

In the last issue of this review, we already noted this acceleration:

"With the slow-down of the recovery, these last months have witnessed an upswing of unemploy­ment: 600,000 additional unemployed for the EEC in January, 300,000 alone in West Germany which, with this progression, beat its own rec­ord of 1953 with 2.62 million unemployed." (‘The dollar: the emperor has no clothes', IR 41)

The evolution of unemployment is all the more rapid, its consequences all the more serious and profound, for more and more being directly nourished by redundancies. When unemployment was still expressed principally by the diffic­ulty of the young generations to find jobs, its evolution wasn't necessarily coupled with a fall in the numbers actively employed. Today this is the case. This growing augmentation of the mass of the unemployed and its corollary, the diminution of the wage-earning population, has at its direct consequence the quasi-bankruptcy of all the unemployment insurance funds. The growing number of benefits to be paid, and a drop in the number of contributions from wages, renders any system of social insur­ance or support impossible. The unemployment insurance schemes, to the extent that they exist - which is only the case for a small num­ber of countries - were never a present from the state. The payments made as indemnities to the temporarily unemployed stem from oblig­atory contributions taken directly from wages. In situations where the rate of unemployment is low and the periods of unemployment are short, such a system can even prove itself to be financially ‘worthwhile' for the state which administers it, like any insurance system. But this becomes quite impossible in a situation of crisis and massive unemployment. In situations such as today, while contributions increase unceasingly, the payments are reduced to next to nothing for shorter and shorter periods, and the funds are constantly in the red, with a growing deficit.

To conclude this rapid survey of the perspect­ives of unemployment, we can affirm:

- unemployment will become more and more mass­ive in the months and years to come, with the unemployed becoming the most important category of the population. The great period of unemp­loyment looming ahead of us, and which began a long time ago with what was called youth unemp­loyment, has nothing conjunctural about it; it is irreversible. It is the most direct and most crying expression of the historic crisis of capital, of wage labor and their reciprocal relations;

- all the insurance and security schemes are not for the future, but a thing of the past. Capitalism cannot digest mass unemployment. The unemployed cannot expect any presents from the state. They'll only get what they win themselves. In other words, if capital, even with its welfare assistance and massive state intervention, can no longer through its judic­ial, social and economic laws ensure a link between the forces and the means of production, between the commodities produced and the needs of society, these means of production and of subsistence still continue to exist, and through their struggle the unemployed can and will continually try to snatch them from the hands of capitalism.

Within the general struggle of labor against capital, the struggle of the unemployed against the situation imposed on them expresses trans­parently the nature and the perspective of the workers' struggle: the subordination of all wealth to the satisfaction of human needs - even if, as Marx said, "Revolutionary demands are expressed in clumsy formulations." There is nothing astonishing about that to the ext­ent that unemployment contains and expresses the whole condition of being a worker. A situation in which the working class touches the roots of its own condition faced with a world whose anachronistic laws come to light with this immense overproduction, which engend­ers nothing but misery, degeneration and death, whereas it could free humanity from an immense burden.

It is in this context that the humanitarian propagandists, in whose mouths the word ‘solid­arity' takes on the meaning of begging for charity, reveal their reactionary nature.

Their solidarity and ours

The exploitation of the notion of ‘solidarity' to serve ends which have nothing to do either with the needs of the workers' struggles, and even less with the perspective of the emancipation of the working class, is nothing new.

We've seen it at work these last years in the work of corporatist isolation taken in hand by the different unions, and in particular in the miners' strike in Britain. With the develop­ment of unemployment this necessarily takes on a caricature form, which at least has the advantage of throwing light on all this hypoc­risy and ineffectiveness.

Ever since the social insurance systems began to reveal their bankruptcy, their inability to face up to, or at least hide, the most acute aspects of the condition of unemployment, the appeals for solidarity ‘against the social dis­ease' have not ceased. The state, to begin with, levies new social insurance taxes on wages - naturally in the name of ‘solidarity'; charit­able institutions appeal for gifts. The unions, old and new, when they are not trying to mobilize workers behind nationalist campaigns along the lines of ‘produce German, French, etc', are appealing for ‘work sharing'.

To begin with, the new social taxes or the raising of the old ones doesn't solve anything and can only have a very limited impact on the conditions of the unemployed. With the const­ant increase in unemployment, the hiking of these contributions becomes an endless spiral, grinding down the wages from which already several people often have to live. In fact, they are not ‘contributions' and still less a ‘gesture of solidarity', but a levy on the crisis of capitalism imposed on a working pop­ulation which already amply suffers and takes the lion's share of supporting the unemployed, since the unemployed are not on the planet Mars but in the families of the workers. When they are alone, their situation rapidly becomes unlivable.

As far as the ‘gifts' and other ‘charitable gestures' are concerned, their ineffectiveness in relation to the immensity of the problem speaks for itself. This business of ‘solidar­ity' through ‘charity' takes us back many years, to the ‘30s:

"Society was engaged to resolve its local prob­lems through an increase of its charitable works. As late as 1931, President Hoover was of the opinion that:

‘The maintenance of a spirit of mutual assist­ance through voluntary gifts is of infinite importance for the future of America...No gov­ernment action, no economic doctrine or project can replace this responsibility imposed by God on the individual man or woman towards their neighbor' (Address on unemployment relief, 18 October 1931).

However, less than a year later, ‘The respons­ibility imposed by God' revealed its impotence. The funds of the state and of local support were exhausted. The radicalization of the workers as much as the masses progressed rapid­ly: hunger marches, all kinds of spontaneous demonstrations, even looting became more and more frequent." (Living Marxism, no. 4, August 1938)

Of all these approaches calling for solidarity in order to face up to the question of unemployment, there remains to be considered the one preached specifically by the unions, the famous ‘work-sharing'. For a hell of a long time now the unions, especially the social democratic ones, have tended to polarize the attention of the working class around the ‘struggle for the 35-hour week'. The basis of the union ideology which preaches this ‘job sharing' is a certain vision of the present crisis. In their ideological work, these unions defend the point of view that the present crisis which gives birth to mass unemployment is merely a conjunctural crisis, a changeover period leading to a new expansion of the world economy or the rule of new technologies. It's in this bright perspective that they call on the working class to accept their derailment and a mythological future.

These slogans about ‘work sharing' aren't so new. During the ‘30s even, the IWW[1] put forward similar orientations for action:

"The unemployed unions of the IWW were of the opinion that charity cannot resolve the quest­ion of unemployment, and that's why it was necessary to send the workless back to work, shortening the working day of all workers to four hours. Their policy was to make ‘indust­rial strike pickets' to impress the workers at work." (Ibid)

It should be said straight away that such act­ions never lead, even minimally, to the desired results. On the contrary, one couldn't dream of a better way of setting one part of the working class against another. And indeed, behind all these masquerades of solidarity, that's fundamentally the only goal the whole bourgeoisie and the different set-ups which belong to it through their ideologies and their actions are willing to consider the problem of the unemployed. As long as they can be dealt with as the ‘needy' and as people to be ‘helped' they are prepared to take account of a certain ‘necessary solidarity' to the extent that it's the working class which pays.

All of these slogans have not succeeded in mobilizing very much, being greeted with suspicion if not outright disgust. And it's easy to understand why. But this failure to mobilize the mass of the unemployed, who find themselves in such a dramatic situation, is in a certain sense the bourgeoisie's victory. A victory without glory or style perhaps, but a victory nonetheless. In the present situation, it's better for the state and the unions to gain small victories than to achieve big victories at great gatherings, since the risks and what's at stake are immense. With the unemployed, these risks are doubled since, beyond the fac­tories and offices, they are difficult to con­tain in the traditional union structures and, in the face of the pressure of their needs, the flabbiness and the traditional demands of the unions are ill-adapted.

It's happened once in history that the bourg­eoisie made the error of gathering the mass of the unemployed, believing itself to be creating an army easily manipulated against the rest of the working class. It quickly got its fingers burned, and isn't prepared to repeat the same mistake. That was in 1848 when, as Marx rep­orts:

"Alongside the mobile guard, the government decided to rally round itself an army of industrial workers. A hundred thousand workers, flung onto the streets by the crisis and the revolution, were enrolled by Minister Marie in so-called National Ateliers. Under this grandiose name was hidden nothing else than the employment of the workers on tedious, monoton­ous, unproductive earthworks at a wage of 23 sous. English workhouses in the open - that is what these National Ateliers were. The provincial government believed that it had .formed in them a second proletarian army against the workers themselves. This time the bourgeoisie was mistaken in the National Ateliers, just as it was mistaken in the mobile guard. It had created an army for mutiny." (The Class Struggles in France, Moscow Edition)

It's in this way that every gathering of the unemployed in demonstrations or in committees is a force to be reckoned with. Gathered mass­ively, the unemployed are directly led to become conscious of the immensity of the prob­lem they face, and the banality of the union speeches. Not only do the unemployed, when they are mobilized, become conscious of their strength, but also of the links uniting them to the whole working class, in relation to which they do not form a separate entity.

From this point of view, there is only one struggle of the working class. Over a period of years the question of unemployment has thus been particularly present, a determining factor in the struggle. The only difference today is that the unemployed threaten to break their isolation and are refusing to accept their fate. Does this mean they should conduct a separate struggle to that of the whole working class? Certainly not. Basing oursel­ves on past experience of the struggles, we can say that the causes of their defeat lay precisely in corporatist, regional isolation, of which the unions are champions. Today the workers' struggle is showing every sign of enlarging its social scope with the appearance of the struggle of the unemployed; and this enlargement can and will contribute towards breaking down all the separations which, until now, have been shown to be poison for the whole working class. We must therefore strug­gle with all our might against the new separat­ions, opposing the workers to one another. These were used by the unions yesterday to lead the struggles against redundancies to defeat, and they are trying to introduce the same thing into the general struggle against unemployment.

If the unemployed in their struggles are unable to count on the active solidarity of the workers still with jobs, they won't be able to make the state back down. The same is true if the unemployed, in one way or another, don't extend their solidarity to the employed work­ers in struggle.

This extension of the class struggle, which is still in embryo, not only contains the possib­ility of creating within society a balance of forces favorable to the working class in the defense of its immediate interests. The exten­sion and unification of the working class makes it possible to outline a perspective which will finally free the horizon from the ravages of the historical crisis of capitalism.

Prenat

---

[1] ‘Industrial Workers of the World' - a ‘revolutionary syndicalist' organization at the beginning of this century. For a history of its degeneration and decline, see Internationalism no. 43

The year 1984 ended in a fanfare for American capitalism with the re-election of Reagan as President of the United States. During his camp­aign, he boasted that he had beaten the economic crisis, that inflation had gone down to 3.2% in 1984, that unemployment had been reduced from 9.6% in 1983 to 7.5% in 1984, that production had been revitalized with a record growth rate of 6.8% in 1984 and finally that the supremacy of ‘King Dollar' had been driven to unprecedented heights in the exchange rates. A veritable high mass was celebrated to the greater glory of Amer­ican capitalism, its power and vitality, to make everyone believe that after years of defeat, the economic policy of the great Reagan, the famous ‘Reaganomics', had at last found the solution to the world economic crisis which has weighed on the whole world economy for 20 years.

American capitalism is powerful - no-one can deny it. Not just the power of its weapons but above all the power of its economy which dominates most of the world economy. The US is the leading prod­ucer, supplying 20-25% of the total world mar­ket, the main financial power whose currency dominates the capitalists of the entire world. 80% of all exchanges are carried on with the US; in 1982 it held 77% of the money reserves of the central banks of the industrialized countries. The entire world economy depends on the good health of American capitalism. But if American capitalism is indeed powerful, it is in bad health and the rest of the world economy along with it.

Once the election euphoria was over, there was no more talk of record growth rates for the GNP for 1985. The tone has changed in Washington. The new slogan of the Reagan Administration is "The Amer­ican economy must prepare a soft landing." To the extent that a ‘landing' of the American economy means a ‘landing' of the world economy and to the extent that we are all passengers on this plane together, we can only wonder at the meaning of this announcement by the pilot.

Why a landing?

If the US economy was as healthy as Reagan claim­ed, then why all this talk now about a ‘landing'? The American recovery, barely felt in the Euro­pean economies (see Table 1) had no effect on the under-developed countries who continued to see their economies systematically fall apart. Not only has the US recovery not been a world recov­ery, it was certainly a fleeting one, an aborted recovery.

Table I	USA	OECD-Europe	1984
Growth of GNP	6.8%	2.4%
Inflation	3.2%	2.6% (West Germany) 6.9% (France, Italy, Canada, UK) (average) 37.0% (Greece, Iceland, Portugal, Turkey) (average)
Unemployment	7.5%	10.7%

 

There has been a steep decline in the world econ­omy in relation to the ‘70s. The US today is incapable of repeating what it could still do in the past: temporarily prime the world economy, act as its locomotive force. No economic policy today can mask the contradictions of capitalism. The American recovery was only possible at the price of incredible debt: the US public debt is more than 1500 billion dollars and the accumul­ated debt of the state, private companies and households has reached the astronomical figure of 6000 billion dollars (twice the US GNP) while at the same time, for 1985 foreign investments in the US are greater than US investments abroad. The US has become a debtor nation in relation to the rest of the world (see IR 41, ‘The Dollar: The Emperor's Clothes'). But even the gigantic accumulated budget and trade deficits of the US are unable to absorb the surplus from the over­-production of the world economy. The US cannot continue this policy without risking a rapid, catastrophic monetary crisis around the dollar. They must urgently try to make a landing. The US cannot continue to allow such budgetary and commercial deficits. The plane hasn't got a lot of fuel left and its engines do not function well.

Only one landing field: World recession      

With the swamp the world economy is in, a decline or halt in the growth of the US economy can only spell a deep and long-lasting descent into recession with no hope of getting out. Europe and Japan have only been able to maintain their relative growth because of the opening up of the American market. If the market contracts, they will be the first to be affected, their exports threatened and their production risks collapse.

The landing that the pilot talked about is going to be on an incline, going down. During the last recession, US production fell by 11% in 1981 and 1982. But the pilot wants to be reassuring - he's promising a ‘graceful' landing.

A soft landing

"All's well", we're told, but the passengers are starting to get nervous. In recent months the dollar has been like a yo-yo, carrying more than 10% in just a few months. Bank failures in the US abound and, like in 1929, panicky customers queue up at closed windows. Stormy weather ahead and the plane is already shaky.

The economists in Washington had predicted a growth rate of 3% in the first quarter of 1985. But after continually lowering their estimates from 2.8% to 2.1% to 1.6%, the American govern­ment finally announced in May an annual projected growth rate of 0.7%. The pilot has lost his bear­ings and doesn't know where he's headed.

One can only have misgivings about the pilot's abilities. The failure of Reagan's so-called recovery marks the bourgeoisie's impotence in the world economic crisis of overproduction. Despite all the propaganda around them, Reagan's recipes are not new. They are the classic recipes of state capitalism: tax cuts to prime consumer spending, large-scale armaments programs to reflate industry ($195 billion in ‘83; $184 billion in ‘84). To attenuate the shocks of the economic crisis, to prevent the collapse of entire sectors of production, the Reagan state is, like all the others, obliged to intervene more and more, to control the economic process more and more closely (see Table 2). All his speeches to the contrary, Reagan has all but nationalized the bankrupt Continental Illinois and has subsidized American agriculture with a $2 billion budget. But these tried and true recipes from the past 40 years are no longer able to prevent recession and the collapse of the world economy.

Table 2	The public sector portion of total borrowing by non-financial economic agents (1973-1982)
USA	1973	1974	1975	1976	1977	1978	1979	1980	1981	1982
10.5	14.2	46.4	30.8	21.8	18.4	14.7	27.1	28.1	50.2

 

Reagan wants a ‘soft landing' but for the proletariat of the entire world, this means more misery, more unemployment. With the combativity of the working class as it is today, with the aggravation of the economic crisis, the social situation is potentially explosive. In these conditions it's understandable why the bourgeoisie is desperately trying to hold back the plunge into recession, why it hopes for a ‘soft landing'. But how are they going to get it? The question for the economists of the entire world is no longer ‘how to get out of the crisis?' but ‘how to fall into it as softly as possible?'

Today Reagan is appealing to his European and Japanese allies to reflate their economies in order to counter-balance the effect on the world economy of the decline in the US growth rate. But this measure can only be another temporary pall­iative because that's all world capitalism has left: to try with all its might to hold back the inevitable spiraling plunge into a recession such as humanity has never before known.

Slowing down the recession means further debt for all nations. Such a policy, along with unemploy­ment, bankruptcies, etc can only lead to an ex­plosion of inflation. Today, inflation continues to ravage the periphery of capitalism in under­developed countries. Although the developed coun­tries thought they had avoided the problem of inflation, it has in fact been rising in recent months. In the US inflation was 3.2% in 1984 but from April ‘84 to April ‘85 it was 3.7%.

A ‘landing' into a recession will indeed takes place but it will not be made ‘gently'. No economist of the bourgeoisie dares to predict the consequences of the end of the recovery in the US. They are catastrophic: unemployment, poverty, bankruptcy and inflation. But if these consequen­ces are catastrophic for the capitalist economy, it is above all on the political level that they will be felt. The aggravation of the living cond­itions of the working class can only mean an intensification of the wave of class struggle be­gun in the autumn of 1983. With the collapse of the capitalist economy, and in view of the present combativity of the proletariat, only the revolutionary perspective is a real alternative.

JJ

 9.6.85

In these articles we have looked at the debates among communists on the relationship between the proletarian revolution and the national question:

• on the eve of capitalism’s decadence over the issue of whether revolutionaries should support ‘the right of nations to self-determination’ (see IR 34 [17]);
• during the first imperialist world war within the Zimmerwald Left on the implications of the new conditions of decadence for the old ‘minimum programme’ of social democracy and the class nature of national wars (see IR 37 [18]).

In this third and last articles we want to examine the most crucial testing time for the revolutionary movement: the historic events between the seizure of power by the Russian workers in 1917 and the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920; from the first optimistic step towards the destruction of capitalism to the first signs of defeat of the workers’ struggles and the degeneration of the movement in Russia.

In these years the errors of the Bolsheviks on the issue of self-determination were put into practice and in the search for allies the young Communist International embarked on an opportunist course towards support for national liberation struggles in the colonies. If the CI was still a revolutionary force in this period, it had already taken the first fatal steps towards its capitulation to the bourgeoisie’s counter-revolution. This only underlines the necessity today to make a critique of this proletarian experience in order to avoid a repetition of its mistakes; a point many in the revolutionary milieu still fail to understand (see article on the IBRP in IR 41).

THE ERROR OF ‘SELF-DETERMINATION’ IN PRACTICE

The establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia in 1917 concretely posed the question: which class rules? In the face of the threat of worldwide soviet power, the bourgeoisie, whatever its national aspirations, was confronted with its own struggle for survival as a class. Even in the most remote corners of the old Tsarist empire, the issue posed by history was the confrontation between the classes – not ‘democratic rights’ or the ‘completion of the bourgeois revolution’. Nationalist movements became the pawns of the imperialist powers in their struggle to destroy the proletarian threat:

In the midst of this class war, the Bolsheviks were soon forced to accept that the blanket recognition of self-determination could only lead to the counter-revolution: as early as 1917 the Ukraine had been granted independence only to ally with French imperialism and turn against the proletariat. Within the Bolshevik Party there was a strong opposition to this policy, as we have seen, led by Bukharin and Piatakov and including Dzerzhinsky, Lunacharsky and others. In 1917 Piatakov had almost carried the debate in the Party, putting forward the slogan “Away with all frontiers!” The outcome, under Lenin’s influence, was a compromise: self-determination for the working class of each country. This still left all the contradictions of the policy intact.

The group around Piatakov, which held a majority in the Party in the Ukraine, opposed this compromise and called instead for the centralization of all proletarian forces in the Communist International as a way to maintain class unity against national fragmentation. This argument of the Left Bolsheviks was ridiculed by Lenin at the time, but from the perspective of the later degeneration of the Russian revolution, their emphasis on proletarian internationalism appears doubly valid. When Lenin denounced their position as ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ he was betraying a national vision of the role of revolutionaries, who take their starting point from the interests of the world revolution.

It was in the most developed capitalist parts of the Tsarist empire that the disastrous results of the Bolsheviks’ policy were clearest and it was here that Rosa Luxemburg concentrated her attack on self-determination in practice (published after her murder). Both Poland and Finland contained well-developed nationalist bourgeoisies who feared above all a proletarian revolution. Both were granted independence, only to rely for their existence on the backing of the imperialist powers. Under the slogan of self-determination the bourgeoisies of these countries massacred workers and communists, dissolved the soviets and allowed their territory to be used as a springboard for the armies of imperialism and the white reaction.

Luxemburg saw all this as a bitter confirmation of her own pre-war polemic against Lenin:

“The Bolsheviks are in part responsible for the fact the military defeat was transformed into the collapse and a breakdown of Russia. Moreover, the Bolsheviks themselves have, to a great extent, sharpened the objective difficulties of this situation by a slogan which they placed in the foreground of their policies: the so-called right of self-determination of peoples, or – something which was really implicit in this slogan – the disintegration of Russia.... While Lenin and his comrades clearly expected that, as champions of national freedom even to the extent of ‘separation’, they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, etc., into so many faithful allies of the Russian revolution, we have witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these ‘nations’ used their freshly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian revolution as its mortal enemy, and under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself.” (The Russian Revolution)

Putting self-determination into practice after 1917 exposed the contradiction between the original intention of Lenin to help weaken imperialism and the resulting constitution of bulwarks against the proletarian revolution, where the bourgeoisie was able to channel working class struggles into national wars and massacres. The balance sheet of this experience therefore is strictly negative.

THE FIRST CONGRESS OF THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL

The Third (Communist) International, in the invitation to its First Congress in 1919, proclaimed the entry of capitalism into its decadent phase, “...the epoch of the disintegration and collapse of the entire capitalist world system.”

The CI put forward a clear international perspective for the working class: the entire capitalist system was no longer progressive and must be destroyed by the mass action of the workers organised in workers’ councils or soviets. The world revolution which had begun with the seizure of political power by the soviets in Russia showed concretely that the destruction of the capitalist state was on the immediate agenda.

In the first year of its work, the CI made no specific reference to support for national liberation struggles, or to the ‘right of nations to self-determination’. Instead, it clearly posed the need for international class struggle. The CI was born at the height of the revolutionary wave which had brought the imperialist war to a shuddering halt and forced the warring bourgeoisies to unite in their efforts to destroy this proletarian threat. The class struggle in the capitalist heartlands – in Germany, France, Italy, Britain and America – gave an enormous impulse to the efforts of the International to clarify the needs of the world revolution which then appeared on the brink of victory, and for this reason the major texts of the First Congress in many ways represent a zenith in the CI’s clarity.

The Manifesto of the CI “to the proletariat of the entire world” gave a very broad, historical perspective to the national question, beginning from the recognition that “The national state, which imparted a mighty impulse to capitalist development, has become too narrow for the further development of the productive forces.” Within this perspective it dealt with two specific questions:

- the small, oppressed nations of Europe which possessed only an illusory independence and before the war had relied on the uninterrupted antagonisms between the imperialist powers. These nations had their own imperialist presentations and now relied for guarantees on Allied imperialism, which under the slogan of ‘national self-determination’ oppressed and coerced them: “The small peoples can be assured the opportunity of a free existence only by the proletarian revolution, which will liberate the productive forces of all countries from the constraint of the national state...

- the colonies which had also been drawn into the war to fight for imperialism. This posed sharply their role as suppliers of cannon fodder to the major powers, and had led to a series of open insurrections and revolutionary ferment in India, Madagascar, Indo-China, etc. Again, the Manifesto emphasised that:

“The emancipation of the colonies is possible only in conjunction with the emancipation of the metropolitan working class. The workers and peasants not only of Annam, Algiers and Bengal, but also of Persia and Armenia, will gain their opportunity of independent existence only when the workers of England and France have overthrown Lloyd George and Clemenceau and taken state power into their own hands... Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia! The hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe will also be the hour of your own liberation!"

The message of the CI was clear. The liberation of the masses throughout the world would only come through the victory of the proletarian revolution, whose key was to be found in the capitalist heartlands of western Europe with the struggles of the strongest and most experienced concentrations of workers. The way forward for the masses in the underdeveloped countries lay in uniting “under the banner of workers’ soviets, of revolutionary struggle for power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, under the banner of the Third International...”

These brief statements, based as they were on recognition of the decadence of capitalism, still shine out today as beacons of clarity. But they hardly represent a coherent strategy to be followed by the proletariat and its party in a revolutionary period; it was still necessary to clarify the vital question of the class nature of national liberation struggles, as well as to define the attitude of the working class to the oppressed masses and non-exploiting strata in the underdeveloped countries, who had to be won over to the side of the proletariat in its struggle against the world bourgeoisie.

These questions were taken up by the Second Congress of the CI in 1920. But if this Congress, with its much greater participation and deeper debate, saw many advances on the level of concretising the lessons of the Russian revolution and the need for a centralised, disciplined organisation of revolutionaries, we also saw here the first major signs of a regression from the clarity reached by the First Congress – the beginnings of tendencies towards opportunism and centrism within the young Communist International. Any attempt to draw up a balance sheet of the work of the Second Congress must begin from these weaknesses which were to prove fatal when the revolutionary wave subsided.

Opportunism was able to take root in the conditions of isolation and exhaustion in the Russian bastion. Even by the time of the First Congress the revolution in Germany had suffered a serious blow with the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg and over 20,000 workers, but Europe was ablaze with revolutionary struggles which still threatened to topple the bourgeoisie. By the time the delegates gathered for the Second Congress the balance of forces had already begun to tip substantially in the bourgeoisie’s favour and the Bolsheviks in Russia were forced to think more in terms of a long drawn-out siege than a swift defeat of world capitalism. So whereas the emphasis at the First Congress had been on the imminence of the revolution in western Europe and the spontaneous energies of the working class, the Second Congress stressed:

• the problem of organising the soviet movement throughout the world;
• the need to build up the defence of the bastion in Russia.

Weighed down by the harsh necessities of famine and civil war, the Bolsheviks began to compromise the original clarity of the Communist International in favour of expedient alliances with dubious and even outright bourgeois elements among the debris of the bankrupt Second International, in order to build ‘mass parties’ in Europe which would give maximum aid to the bastion. The search for possible support among the national liberation struggles in the underdeveloped countries must be seen in this same light.

The cover for this opportunist course was the war against the left-wing in the International, announced by Lenin in his famous pamphlet ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder. In fact, in his opening speech to the Second Congress, Lenin still stressed that “Opportunism is our main enemy... In comparison with this task the correction of the mistakes of the ‘left’ trend in Communism will be an easy one.” (The Second Congress, vol.1, p.28). However, in a situation of reflux in the class struggle, the effect of this tactic could only open the door further to opportunism whilst weakening its most intransigent opponents, the left-wing. As Pannekoek wrote afterwards to the anarchist Muhsam:

“We regard the Congress as guilty of showing itself to be, not intolerant, but much too tolerant. We do not reproach the leaders of the Third International for excluding us; we censure them for seeking to include as many opportunists as possible. In our criticism, we are not concerned about ourselves, but about the tactics of communism; we do not criticise the secondary fact that we ourselves were excluded from the community of communists, but rather the primary fact that the Third International is following in western Europe a tactic both false and disastrous for the proletariat.” (Die Aktion, 19 March 1921)

This was to prove equally correct in the case of the CI’s position on national liberation struggles.

THE SECOND CONGRESS: “OPPORTUNISM IS OUR MAIN ENEMY”

The Theses on the National Colonial Question adopted at the Second Congress reveal above all an uneasy attempt to reconcile a principled internationalist position and denunciation of the bourgeoisie with direct support for what were termed ‘national-revolutionary’ movements in the backward countries and the colonies:

“As the conscious express of the proletarian class struggle to throw off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, and in accordance with its main task, which is the fight against bourgeois democracy and the unmasking of its lies and hypocrisy, the Communist Party should not place the main emphasis in the national question on abstract and formal principles, but in the first place on an exact evaluation of the historically given and above all economic milieu. Secondly it should emphasise the explicit separation of the interests of the oppressed classes, of the toilers, of the exploited, from the general concept of the national interest, which means the interests of the ruling class. Thirdly it must emphasise the equally clear division of the oppressed, dependent nations which do not enjoy equal rights from the oppressing, privileged nations, as a counter to the bourgeois democratic lie which covers over the colonial and financial enslavement of the vast majority of the world’s total population, by a tiny minority of the richest and most advanced capitalist countries, that is characteristic of the epoch of finance capital and imperialism.” (Second Thesis)

This established the primary task of the Communist Party as the struggle against bourgeois democracy, a point reiterated in many other texts of the CI. This was crucial to a marxist approach. The second emphasis was on the rejection of the 'national interest’ which belonged only to the bourgeoisie. As the Communist Manifesto had proclaimed with profound clarity over seventy years before, the workers have no fatherland to defend. The most fundamental antagonism in capitalist society is the struggle  between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which alone offers a revolutionary dynamic towards the destruction of capitalism and the creation of communism, and any attempt to blur this separation of historic interests consciously or unconsciously defends the interests of the ruling class.

It is in this sense that we must understand the third emphasis in the Second Thesis, which is much more vague, and remains a simple description of the situation of world imperialism, in which the majority of the underdeveloped countries was ruthlessly pillaged by a minority of the more highly developed capitalist countries. Even in the ‘oppressed countries’ there was no ‘national interest’ for the proletariat to defend. The struggle against patriotism was a basic principle of the workers’ movement which could not be broken, and further on, the Theses emphasised the primordial importance of the class struggle:

“From the principles set forth it follows that the whole policy of the Communist International must be based mainly on the union of the workers and toiling masses of all nations and countries in the common revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the landlords and of the bourgeoisie.” (Fourth Thesis, our emphasis)

There was, however, an ambiguity in this emphasis on the division between oppressed and oppressor nations, an ambiguity which was subsequently exploited to help to justify a policy of the proletariat giving direct support to national liberation struggles in the underdeveloped countries with the aim of ‘weakening’ imperialism. Thus, while it was necessary for the Communist Parties “to clarify constantly that only the soviet order is capable of assuring nations true equality by uniting first the proletariat and then the whole mass of toilers in the fight against the bourgeoisie,” in the same breath it was stated that it was necessary “to give direct support to the revolutionary movements in dependent nations and those deprived of their rights, through the Communist Parties of the countries in question.” (Ninth Thesis)

There is a further ambiguity introduced here: What is the exact class nature of this ‘revolutionary movement’? It is not a reference to the political milieu of the embryonic proletariat in the backward countries. The same uneasiness of terminology runs throughout the Theses, which sometimes talk of ‘revolutionary liberation’ movements, sometimes ‘national liberation’ movements. In addition, the actual form that this direct support should take was left to each individual Communist Party, where one existed.

There was at least a recognition in the Eleventh Thesis of the potential dangers in such support, for it warned that: “A determined fight is necessary against the attempt to put a communist cloak around revolutionary liberation movements that are not really communist in the backward countries. The Communist International has the duty to support the revolutionary movement in the colonies only for the purpose of gathering the components of the future proletarian parties... and training them to be conscious of their special tasks.... of fighting against the bourgeois democratic tendencies within their own nation. The Communist International should accompany the revolutionary movement in the colonies and the backward countries for part of the way should even make an alliance with it; it may not, however, fuse with it, but most unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement, be it only in embryo.”

The material issue here was whether national liberation struggles in the colonies still had a progressive character. It was not yet unequivocally clear that the epoch of bourgeois democratic revolutions was definitely over in Africa, Asia and the Far East. Even those communists in western Europe who during the war had opposed the slogan of ‘self-determination’ made an exception in the case of the colonies. It had not yet been settled by the experience of the proletariat that even in the farthest corners of the globe capitalist ascendancy had ended and that even the bourgeoisie in the colonies could only survive by turning against its ‘own’ proletariat.

But the most serious failure of the Second Congress was not to thrash out this question in open debate, especially when the thrust of many contributions from communists in the underdeveloped countries pointed towards a rejection of any support for the bourgeoisie, even in the colonies.

Within the Commission on the National and Colonial Question there was a debate around the ‘Supplementary Theses’ put forward by the Indian communist MN Roy who, while sharing many of the views of Lenin and the majority of the CI, high lighted a growing contradiction between bourgeois nationalist movements which pursued political independence while preserving capitalist order and the interests of the poor peasantry. Roy saw the most important task of the Communist International as the creation of: “communist organisations of peasants and workers in order to lead them to the revolution and the setting up of soviet power. In this way the masses of the people in the backward countries will be brought to communism not by capitalist development but by the development of class consciousness under the leadership of the proletariat of the advanced countries.”  (Supplementary Theses on the National and Colonial Question).

This would involve a fight against the domination of bourgeois nationalist movements.

In support of his Theses, Roy pointed to the rapid industrialisation of colonies like India, Egypt, the Dutch East Indies and China, with a consequent growth of the proletariat; in India there had been enormous strike waves with the development of an independent movement among the exploited masses outside the control of the nationalists.

The debate in the Commission was about whether it was correct in principle for the Communist International to support bourgeois nationalist movements in the backward countries. There was a tentative understanding that the imperialist bourgeoisie was actively encouraging such movements for its own reactionary purposes, as Lenin acknowledged in his introductory speech to the Congress:

“A certain understanding has emerged between the bourgeoisie of the exploiting countries and that of the colonies, so that very often even perhaps in most cases, the bourgeoisie of the oppressed countries, although they support national movements, nevertheless fight against all revolutionary movements and revolutionary classes with a certain degree of agreement with the imperialist bourgeoisie, that is to say together with it.” (The Second Congress, vol. 1, p. 111 our emphasis)

But the ‘solution’ to the divergence in the Commission, agreed by Roy, was to adopt both sets of Theses, replacing the words ‘bourgeois-democratic’ with ‘national-revolutionary’:

“The point about this is that as communists we will only support the bourgeois freedom movements in the colonial countries if these movements are really revolutionary and if their representatives are not opposed to us training and organising the peasantry in a revolutionary way. If that is no good, then the communists there also have a duty to fight against the reformist bourgeoisie...” (Ibid, our emphasis)

Given the great amount of uneasiness on the part of the CI in giving any support to nationalist movements, this was a clear case of fudging the issue; i.e. of centrism. The change in terminology had no substance in reality and only obscured the historic alternative posed by the entry of capitalism into its decadent epoch: either the international class struggle against the national interest of the bourgeoisie, or the subordination of the class struggle to the bourgeoisie and its counter-revolutionary nationalist movements. The acceptance of the possibility of support for national liberation struggles in the underdeveloped countries by centrist majority of the CI paved the way for more overt forms of opportunism.

THE BAKU CONGRESS AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF OPPORTUNISM

This opportunist tendency hardened after the Second Congress. Immediately afterwards a Congress of the Peoples of the East was held at Baku, at which the leaders of the Communist International re-affirmed their support for bourgeois nationalist movements and even took the step of issuing a call for a ‘holy war’ against British imperialism.

The policies pursued by the world party of the proletariat were more and more being dictated by the contingent needs of the defence of the Soviet Republic rather than by the interests of the world revolution. The Second Congress had established this as a major axis of the CI. The Baku Congress followed this axis, addressing itself particularly to those national minorities in countries adjacent to the besieged Soviet Republic where British imperialism was threatening to strengthen its influence and thus create new springboards for armed intervention against the Russian bastion.

The fine speeches at the Congress and the declaration of solidarity between the European proletariat and the peasants of the East, with many formally correct statements on the need for soviets and for revolution, were not enough to hide the opportunist course towards the indiscriminate backing of nationalist movements:

“We appeal, comrades, to the warlike feelings which once inspired the peoples of the East when these peoples, led by their great conquerors, advanced upon Europe. We know, comrades, that our enemies will say that we are appealing to the memory of the great conquering Caliphs of Islam. But we are convinced that yesterday (i.e. in the Congress – ICC) you drew your daggers and your revolvers not for aims of conquest, not to turn Europe into a graveyard – you lifted them in order, together with the workers of the whole world, to create a new civilisation, that of the free worker.” (Radek, quoted in Congress of the Peoples of the East, New Park, 1977, pp. 51-52)

The Manifesto issued by the Congress concluded with a summons to the peoples of the East to join “the first real holy war, under the red banner of the Communist International”; more specifically, a jihad against “the common enemy, imperialist Britain”.

Even at the time there was a reaction against these blatant attempts to reconcile reactionary nationalism with proletarian internationalism. Lenin himself warned against ‘painting nationalism red’. Significantly, Roy criticised the Congress before it was held, and refused to attend what he dubbed as “Zinoviev’s Circus”, while John Reed, the American left-wing communist, also objected bitterly to its “demagogy and display”.

However, such responses failed to address the roots of the opportunist course being followed, remaining instead on a centrist terrain of conciliation with more open expression of opportunism, and hiding behind the Theses of the Second Congress, which, to say the least covered a multitude of sins in the revolutionary movement.

Already in 1920 this opportunist course involved direct support to the bourgeois nationalist movement of Kemal Pasha in Turkey, even though at the time Kemal had given his support to the religious power of the Sultan. This was hardly the policy of the Communist International, as Zinoviev noted, but: “...at the same time we say that we are ready to help any revolutionary struggle against the British government.” (Congress, p.33). The very next year the leader of this ‘revolutionary struggle’ had the leaders of the Turkish Communist Party executed. Despite this, the Bolsheviks and the CI continued to see a ‘revolutionary potential’ in this nationalist movement until Kemal’s alliance with the Entente in 1923, choosing to ignore the massacre of workers and communists in favour of seeking an ally in a strategically important country on Russia’s borders.

The CI’s policies in Persia and the Far East had similarly disastrous results, proving that Kemal was no accident but simply an expression of the new epoch of capitalist decadence, in which nationalism and the proletarian revolution were utterly irreconcilable.

The results of all this opportunism were fatal for the workers’ movement. With the world revolution sinking into deeper and deeper defeat, and the proletariat in Russia exhausted and decimated by famine and civil war, the Communist International more and more became the foreign policy instrument of the Bolsheviks, who found themselves in the role of managers of Russian capital. From being a serious error within the workers’ movement, the policy of support for national liberation struggles was transformed by the late 1920s into the imperialist strategy of a capitalist power. A decisive moment in this involution was the CI’s policy of support for the viciously anti-working class nationalists of the Kuoming-tang in China, which led in 1927 to the betrayal and massacre of the Shanghai workers’ uprising. Such overt acts of treason demonstrated that the Stalinist faction, which had by then won almost complete dominion over the CI and its parties, was no longer an opportunist current within the workers’ movement but a direct expression of the capitalist counter-revolution.

But it is nevertheless a fact that the roots of this policy lay in errors and weaknesses within the workers’ movement, and it is the duty of communists to explore these roots today in order to better arm themselves against the process of degeneration, because:

“Stalinism did not fall from the sky, nor did it arise from a void. And if it is absurd to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so it is absurd to condemn the Communist International because Stalinism developed and triumphed from within it... But it is no less absurd to pretend that the dirty bathwater was always absolutely pure and limpidity clear and to present the history of the Communist International as divided into two neat periods, the first when it was pure, revolutionary, spotless, without weakness, until sharply interrupted by the explosion of the counter-revolution. These images of a happy paradise and a horrible hell, with no link between them, have nothing to do with a real movement, such as the history of the communist movement, where continuity flows through profound splits and where future ruptures have their seeds in the process of the continuity.” (Introduction to texts of the Mexican Left 1938, in International Review no. 20)

The Second Congress highlighted the dangers for the workers’ movement of opportunism and centrism within its own ranks; and if opportunism was only able to finally triumph in conditions of profound reflux in the international class struggle, and the isolation of the Russian workers, it could take root in the first place in all the existing vacillations and hesitations of the revolutionary movement, exploiting all the ‘well-meaning’ efforts to smooth over differences with a finely turned word instead of honestly confronting serious divergences.

These are the typical characteristics of centrism, demonstrated clearly in the example of the Dutch communist Sneevliet (‘Maring’), who in the Second Congress was apparently responsible for ‘resolving’ the problem of the divergence between the Theses of Lenin and Roy by proposing, as secretary of the Commission on the National and Colonial Question, that the Congress adopt both sets of Theses. Sneevliet in fact agreed with Lenin that it was necessary to make temporary alliances with bourgeois nationalist movements. In practice, it was this view which was to dominate the policy of the CI and not Roy’s rejection of such alliances.

Sneevliet was appointed to the Executive Committee of the CI and was sent to China as its Far East representative. He became convinced that the Chinese nationalist Kuomingtang had a ‘revolutionary potential’, and wrote in the official organ of the CI:

“If we communists, who are actively trying to establish links with the workers of north China are to work successfully, we must take care to maintain friendly relations with the nationalists. The Thesis of the Second Congress can only be applied in China by offering active support to the nationalist elements of the south (i.e. the KMT – ICC). We have as our task to keep the revolutionary nationalist elements with us and to drive the whole movement to the left.”  (Kommunistische Internationale 13 September 1922)

Five years later these same ‘revolutionary elements’ beheaded communists and workers in the streets of Shanghai in an orgy of mass murder.

It’s important to stress that Sneevliet was only one individual example of the danger of centrism and opportunism facing the revolutionary movement. His views were shared by the majority of the CI.

They were shared to a greater or lesser extent even by the left-wing communists, who failed to clearly present their positions. Those like Bukharin and Radek who had opposed the slogan of self-determination now appeared to accept the majority view, while the Italian Left around Bordiga and the Communist Abstentionist Fraction, although against the opportunist tactic of ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’, fully supported Lenin’s Theses. The German Left, basing its position on the work of Rosa Luxemburg, was of all the left fractions in the best position to make a determined, principled stand against support for national liberation struggles in the CI, but the delegates of the KAPD, who included Otto Ruhle, failed to participate, at least in part due to councilist prejudices.

The theoretical gains made by the western European lefts in the debates within the Zimmerwald Left during the war were not concretised in the Second Congress. It was only with the defeat of the revolutionary wave in the late 1920s that the few surviving left fractions, and especially the Italian Left around the journal Bilan, were able to conclude that the proletariat could give no support to nationalist movements even in the colonies. For Bilan, the massacre in China in 1927 proved that “The Theses of Lenin at the Second Congress must be completed by radically changing their content... the indigenous proletariat can... become the protagonist of an anti-imperialist struggle only if it links itself to the international proletariat...” (Bilan no. 16, February 1935, quoted in Nation or Class?, p. 32). It was the Italian Left, and later the Mexican and French Lefts, who were finally able to make a higher synthesis of the work of Rosa Luxemburg on imperialism and the experience of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23.

LESSONS FOR TODAY

The mistakes of the CI are clearly no excuse for the same errors by revolutionaries today. The Stalinists long ago passed over to the counter-revolution, taking the Communist International with them. For the Trotskyists, the ‘possibility’ of support for nationalist struggles in the colonies was transformed into unconditional support, and in this way they ended up participating in the second imperialist world war.

Within  the proletarian camp, the Bordigists of the degenerated Italian Left devised a theory of geographical areas where, for the vast majority of the world’s population in the underdeveloped countries, the ‘anti-imperialist bourgeois-democratic revolution’ was still on the agenda. The Bordigists, by freezing the last dot and comma of the Theses of the Second Congress, took over the centrism and opportunism of the CI, lock, stock and barrel. The dangers of trying to apply its unworkable policies in the decadence of capitalism were finally proved by the disintegration of the International Communist Party (Communist Program) in 1981 after becoming thoroughly corroded with opportunism towards various nationalist movements (see IR 32).

Which finally brings us to the ‘embarrassed’ Bordigists of the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista, now partially regrouped with the Communist Workers’ Organisation – see articles on the IBRP in IRs 40 and 41). Battaglia defends a position against national liberation struggles in decadence, as a group within the proletarian political milieu. But shows a singular difficulty in breaking definitively with the opportunism and centrism of the early CI on this and other vital questions. For example, in its preparatory text for the Second Conference of Groups of the Communist Left in 1978, BC fails to make any critique of the positions of the Second Congress, or of the practice of the early CI, preferring instead to support polemic against Rosa Luxemburg! BC’s vision of a future party “turning movements of national liberation into proletarian revolutions” introduces the danger of opportunism through the back door, and has already led it, together with the CWO, into a filtration with the Iranian nationalist group, the UCM (now the ‘Communist Party of Iran’ – a Maoist grouping). Theses relations have been justified by the need to “help orientated new militants” coming from a country “that has no communist history or tradition, a backward country...” (from a document presented by Battaglia at an ICC public meeting in Naples in July 1983).

This patronising attitude is not only an excuse for the worst kind of opportunism, it is an insult to the communist movement in the underdeveloped countries, a movement which despite the cringing excuses of Battaglia  has a rich and proud history of principled opposition to bourgeois nationalist straggles. It is an insult to the militants of the Persian Communist Party who at the Second Congress warned that: “If one were to proceed according to the Theses in countries which already have ten or more years of experience, or in those where the movement has already had power, it would mean driving the masses into the arms of the counter-revolution. The task is to create and maintain a purely communist movement in opposition to the bourgeois-democratic one.” (Sultan Zadeh, quoted in The Second Congress, vol. 1, p.135).

It is an insult to the position of the Indian Communist Roy (who was actually a delegate of the Mexican CP). It is an insult to those in the young Chinese Communist Party like Chang Kuo-Tao who opposed the official CI policy of centrism into the nationalist KMT.

Gorter once talked about the communist programme being “hard as steel, clear as glass.” With the infinitely malleable, opaque pronouncements of Battaglia Communista we are back on the same terrain as the Second Congress of the CI over fifty years ago: the terrain of opportunism and centrism, with an added dash of patronising chauvinism. It is a terrain revolutionaries today must fight constantly to avoid. This is the most enduring lesson of the past debates among communists on the national questions.

S. Ray

Part 1: The debate on the national question at the dawn of decadence [17]

Part 2: The debate during the years of imperialist war [18]

 

IR 42, 3rd Quarter 1985

JAN APPEL: A REVOLUTIONARY HAS DIED 

On the Fourth of May (1985), the last great figure of the Communist International, Jan Appel, died at the age of 95. The proletariat will never forget this life, a life of struggle for the liberation of humanity.

The revolutionary wave of the beginning of this century ran aground. Thousands of revolutionary marxists were killed in Russia and Germany, some even committing suicide. But, despite this long night of the counter­-revolution, Jan Appel remained true to marxism. He remained faithful to the working class, con­vinced that the proletarian revolution would come.

Jan Appel was formed and tempered in the revo­lutionary movement in Germany and Holland at the beginning of this century. He fought side by side with Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Lenin, Trotsky, Gorter, Pannekoek. He fought in the German revolution in 1918—19. He was one of those who never betrayed the cause of the proletariat. He was a worthy representa­tive of this anonymous mass of the dead generations of the proletariat. Their historic struggle always renounced the glorification of personalities or the search for exalted titles. Just like Marx and Engels, Jan Appel never had anything to do with the sensationalist capitalist press.

But he was also more than this anonymous mass of courageous revolutionary militants produced by the revolutionary wave of the workers’ move­ment at the beginning of our century. He left behind him traces which permit revolutionaries today to take up the torch. Jan Appel was able to recognise those who, just as anonymously, and reduced for the moment to a small minority, continued the communist combat. It was thus with pride that we welcomed Jan Appel to the founding Congress of the International Commu­nist Current in 1976 in Paris

(An index of the initials used here is supplied at the end of this article.)

Born in 1890 in Mecklenburg in Germany, Jan Appel began at a very early age to work in the shipyards in Hamburg. From 1908 on he was an active member of the SPD. During the tormen­ted war years, he took part in discussions on the new questions posed to the working class: its attitude in face of the imperialist war and of the Russian Revolution. This was what led him, at the end of 1917, beginning of 1918, to join up with the left radicals in Hamburg who had taken a clear position against the war, for the revolution. Thus he followed the July 1917 appeal of the Hamburg IKD calling on all revolutionary workers to work towards the con­stitution of an ‘International Social Demo­cratic Party’ in opposition to the reformist-opportunist politics of the majority of the SPD. Pushed on by the workers’ struggles at the end of 1918, he also joined the Spartakus­bund of Rosa Luxemburg and took up, after the formation of the KPD(S), a position of responsibility in the district group in Hamburg.

1918 was above all the year of the great strikes in Hamburg and in the whole of Ger­many after November, in which Appel was to he found in the front line. The workers of the shipyards had in fact long been vanguard fighters who from the beginning adopted a revolutionary attitude, and, pushed by the IKD and the KPD(S), took the lead in the struggle against the orientations of the reac­tionary SPD, the centrist USPD and the refor­mist unions. It was in their midst that the revolutionary factory delegates, and after­wards the AAU, saw the light of day. To quote Appel himself:

“In January 1918, the armaments and ship­yard workers (under military control), came to revolt everywhere against the strait­jacket of the war, against hunger, lack of clothing, against misery. And this through the general strike. At first, the working class, the proletarians in uniform, didn’t understand these workers ... but news of the situation, of this combat of the working class, penetrated the most remote corners. And since the balance of forces was suffi­ciently ripe, since nothing could be saved from the military economy and the so—called German Empire, thus, the working class and the soldiers applied what they had learnt from the pioneers of January 1918” (Hempel, pseudo­nym of Jan Appel, at the Third Congress of the Communist International, July 1921).

And on the November strikes in Hamburg, Appel recalled:

      “When, in November 1918 the sailors revolted and the workers of the shipyards in Kiel downed tools, we learned at the Vulkan military ship­yard from the workers what had happened. There followed a secret meeting at the shipyards; the factory was under military occupation, work ceased, but the workers remained in assembly in the enterprise. A delegation of 17 volunteers was sent to the union headquarters, to insist on the declaration of a general strike. We insisted on holding an assembly, but it turned out that the known leaders of the SPD and of the unions took up an attitude opposed to the movement. There were hours of harsh discuss­ions. During this time, at the Blohm und Voss shipyard, where 17,000 workers were employed, a spontaneous revolt broke out. And so, all the workers poured out of the factories, at the Vulkan shipyard too (where Appel worked) and set off towards the union house. It was at this moment that the leaders disappeared. The revolution had begun.” (Appel, 1966, in a discussion with H M Bock).

      It was above all the revolutionary factory delegates elected at that moment who organised the workers in factory councils, independent of the unions. Jan Appel was elected, on acc­ount of his active and preponderant part in the events, as the president of the revolutionary delegates. It was he who, along with Ernst Thalmann, revolutionary shop steward of the USPD, was designated by a mass assembly after the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht to organise the following night a march on the Barenfeld Barracks, in order to arm the workers. The lack of centralisation of the councils, especially with Berlin, the dis­persion and above all the weakness of the KPD(S) which was just forming itself, did not allow the movement to develop, and two weeks later the movement broke down. This led to the period when attention was mainly oriented towards the reinforcement of the organisation.

      For the workers in struggle, the unions were dead organs. At the beginning of 1919, the local unions in Hamburg, among other places, were dissolved, the dues and funds were divided amongst the unemployed. In August, the Confer­ence of the northern district of the KPD(S), with Hamburg at the head, obliged its members to leave the unions. According to Appel:

      “At that moment, we reached the conclusion that the unions were unusable for the revolutionary struggle, and that led, at an assembly of the revolutionary delegates to propaganda for the constitution of revolutionary factory organisations, as the basis for the councils. Departing from Hamburg, this propaganda for the formation of enterprise organisations spread, leading to the Allgemeine Arbeiter Unionen (AAU)” (ibid.).

      On the 15 August, the revolutionary delegates met in Essen, with the approval of the Central Committee of the KPD(S) to found the AAU. In the paper of the KAZ different articles appeared at this time explaining the basis for the deci­sion and why the unions no longer had a raison d’etre for the working class in decadence, and therefore the revolutionary period, of the capitalist system.

      Jan Appel, as the president of the revolutionary delegates, and an active organiser, was thus also elected president of the KPD(S) of Hamburg. During the subsequent months, the tensions and conflicts between the central committee of Paul Levi, and the northern section of the KPD(S) in particular, multiplied, above all around the question of the unions, the AAU and the mass party. At the Second Congress of the KPD in October 1919 in Heidelberg, where the ques­tions of the utilisation of parliamentarism and the unions were discussed and voted, Appel, as the president and delegate of the Hamburg district, took up a clear position against the opportunist theses which were opposed to the most revolutionary developments. The opposi­tion, although in a majority, was excluded from the party: at the Congress itself, 25 particip­ants were excluded straight away. The Hamburg group in its quasi-totality declared itself in agreement with the opposition, being followed by other sections. After making different attempts at opposition within the KPD(S), in February 1920 all the sections in agreement with the opposition were finally excluded. But it wasn’t until March that all efforts to re­dress the KPD(S) from within broke down. March 1920 was in fact the period of the Kapp Putsch, during which the central committee of the KPD(S) launched an appeal for a general strike, while propagating a line of ‘loyal opposition’ to the social democratic govern­ment and negotiating to avoid any armed revolu­tionary revolt. In the eyes of the opposition, this attitude was a clear and cutting sign of the abandonment of any revolutionary politics.

      When in April 1920 the Berlin group left the KPD, the basis was given for the construction of the KAPD; 40,000 members, among them Jan Appel, had left the KPD.

      In the insurrectional combats of the Ruhr in March 1920, Jan Appel was once more to be found in the foremost ranks, in the unionen, in the assemblies, in the struggles. On the basis of his active participation in the struggles since 1918 and of his organisational talents, the participants at the Founding Con­gress of the KAPD appointed Appel and Franz Jung to represent them at the Communist Inter­national in Moscow. They came to negotiate adhesion to the Third International and to discuss the treacherous attitude of the Central Committee of the KPD during the insurrection in the Ruhr. In order to get to Moscow, they had to divert the course of a ship. On arrival they held discussions with Zinoviev, presi­dent of the Communist International, and with Lenin. On the basis of Lenin’s text Left-Wing Communism — an Infantile Disorder, they dis­cussed at great length, refuting among other things the false accusation of syndicalism (in other words the rejection of the role of the party) and of nationalism. Thus Appel, in his article ‘Information on Moscow’ and ‘Where is Ruhle heading?’ in the KAZ, defended the position that Laufenberg and Wolfheim ought to be excluded “since we can have more confidence in the Russian communists than in the German nationalists who have left the terrain of the class struggle”. Appel declared also that he had “judged that Ruhle also no longer found himself on the terrain of the programme of the party; if this vision had proven itself to be wrong, the exclusion of Ruhle would not have been posed. But the delegates had the right and the duty in Moscow to defend the programme of the party.”

      He made many more trips to Moscow to get the KAPD admitted as a sympathising organisation to the IIIrd International, and thereby partici­pated at the Third Congress in 1921.

      In the meantime, Appel had travelled around Germany under the false name of Jan Arndt, and was active wherever the KAPD and the AAUD sent him. Thus, he became responsible for the weekly Der Klassenkampf of the AAU in the Ruhr, where he remained until November 1923.

      At the Third Congress of the Communist Inter­national, in 1921, Appel again, along with Meyer, Schwab and Reichenbach, were the dele­gates to conduct the final negotiations in the name of the KAPD, against the growing opportun­ism of the CI. They attempted in vain to form a left opposition with the delegations of Bul­garia, Hungary, Luxemburg, Mexico, Spain, Brit­ain, Belgium and the USA. Firstly, ignoring the sarcasms of the Bolshevik delegation or the KPD, Jan Appel, under the pseudonym of Hempel, underlined at the end of the Third Congress some fundamental questions for the world revolu­tion today. Let us recall his words:

      “The Russian comrades lack an understanding of what is happening in Western Europe. The Russian comrades have experienced a long Czar­ist domination, they are hard and solid, where­as where we come from the proletariat is pene­trated by parliamentarism and is completely in­fested by it. In Europe we have to proceed dif­ferently. The path to opportunism has to be barred ... Opportunism among us is the utilisa­tion of bourgeois institutions in the economic domain ... The Russian comrades are not super­men either, and they need a counterweight, and this counterweight must be a IIIrd International ridding itself of any tactic of compromise, parliamentarism and the old unions.”

      Appel was arrested in November 1923 on the charge of inciting mutiny on the ship with which the delegation had arrived in Moscow in 1920. In prison he prepared a study of the wor­kers’ movement and in particular of the period of transition towards communism, in the light of the lessons of events in Russia.

      He was set free at the end of 1925, but Germany had become dangerous for him, and he obtained work at a shipyard in Holland. He immediately took contact with Canne-Meyer, whom he had not known personally, in order to be able to inte­grate himself into the situation in Holland. Departing from this contact, ex—members of the KPN and/or the KAPN regrouped slowly, and in 1927 formed the GIC which published a review, Press Material of the International Commu­nists (PIC), as well as an edition in German. It closely followed the evolution of the KAPD in Germany and oriented itself more towards the Theses of the Berlin KAPD, in opposition to the group around Gorter. Over four years, the GIC studied and discussed the study which Appel had made in prison, and the book Foundations of Communist Production and Distribution was published in 1930 by the Berlin AAU, a book which has been discussed and criticised by revolutionaries throughout the world to this very day.

      Appel made many other important contributions during the difficult years of the counter-revo­lution, up until World War II, against the posi­tions of the degenerating Communist Parties, rapidly becoming bourgeois. The GIC worked in contact with other small revolutionary organisations in different countries (like the Ligue des Communistes Inter­nationalistes in Belgium, the group around Bilan, Union Communiste in France, the group around Paul Mattick in the USA etc.), and was one of the most important currents of this period in keep­ing internationalism alive. From 1933 on Appel kept in the background, since the Dutch state, on good terms with Hitlerite Germany, would have expelled him. Until 1948, Appel remained in clandestinity under the name of Jan Vos.

      During and after the second world war however, Appel and other members of the GIC regrouped with the Spartacusbond coming out of the ‘Marx— Lenin—Luxemburg Front’, the only internationa­list organisation in Holland until 1942. The members of the GIC, who were expecting, like all the other revolutionary organisations at that time, important class movements after the war, considered it important to regroup, even if there still existed divergences between them, in order to prepare a more important, stronger revolutionary organisation, with the aim of playing a more preponderant role in the move­ments. But these movements did not develop, and numerous discussions cropped up in the group on the role and the tasks of the political organisa­tion. Appel remained within the Spartacusbond and defended positions against the councilist ideas which were being reinforced within the group. Almost all the GIC members left the group in 1947, only to quickly disappear into the void. Witness a letter by Pannekoek, him­self having become a councilist, in September 1947:

      “And now that the strong mass movement hasn’t turned up, nor the influx of young workers (we had counted on this for the period after the war, and it was certainly the fundamental motive of the GIC in regrouping with Spartacusbond in the last year of the war), it follows logically that the GIC returned to its old role, not preven­ting the Spartacusbond from returning to its old role as RSP. According to my information, the question of which form of propaganda to choose is presently being discussed in the GIC ... it’s a pity that Jan Appel has stayed with the people of Spartacusbond. Already in the past, I have noted how his spirit and his conceptions are determined by his experiences in the great German movement which was the culminating point of his life. It’s there that he formed his understand­ing of the organisational techniques of the coun­cils. But he was too much a man of action to be content with simple propaganda. But the wish to be a man of action in a period in which the mass movement doesn’t yet exist, easily leads to the formulation of impure and mystified forms of action. Perhaps it’s a good thing after all that Spartacus has held on to one strong element.”

      By accident, Appel was re-discovered by the Dutch police in 1948. After encountering many difficulties, he was allowed to stay in Holland, but was forbidden any political activity. Appel thus formally left Spartacusbond and organised political life.

      After 1948, however, Appel remained in contact with his old comrades, both in Holland and else­where, among others with Internationalisme, pre­decessor of the ICC, at the end of the forties and during the fifties. That’s why Jan Appel was once again present at the end of the sixties at the founding of Revolution Internationale, the future section in France of the ICC, and a product of the massive struggles of the proleta­riat in 1968. Since then with numerous visits from comrades and sympathisers of the ICC, Jan Appel contributed to the formation of a new generation of revolutionaries, participating at the formal constitution of the ICC in 1976, one last time, thereby passing on the torch and the lessons of one generation of revolutionaries to another.

     Until the very end, Jan Appel was convinced that “only the class struggle is important”. We con­tinue his struggle.

For the ICC,

A. Bal 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

To be found in issues of the International Review:

·         ‘The Councilist Danger’, IR 40;

·         ‘The Communisten­bond Spartacus and the Councilist Current’, IR 38 & 39;

·         ‘The Bankruptcy of Councilism’, ‘Organisa­tional Conceptions in the German-Dutch Left’, IR 37;

·         ‘Critique of Pannekoek’s ‘Lenin as Philoso­pher’, IRs 25, 27, 28, 30;

·         ‘The Dutch Left’, IRs 16,17,27;

·         ‘Breaking with Spartacusbond’, IR 9;

·         ‘The Epigones of Councilism at Work: Spartacusbond, Daad en Gedachte’, IR 2.

 

INDEX OF THE INITIALS USED:

 

GIC:  International Communist Group

KAZ:  Communist Workers’ Journal

USPD: Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany

RSP:  Revolutionary Socialist Party, a split from the KPN (1925-35) which was turned into the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg front(MLL front) in 1940.

PIC:  Press Material of the International Commu­nists

KPN:  Communist Party of the Netherlands

KAPN: Communist Workers Party of the Netherlands

KAPD: Communist Workers Party of Germany

KPU(S):     Communist Party of Germany/Spartacus.