Sixty years ago on 20th August 1940, Trotsky died, assassinated by Stalin’s underlings; the second imperialist war had just begun. In this article, we want not only to remember a great figure of the proletariat, sacrificing a little to the fashion for anniversaries, but also to use the event to examine some of his mistakes, and the political positions that he adopted at the beginning of the war. After a life of ardent militant activity, entirely devoted to the cause of the working class, Trotsky died as a revolutionary and a fighter. History is full of examples of revolutionaries who have deserted, and even betrayed the working class; few are those who remained faithful all their lives and died fighting, as did Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Trotsky was one of them.

In his later years, Trotsky defended a number of opportunist positions, such as the policy of entryism into the Social Democracy, the workers’ united front, etc. - and the communist left rightly criticised these during the 1930s. But he never went over to the enemy camp, the camp of the bourgeoisie, as the Trotskyists did after his death. On the question of imperialist war in particular, he defended until the end the traditional position of the revolutionary movement: the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war.

The closer came the imperialist war, the more Trotsky’s elimination became a key objective for the world bourgeoisie.

To consolidate his power, and to develop the policy which had made him the chief architect of the counter-revolution, Stalin had first eliminated swathes of revolutionaries, old Bolsheviks, and especially Lenin’s companions who had built the October revolution. But this was not enough. As military tensions rose at the end of the 1930s, he had to have his hands completely free at home to develop his imperialist policies. With the beginning of the war in Spain, 1936 witnessed the trials and execution first of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Smirnov1, then of Piatakov and Radek, and finally of the so-called “Rykov-Bukharin-Kretinsky” group. But although in exile, Trotsky remained the most dangerous of all the Bolsheviks. Stalin had already reached out to assassinate Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov, in Paris in 1938. Now Trotsky himself had to die.

In his book I was Stalin’s agent2, general Walter Krivitsky, the head of Soviet military counter-espionage in Western Europe during the 1930s, asks “Was it necessary for the Bolshevik revolution to put to death all the Bolsheviks?”. Although he claims to have no answer to the question, on the contrary his book gives a very clear one. The Moscow trials and the liquidation of the last Bolsheviks was the price to pay for the march towards war: “In secret, Stalin’s aim [an understanding with Germany] remained the same. In March 1938, Stalin set up the great ten-day trial of the Rykov-Bukharin-Kretinsky group, who had been Lenin’s most intimate associates and the fathers of the Soviet revolution. These Bolshevik leaders - detested by Hitler - were executed by Stalin’s order on 3rd March. On 12th March, Hitler annexed Austria (...) On 12th January, took place before the assembled Berlin diplomatic corps, the cordial and democratic conversation between Hitler and the new Soviet ambassador”. This was followed on 23rd August 1939 by the Germano-Soviet pact between Hitler and Stalin.

However, while the elimination of the old Bolsheviks was first and foremost a matter of Stalin’s internal policies, it also suited the whole world bourgeoisie. Henceforth, the fate of Trotsky himself was sealed. For the whole world’s capitalist class, Trotsky, symbol of the October Revolution, had to die! “Robert Coulondre3, French ambassador to the Third Reich, gives a striking testimony in the description of his last meeting with Hitler, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Hitler had boasted of the advantages he had obtained from his pact with Stalin, just concluded; and he drew a grandiose vista of his future military triumph. In reply the French ambassador appealed to his ‘reason’ and spoke of the social turmoil and the revolutions that might follow a long and terrible war and engulf all belligerent governments. ‘You are thinking of yourself as a victor...’, the ambassador said, ‘but have you given thought to another possibility - that the victor might be Trotsky?’ At this Hitler jumped up (as if he ‘had been hit in the pit of the stomach’) and screamed that this possibility, the threat of Trotsky’s victory, was one more reason why France and Britain should not go to war against the Third Reich”4. Isaac Deutscher rightly highlights Trotsky’s remark on hearing of this conversation: “They are haunted by the spectre of revolution, and they give it a man’s name”5.

Trotsky had to die6, and he himself realised that his days were numbered. His elimination had a greater significance than that of the other old Bolsheviks, and the Russian left communists. The assassination of the old Bolsheviks had served to strengthen Stalin’s absolute power. That of Trotsky represented a need for the world bourgeoisie, including the Russian bourgeoisie, to have its hands free to unleash world war. Its way was a good deal clearer once the last great figure of the October Revolution, the most famous of the internationalists, had been eliminated. Stalin called on all the efficiency of the GPU to liquidate him. Several attempts were made on his life, and these could only be repeated. Nothing seemed able to halt the Stalinist machine. On 24th May 1939, shortly before Trotsky’s death, a commando attacked his house during the night. Stalin’s henchmen had succeeded in placing a machine-gun opposite the windows of his bedroom. They fired between 200-300 rounds, and threw firebombs. Happily, the windows were placed high above the floor, and Trotsky, his wife Natalia, and his grandson Sjeva had a miraculous escape by hiding under the bed. But in the attempt that followed, Ramon Mercader succeeded with his ice pick where the others had failed.

But for the bourgeoisie, Trotsky’s assassination was not enough. As Lenin so rightly said in State and Revolution: “During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes relentlessly persecute them, and treat their teachings with malicious hostility, the most furious hatred, and the most unscrupulous campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain ‘halo’ for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating the revolutionary doctrine of its content, vulgarising it and blunting its revolutionary edge (...) They omit, obliterate and distort the revolutionary side of [Marxism’s] doctrine, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie”7.

As far as Trotsky is concerned, this dirty work has been done by those who claim to be his heirs, the Trotskyists. They have used his “opportunist” positions to justify every national war since the last imperialist world war, as well as their defence of the USSR’s imperialist camp.

When the 4th International was founded in 1938, Trotsky based his thinking on the idea that capitalism was in its “death throes”. The Italian Fraction of the Communist Left (the Bilan group) defended the same idea; we agree with Trotsky’s evaluation of the period, although not with his idea that as a result “the productive forces have ceased to grow”8. He was perfectly correct in declaring that in its “death throes”, capitalism had ceased to be a progressive social form and that its socialist transformation was on the historical agenda. However, he was wrong to think that conditions were ripe for revolution during the 1930s. Unlike the Italian Left, he announced the onset of revolution with the arrival of the Popular Front, first in France, then in Spain9. This mistaken understanding of the historic course, which led him to believe that revolution was on the immediate agenda, when in fact World War II was looming, is key to understanding the opportunist positions that he developed during this period.

Concretely, Trotsky this was expressed in the concept of the “Transitional Programme”, which he put forward at the foundation of the 4th International. This in fact was a series of practically impossible demands, supposed to raise the consciousness of the working class and sharpen the class struggle. It was the lynchpin of his political strategy. Trotsky did not see the measures in the Transitional Programme as reformist, since they were never intended to be applied, nor indeed could they be. In fact, they were designed to demonstrate capitalism’s inability to offer lasting reforms to the working class, and in consequence to reveal its bankruptcy and to push the class to struggle for its destruction.

On the same basis, Trotsky developed his famous “Proletarian Military Programme” (PMP)10, which was basically an application of the Transitional Programme to a period of universal war and militarism11. This policy hoped to win over the millions of workers under arms to revolutionary ideas. It centred around the demand for obligatory military training for the working class, overseen by elected officers, in special training schools run by the state but under the control of working class institutions like the trades unions. Obviously, no capitalist state could grant such demands to the working class, since this would deny its own existence as a state. For Trotsky, the perspective was the overthrow of capitalism by the workers under arms, all the more so since he thought that the war would create favourable conditions for a proletarian insurrection, as had happened during World War I.

“We have said more than once that the present war is only a continuation of the last. But continuation does not mean repetition (...) Our policy, the policy of the revolutionary proletariat with regard to the second imperialist war, is a continuation of the policy worked out during the first imperialist war, above all under Lenin’s leadership””12

According to Trotsky, conditions were even more favourable than they had been in 1917, inasmuch as capitalism, on the eve of a new war, had proven objectively that it was in a historical dead end, while subjectively the working class world wide had accumulated a whole new experience.

“It is this perspective [the revolution] that must be at the root of our agitation. It is not just a matter of having a position on capitalist militarism and the refusal to defend the bourgeois state, but of the direct preparation for the seizure of power and the defence of the socialist fatherland”13

Trotsky had clearly lost his bearings in thinking that the course of history still ran towards proletarian revolution. He failed to understand the situation of the working class and the balance of class forces with the bourgeoisie. During the 1930s, only the Italian Communist Left was able to demonstrate that humanity was living through a profoundly counter-revolutionary period, that the proletariat had been defeated, and that only imperialist world war, the bourgeoisie’s solution to history’s dilemma, was then possible.

Nonetheless, we can say that despite his “militarist” fantasies, which led him towards opportunism, Trotsky continued to stand firmly on internationalist ground. But in trying to be “concrete” (as he tried to be “concrete” in the workers’ struggle with the Transitional Programme, and in the army with his military policy) to win over the working masses to the revolution, he ended up distancing himself from the classical vision of marxism and defending a policy opposed to proletarian interests. This policy, intended to be very “tactical”, was in fact extremely dangerous since it tended to tie the workers to the bourgeois state for the satisfaction of their economic demands, and to make them think that a good bourgeois solution was a possibility. During the war, the Trotskyists were to develop this “subtle” tactic to justify the unjustifiable, in tactic to justify the unjustifiable, in particular their rallying to the bourgeois camp through their defence of the nation and their participation in the Resistance.

But how, fundamentally, should we understand the importance that Trotsky gave to his “military policy”? For him, the perspective facing humanity was a total militarisation of society, which would be increasingly marked by armed struggle between the classes. Humanity’s fate would be settled above all at the military level. Consequently, the proletariat’s primary responsibility was to prepare, immediately, to wrest power from the capitalist class. He developed this vision especially at the beginning of the war, when he said:

“In the conquered countries, the position of the masses will be immediately worsened. National oppression will be heaped on class oppression, and the main burden will be borne by the workers. Of all forms of dictatorship, the totalitarian dictatorship of a foreign conqueror is the most intolerable”14.

“It is impossible to place an armed soldier next to every Polish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch and French worker”15.

“We can certainly expect the rapid transformation of all the conquered countries into powder-kegs. The danger is rather that the explosions will come too early, without adequate preparation, and will lead to isolated defeats. In general, however, it is impossible to speak of a European and world revolution without taking account of partial defeats”16

However, this does not alter the fact that Trotsky remained a proletarian revolutionary to the end. Proof lies in the content of the Manifesto of the 4th International, known as The Alarm, which he wrote to take an unambiguous position from the sole standpoint of the revolutionary proletariat against the generalised imperialist war:

“At the same time, we do not for a moment forget that this war is not our war (...) The 4th International bases its policy, not on the military fortunes of the capitalist states, but on the transformation of the imperialist war into a war of the workers against the capitalists, for the overthrow of the ruling class in every country, on the world socialist revolution (...) We explain to the workers that their interests and those of bloodthirsty capitalism cannot be reconciled. We mobilise the workers against imperialism. We propagate the unity of the workers in all the belligerent and neutral countries”17

This is what the Trotskyists have “forgotten” and betrayed.

By contrast, from the class standpoint, Trotsky’s “Transitional Programme” and “Proletarian Military Policy” turned out to be a fiasco. Not only was there no proletarian revolution at the end of World War II, the PMP allowed the 4th International to justify its participation in the slaughter by turning its militants into good little soldiers for “democracy” and Stalinism. It was at this point that Trotskyism passed irrevocably into the enemy camp.

Clearly, Trotsky’s greatest weakness was his failure to understand that history’s course was running irrevocably towards counter-revolution, and so towards world war, as the Italian Communist Left clearly demonstrated. Thinking that the course was still towards revolution in 1936, he proclaimed that “The French revolution has begun”18; as for Spain, “The workers of the whole world eagerly await the new victory of the Spanish proletariat”19. He thus made a major political mistake in telling the working class that what was happening, in France and Spain in particular, was heading towards revolution, when in fact the world situation was moving in the opposite direction: “From his expulsion from the USSR in 1929 until his assassination, Trotsky constantly interpreted the world upside down. At a time when the task at hand was to assemble the revolutionary energies that had escaped the defeat, and first and foremost to undertake a complete political balance-sheet of the revolutionary wave, Trotsky insisted blindly that the proletariat was still marching forward when in fact it had been defeated. Hence the 4th International, created more than 50 years ago, was never anything more than an empty shell, where the life of the working class could not flow for the simple and tragic reason, that it was ebbing before the counter-revolution. On the basis of this mistake, all Trotsky’s action only contributed to the dispersal of the world’s all-too-feeble revolutionary forces during the 1930s, and worse still to drag the greater part into the capitalist mire of “critical” support for Popular Front governments, and participation in the imperialist war”20.

Trotsky’s position on the USSR is among his most serious mistakes. While he attacked Stalinism, he always considered, and defended, the USSR as the “socialist fatherland”, and at the least as a “degenerated workers’ state”.

But despite their dramatic consequences, all these political errors did not make Trotsky an enemy of the working class, as his “heirs” became after his death. In the light of events at the beginning of the war, Trotsky was even able to admit the possibility that he would have to revise his political judgement, in particular as far as the USSR was concerned.

In one of his last pieces, dated 25th September 1939 and entitled The USSR in the war, he wrote:

“We do not change our orientation. But suppose that Hitler turns his weapons to the East and invades the territories occupied by the Red Army (...) The Bolshevik-Leninists will combat Hitler, weapons in hand, but at the same time they will undertake a revolutionary propaganda against Stalin in order to prepare his overthrow at the next stage...”.

He certainly defended his analysis of the nature of the USSR, but he tied its fate to the outcome of the trials it would undergo in the test of World War II. In the same article, he says that if Stalinism were to emerge victorious and strengthened by the war (something he did not envisage happening), then it would be necessary to revise his judgement of the USSR and even of the general political situation:

“If however we consider that the present war will provoke, not the revolution but the decline of the proletariat, then there is only one possible outcome to the alternative: the further decomposition of monopolist capital, its fusion with the state and the replacement of democracy, where it still survives, by a totalitarian regime. In these conditions, the proletariat’s inability to seize the leadership of society could lead to the development of a new exploiting class emerging from the Bonapartist and fascist bourgeoisies. In all likelihood this would be a regime of decadence, and would signify the twilight of civilisation.

We would reach a similar result should the proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries take power and prove unable to hold on to it, abandoning it, as in the USSR, in the hands of a privileged bureaucracy. We would then be forced to recognise that the new decline into bureaucracy was due, not to one country’s backwardness and capitalist environment, but to the proletariat’s organic inability to become a ruling class. We would then have to establish retrospectively that in its fundamental traits today’s USSR is the precursor of a new regime of exploitation on an international scale.

We have strayed a long way from the terminological controversy on the definition of the Soviet state. But our critics should not protest: only by basing ourselves on the necessary historical perspective can we formulate a correct judgement on such a question as the replacement of one social regime by another. Taken to its conclusion, the historical alternative appears thus: either the Stalinist regime is an awful setback in the process of the transformation of bourgeois society into a socialist society, or else the Stalinist regime is the first step towards a new society of exploitation. If the second forecast proved correct, then of course the bureaucracy would become a new exploiting class. However dire this second perspective may appear, should the world proletariat indeed prove itself unable to carry out the mission entrusted to it by the course of historical development, then we would be forced to recognise that the socialist programme, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, has finally turned out to be a Utopia. It goes without saying that we would need a new “minimum programme” to defend the interests of the slaves of the totalitarian bureaucratic society” (our emphasis).

If we leave aside the perspective he develops here, which reveals a discouragement, not to say a profound demoralisation where he seems to lose all confidence in the working class and its ability to assume historically its revolutionary perspective, it is clear that here Trotsky is beginning to call into question his positions on the “socialist” nature of the USSR and the “working of the USSR and the “working class” character of the bureaucracy.

Trotsky was assassinated before the end of the war, and Russia ended in the victorious camp alongside the “democracies”. Historical conditions demanded of those who claimed to be his faithful followers that they undertake, as he had planned to do, a revision of his position to, as he had said, “establish retrospectively that in its fundamental traits today’s USSR is the precursor of a new regime of exploitation on an international scale”. Not only did the 4th International fail to do this, it passed, bags and baggage, into the camp of the bourgeoisie. Only a few elements escaped from Trotskyism to remain on the revolutionary terrain, such as those who formed the Chinese group which published The Internationalist in 1941, the members of the 4th International’s Spanish section around Munis, the Revolutionaren Kommunisten Deutschlands (RKD), the Socialisme ou Barbarie group in France, Agis Stinas in Greece, and Natalia Trotsky21.

Faithful to the spirit of her companion in life and comrade in the revolution, Natalia Trotsky, in a letter written on 9th May 1951 to the Executive Committee of the 4th International, insisted particularly on the counter-revolutionary nature of the USSR:

“Obsessed by old and outmoded formulations, you continue to consider the Stalinist state as a workers’ state. I cannot and will not follow you on this point (...) It should be clear to all that Stalinism has completely destroyed the revolution. And yet you continue to say that Russia is still, under this iniquitous regime, a workers’ state”.

Natalia drew the logical conclusions from this clear position, and quite rightly continued:

“The most intolerable is the position on war to which you have committed yourselves. The third world war threatening humanity places the revolutionary movement before the most difficult and complex situations, the gravest decisions (...) But faced with the events of recent years, you continue to call for the defence of the Stalinist state, and to commit the whole movement to it. Now, you even support the Stalinist armies in the war which is crucifying the Korean people”.

She concluded bravely: “I cannot and will not follow you on this point (...) I find that I must tell you that I find no other way out than to say openly that our disagreements make it impossible for me to stay any longer in your ranks”22.

Not only, as Natalia Trotsky says, did the Trotskyists fail to follow Trotsky’s example and revise their political positions following the USSR’s victory in World War II, but the Trotskyists’ own discussions and questioning today - when they exist - deal with the “proletarian military policy”23. These discussions continue to maintain a deafening silence on fundamental questions like the nature of the USSR or proletarian internationalism and revolutionary defeatism in the face of war. Pierre Broué recognises this, in the midst of a pseudo-scientific babble: “There is no doubt that the absence of any discussion or evaluation of this question (the PMP) weighed very heavily in the history of the 4th International. An in-depth analysis would have shown it as being at the bottom of the crisis which began to shake the International during the 1950s”24. How nicely put!

It is a fact that the Trotskyist organisations betrayed and changed camp. But Trotskyist historians like Pierre Broué or Sam Levy try to drown the question in a mere crisis of the Trotskyist movement:

“The fundamental crisis of Trotskyism came from its confusion and inability to understand the war and the immediate post-war world”25.

It is quite true that Trotskyism failed to understand the war or the post-war world; this is why it betrayed the working class and proletarian internationalism by supporting one imperialist camp against another during World War II, and why ever since it has constantly supported little imperialisms against bigger ones in the all too frequent so-called “national liberation” struggles, or the struggles of “oppressed peoples”. Pierre Broué, Sam Levy and the others may not know it, but Trotskyism is dead for the working class, and there is no hope of its rebirth as an instrument of the class’ emancipation. There is no point their trying to recuperate for themselves the real internationalists, and in particular the activity of the Italian Communist Left during the war, as the Cahiers Leon Trotsky try to do in their issue no.39.

A little decency gentlemen! Don’t mix up the internationalists of the Italian Communist Left with the chauvinist 4th International that betrayed the working class. We of the Communist Left have nothing to do with the 4th International and its avatars today. By contrast, hands off Trotsky! He still belongs to the working class.

Rol

1 See 16 Fusillés à Moscou by Victor Serge, Spartacus editions.

2 J’étais l’agent de Staline, Editions Champ Libre, Paris 1979.

3 Robert Coulondre (1885-1959), French ambassador to Moscow, then to Berlin.

4 The Prophet Outcast, Isaac Deutscher, Oxford Paperbacks, p515.

5 In the Manifesto of the 4th International on the imperialist war and the world proletarian revolution.

6 Like Jean Jaurès immediately before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, but with this difference: Jaurès was a pacifist, while Trotsky was always a revolutionary and an internationalist.

7 Essential works of Lenin, Bantam Books, 1971, p272.

8 For us, the fact that the system has entered its decadence does not mean that it can no longer develop. By contrast, for us as for Trotsky, a system in decadence has lost its dynamism, and the relations of production have become a fetter on society’s further development. In other words, the system has ceased to play a historically positive role and is ready to give birth to a new society.

9 See our book The Italian Communist Left, and our pamphlet Le Trotskisme contre la classe ouvrière.

10 This was not a new position for Trotsky, since it had already found an expression during the war in Spain: “... we must clearly distinguish ourselves from treachery and traitors, while remaining the best fighters on the front”. He compared the idea of being the best worker in the factory, with being the best soldier on the front. This formulation was also used in the Sino-Japanese war, since China was an “aggressed” nation, “colonised” by Japan.

11 "Our military transitional programme is a programme for agitation” (Oeuvres, no24).

12 Trotsky, Fascism, Bonapartism and war.

13 Ibid.

14 Trotsky, Our course does not change, written 30th June 1940.

15 Ibid. These nations are cited because they had just been defeated when the article was written.

16 Ibid.

17 Trotsky, Manifesto of the 4th International, 29th May 1940.

18 La Lutte Ouvrière, 9th June 1936.

19 Ibid.

20 See our pamphlet Le Trotskisme contre la classe ouvrière.

21 See International Review no.94, the article “Trotsky belongs to the working class, the Trotskyists have kidnapped him” in Le Trotskisme..., International Review no.58 and the article “In memory of Munis” published on his death in 1989, also Stinas’ memoirs published by La Breche, Paris 1990.

22 Les enfants du prophète, Cahiers Spartacus, Paris 1972.

23 See Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.23, 39, and 43, and Revolutionary History no.3, 1988.

24 Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.39.

25 A veteran of the British Trotskyist movement, quoted in Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.23.

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The article that follows is the second part of a study published in the review Bilan in 1934. In the first part, published in the previous issue of the International Review (see Crises and cycles in the economy of dying capitalism, part 1 [5]), Mitchell returned to the foundations of the marxist analysis of profit and accumulation, in continuity with the analyses of Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. In this second part, he deals with “the analysis of the general crisis of decadent imperialism”, and explains with remarkable clarity the expressions of this general crisis of capitalism’s decadence. In its day, this study made it possible to lay the theoretical foundations for understanding the inevitable tendency to generalised war engendered by the historical crisis of capitalism; it is not merely of historical interest today. On the contrary, it is of burning immediacy in laying down the theoretical framework which allow us to understand the expressions of the economic crisis today.

ICC

In the first part of this study we saw that the period from 1852 to 1873 was marked by a considerable development of "freely competing" capitalism (a competition mitigated nonetheless by a protectionism designed to defend growing industries). During this same historical phase, the various national bourgeoisies completed their economic and political domination on the ruins of the remnants of feudalism, breaking down all the barriers to the capitalist forces of production: in Russia, through the abolition of serfdom; in the USA through the Civil War which swept away the anachronistic system of slavery; through the creation of Italy and the foundation of German unity. The Treaty of Frankfurt closed the cycle of the great national wars which gave birth to the modern capitalist state.

The organic process in the capitalist epoch

By 1873, capitalism's rapid development had already integrated into its market the adjacent extra-capitalist domain. Europe had become a vast market economy (except for a few backward East European nations), dominated by capitalist production. The North American continent was dominated by an already highly developed Anglo-Saxon economy.

At the same time, the process of capitalist accumulation, temporarily interrupted by cyclical crises but taking off again with renewed vigour after each economic purge, led to an irresistible centralisation of the means of production, accelerated by the tendency towards the falling rate of profit and by bitter competition. There was a spread of enormous enterprises of high organic composition, encouraged by the development of joint stock companies replacing the individual capitalists, who were unable by themselves to satisfy the extensive demands of the productive process. The industrialists became mere agents subordinated to the company board.

But another process was also under way: following the crisis of 1873, the formation of monopolies grew in importance. This was a means both of countering the fall in the rate of profit, so that it remained within limits compatible with capitalist production, and of preventing an anarchic and "disastrous" competition. Their first expression was the cartels, followed by a more concentrated form, the syndicates. Finally there appeared the trusts and konzerns, which either concentrated similar industries horizontally, or grouped different branches of industry together vertically.

With the influx of a considerable mass of available savings, produced by intense accumulation, human capital gained a preponderant influence. The system of "cascading" shareholdings grafted onto the monopolistic organism, gave it the key to the control of fundamental production. Industrial, commercial, and banking capital gradually lost their autonomous position in the economic mechanism, and the greater part of the surplus-value produced was drained towards a higher, synthetic capitalist form, which disposed of it according to its own interests: finance capital. In short, the latter is the hypertrophied product of capitalist accumulation and its contradictory expressions. This definition obviously has nothing in common with the one which presents finance capital as an expression of the will of a few individuals moved by "speculative fever" to oppress and despoil the other capitalist formations and to oppose their "free" development. Such a conception, attractive to petty-bourgeois social-democratic and neo-marxist currents wallowing in the swamp of "anti-hypercapitalism", expresses an ignorance of the laws of capitalist development and turns its back on marxism while strengthening the ideological domination of the bourgeoisie.

Far from eliminating competition, the process of organic centralisation amplifies it in other forms, and in doing so it expresses nothing other than the deepening of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. The competition between individual capitalists across the whole breadth of the capitalist market (domestic and international), contemporaneous with "progressive" capitalism, is replaced by a vast international competition between more highly evolved organisms: the monopolies, masters of the national market and of basic production. This period corresponds to a productive capacity which far outstrips the limits of the national market and to a geographical extension of the latter through the colonial conquests at the beginning of the imperialist epoch. The highest form of capitalist competition finds expression in inter-imperialist wars, and appears once every territory in the world has been shared out among the imperialist powers. Under the aegis of finance capital, there appeared a process of transformation of national formations - the product of historic upheavals whose development contributed to a crystallisation of the world-wide division of labour - into complete economic entities. "The monopolies" said Rosa Luxemburg, "aggravate the contradiction between the international nature of the world capitalist economy and the national nature of the capitalist state".

The development of economic nationalism is both intensive and extensive.

The cornerstone of intensive development is protectionism, geared to ensuring not "emerging industries", but the monopoly on the domestic market. This opens up two possibilities: at home, the realisation of a super-profit and abroad, prices fixed below the value of the product, competition by dumping.

The "extensive" development, determined by capital's constant need to expand in search of zones for the realisation and capitalisation of surplus-value, is oriented towards the conquest of pre-capitalist and colonial territories.

We have shown that a continual extension of the market, in order to escape the permanent threat of overproduction of commodities as expressed in cyclical crises, is a fundamental necessity for the capitalist mode of production. This is manifested on the one hand by an organic evolution leading to the monopoly, to finance capital and economic nationalism, and on the other to a historic evolution leading to imperialism. To define imperialism as "a product of finance capital", as Bukharin does, is to establish an incorrect connection and above all is to lose sight of the common origin of these two aspects of the capitalist process: the production of surplus value.

Colonial wars in the first phase of capitalism

The cycle of national wars is essentially characterised by struggles between nations in the process of formation, building their social and political structure in accordance with the demands of capitalist production. Colonial wars, by contrast, oppose fully developed capitalist nations, already bursting out of their own narrow framework, and non-evolved countries with natural or backward economies.

The regions for conquest are of two kinds:

1. colonies for the expansion of population, which serve essentially as spheres of capital investment, and so become in some sense an extension of the metropolitan economy, undergoing a similar capitalist evolution, and even competing with the metropolis, at least in certain branches of industry. Such is the case in the British Dominions, whose capitalist structure is complete;
2. colonies for exploitation, densely populated, where capitalism has essentially two objectives: to realise its surplus value, and to appropriate cheap raw materials, allowing it to hold back the growth of constant capital invested in production, and to improve the ratio of the mass of surplus value to total capital. As far as the realisation of commodities is concerned, the process is as we have already described: capitalism forces the peasants and small producers of the domestic economy to produce, not for their own direct needs, but for the market, where capitalist products of mass consumption are exchanged for agricultural produce. The farmers of the colonies are integrated into the market economy under the pressure of commercial capital and debt, stimulating the large-scale cultivation of raw materials for export: cotton, rice, rubber, etc. Colonial loans represent an advance on purchasing power made by finance capital, and are used either to equip the network for the circulation of commodities - construction of ports and railways which improve the transport of raw materials - or for strategic works to consolidate imperialist rule. Moreover, finance capital takes care that these funds cannot be used as an instrument for the emancipation of the colonies, and that the productive forces are only developed and industrialised in as much as they do not threaten the metropolitan industries, for example by orienting their activity towards the preliminary refinement of raw materials thanks to the exploitation of indigenous labour power at virtually no cost.

Not only that, but the peasants, crushed under the weight of their own debts and the taxes raised to pay off government loans, are forced to sell their produce below its value, or even below its cost of production.

A third type of colonisation consists in the acquisition of "zones of influence" through the reduction of backward states to vassal status, through loans and inward investment. The intense flow of capital exports, linked to the extension of monopolistic protectionism, encouraged an expansion of capitalist production, at least to Central and Eastern Europe, to America, and even to Asia where Japan became an imperialist power.

On the other hand, the unequal development of capitalism was prolonged into the process of colonial expansion. On the eve of the cycle of colonial wars, the oldest capitalist nations already possessed a solid imperial basis: Britain and France, the two great powers of the day, had already shared out the "best" lands of America, Africa, and Asia. This encouraged their further extension to the detriment of their younger competitors, Germany and Japan. The latter were forced to be content with some meagre remnants in Africa and Asia; by contrast, they developed the metropolis much faster than the older nations. As an industrial power, Germany was soon to dominate the European continent in the face of British imperialism, and to pose the problem of world hegemony, whose solution was sought through the first imperialist war.

While economic contrasts and economic antagonisms sharpened during the cycle of colonial wars, the resulting class conflicts could still be "resolved" peacefully by the bourgeoisie in the most advanced countries. The colonial banditry of the latter accumulated reserves of surplus value which it used abundantly to corrupt the privileged layers of the working classi. The last two decades of the 19th century were accompanied by the triumph of opportunism and reformism within international social-democracy, monstrous parasitic growths feeding off the colonial peoples.

But extensive colonialism is limited in its development, and capitalism, the insatiable conqueror, quickly exhausted the available extra-capitalist outlets. Inter-imperialist competition, deprived of any natural outlet, took the direction of imperialist war.

"Those who are engaged today in armed conflict" said Rosa Luxemburg, "are not the capitalist countries on the one hand, and on the other the countries of natural economy, but states which are pushed into conflict precisely by their identical high level of capitalist development".

Cycles of imperialist wars and revolution in the general crisis of capitalism

Whereas the ancient natural communities survived for thousands of years, and ancient and feudal societies occupied a long historical period, "modern capitalist production, on the contrary", said Engels, "which is barely 300 years old, and whose domination dates from no earlier than the establishment of large-scale industry - in other words 100 years - has, in this short lapse of time achieved disparities of distribution (concentration of capital among a few owners on the one hand, a concentration of propertyless masses in the cities on the other) which will inevitably lead it to its downfall".

Because of the intensity reached by the contradictions in its mode of production, capitalist society can no longer continue its historic mission: the continuous and progressive development of the productive forces and of the productivity of human labour. The revolt of the forces of production against private appropriation goes from being sporadic to become permanent. Capitalism enters into its general crisis of decomposition, and history records its death spasms in lines of blood.

Let us summarise the main characteristics of this general crisis: general and permanent industrial overproduction; chronic unemployment weighing on the production of non-viable capital; permanent unemployment of considerable masses of labour power seriously aggravating class antagonisms; a chronic agricultural overproduction, which adds a general crisis to the industrial crisis, and which we will analyse later; a considerable slowdown in the process of capitalist accumulation as a result of the shrinking field for the exploitation of labour power (organic composition), and the continued decline in the rate of profit which Marx foresaw when he said that "as soon as the formation of capital falls into the hands of a few large capitalists, for whom the mass of profit can compensate for its rate, then production will lose all vitalising stimulus and will fall into slumber. The rate of profit is the motive form of capitalist production. Without profit, no production". Finally, the necessity for finance capital to seek a super-profit, not from the production of surplus value, but by despoiling both the consumers (by raising commodity prices above their value), and the small producers (by appropriating a part of a part of their labour). Super-profit thus represents an indirect tax raised on the circulation of commodities. Capitalism tends to become parasitic in the absolute sense of the term.

During the two decades that preceded the World War, these agents of general crisis were already developing and acting to a certain extent, even though the conjuncture was still in a rising curve, expressing capitalism's "swan-song" as we might say. By 1912 it had reached its zenith, and the capitalist world was flooded with commodities; the crisis broke out in the USA in 1913 and began to spread to Europe. The spark in Sarajevo caused it to explode into a world war, where the stakes were a redivision of the colonies. The slaughter which followed formed an enormous outlet for capitalist production, opening up a "magnificent" perspective.

Heavy industry produced the means of destruction instead of production. Consumer industry worked flat out, not to satisfy the needs of human beings but to hasten their destruction. On the one hand, the war carried out the "salutary" operation of restoring hypertrophied capital-values to health by destroying them without any concern for their replacement. On the other hand it also encouraged the realisation of commodities well above their value through a formidable rise in prices under the regime of price controls. The mass of super-profit which capitalism drew from thus despoiling the consumers largely compensated for the reduction in the mass of surplus value, which was the result of the decline in opportunities for the exploitation of labour power, due to its mobilisation at the front.

Above all, war destroys enormous amounts of labour which in peace, excluded from the productive process, formed a growing threat to bourgeois dominationii. It has been estimated that the destruction of real value represented a third of the world's wealth accumulated by the labour of generations of workers and peasants. From the standpoint of world capitalist interests, this social disaster takes on the air of the healthy balance-sheet of a limited company dealing in financial shareholdings, and whose profit and loss account, swollen with profit, hides the ruin of innumerable small companies and the poverty of the workers. For although the destruction is of cataclysmic proportions, its cost is not born by capitalism. During the conflict, all power converges on the capitalist state under the imperious necessity of establishing a war economy. The state becomes the great and insatiable consumer which creates its purchasing power through monstrous loans that drain all the nation's savings. This is all done under the auspices of finance capital, which of course is paid for its help. The state pays with bonds which mortgage the future revenue of the proletariat and small peasants. Marx's words of 75 years ago are fully validated: "The only part of the national wealth which really enters the collective possession of modern peoples is their national debt".

The war of course accelerates the exacerbation of social antagonisms. The last period of the massacre opens with the thunderclap of October 1917. The weakest sector of world capitalism imploded. Revolutionary convulsions shook Eastern and Central Europe. Bourgeois power trembled. The conflict had to be brought to an end. In Russia the proletariat, guided by a party tempered by fifteen years of workers' s struggles and ideological work, was able to overpower a still weak bourgeoisie and establish its dictatorship. But in the central countries, where capitalism was still solidly rooted, the bourgeoisie, although it wavered before the impetuosity of the revolutionary tide, nonetheless was able - with the support of a still powerful social-democracy and thanks to the immaturity of the communist parties - to direct the proletariat away from its specific goals. Capitalism's task was made easier by its ability, after the armistice, to prolong its wartime "prosperity" in a period of economic growth justified by the need to adapt military production to renewing the productive apparatus and restoring peacetime production in order to meet the huge need for basic necessities which emerged after the war. The recovery reintegrated into production almost all the demobilised workers, and economic concessions - while they did not affect profits (since the rise in wages was far from matching the devaluation of paper currency) - allowed the bourgeoisie to create the illusion within the working class that it could improve its lot within the framework of the capitalist regime, and so to crush the revolutionary vanguard by isolating it from the class.

Disturbances in the monetary system aggravated the disorder that the war had caused in the hierarchy of value and in the trade networks, so that economic growth (at least in Europe) took the direction of speculative activity and an increase in fictitious value, rather than of a new cyclical phase. This quickly reached its high point, since although the volume produced by the seriously reduced capacity of the productive forces remained well below the pre-war level, it nonetheless soon exceeded the low purchasing power of the masses. Whence the crisis of 1920, which as the 3rd Congress of the Communist International put it, appeared as "the reaction of poverty against the efforts to produce, trade, and live in a similar style to that of the preceding capitalist period", ie the fictitious prosperity of the war and the immediate post-war period.

Although this was not the case in Europe, in the US the crisis appeared as the conclusion of an industrial cycle. The war had allowed the US economy to break the grip of the economic depression of 1913, and offered immense possibilities of accumulation by eliminating its European competitors and opening up an almost inexhaustible military market. The USA became Europe's main supplier of raw materials, industrial and agricultural products. Based on a colossal productive capacity, a powerfully industrialised agriculture, enormous capital resources, and its position as the world's creditor, the US became the economic centre of world capitalism, thus shifting the axis of imperialist contradictions. The old Anglo-German rivalry, which had been the motive force of World War I, was replaced by an antagonism between Britain and Americaiii. With the end of the war, the US was confronted by the profound contrast between a hypertrophied productive apparatus and a considerably contracted market. The contradiction broke out in the crisis of April 1920, and it was the turn of the young American imperialism to plunge into the general decomposition of its economy.

In imperialism's decadent phase, there is only one way out for capitalism's contrasts: war. Humanity can only escape such an outcome through the proletarian revolution. But in the advanced Western countries, the October revolution proved unable to bring the proletariat's consciousness to fruition. The revolution was unable to guide the productive forces towards socialism, which alone could overcome capitalism's contradictions; thus, once the last revolutionary energies had burnt themselves out in the defeat of the German proletariat in 1923, the bourgeoisie was able to restore its system to a relative stability. Although this strengthened its domination, it nonetheless pushed it down a path leading to a new and still more terrible general conflagration.

Meanwhile, a new period of economic recovery began, which had all the appearances of a prosperity analogous to a cycle of ascendant capitalism, at least as far as one essential aspect was concerned: the development of production. But we have seen that previously, growth corresponded to an extension of capitalist markets through the annexation of new pre-capitalist regions, whereas the expansion of 1924-29 took place within the general crisis of capitalism and could not draw on such resources. On the contrary, we saw an aggravation of the general crisis under the influence of certain factors which will examine rapidly here:

1. The capitalist market was deprived of the vast outlet which had been formed by imperial Russia, an importer of industrial products and capital, and an exporter of raw materials and agricultural products, sold cheap thanks to a ferocious exploitation of the peasantry; moreover, this last great pre-capitalist area, with its immense resources and a vast reservoir of manpower, was plunged into terrible social convulsions which made it impossible for capitalism to invest there "safely".
2. The breakdown of the world economic mechanism eliminated gold as a universal currency and general equivalent for commodities; the absence of any common measure and the co-existence of monetary systems based either on gold or on a fixed exchange rate or non-convertibility, created such a difference in prices that the notion of value became vague, international trade became completely disjointed, and its disorder was aggravated by the increasingly frequent resort to dumping.
3. The general and chronic crisis in agriculture in the agrarian countries, and in the agricultural sector of the industrial countries (it was to reach its full extent during the world economic crisis). The pre-war development of agricultural production under the impetus of agricultural industrialisation and capitalisation in large areas of the USA, Canada, and Australia, was extended to the most backward regions of Central Europe and South America, whose essentially agrarian economies lost their semi-autonomous nature, to become totally dependent on the world market.

Moreover the industrial countries, which would normally be importers of agricultural produce, adopted policies of economic nationalism, and tried to make up for their own agricultural deficiencies by an extension of the land under cultivation for cereals, and through an increase in yields behind the shelter of customs barriers and subsidies. This practice extended also to countries with an industrialised agriculture (USA, Canada, Argentina). Under monopolistic pressure, the result was a regime of unreal farm prices, which rose to the level of the highest cost of production, and which weighed heavily on the purchasing power of the masses (this was true above all for wheat, an article of mass consumption).

For capitalism, the fact that the peasant economies had been completely integrated into the market meant that national markets could no longer be extended and so reached the point of absolute saturation. Although he still appeared to be an independent producer, the peasant was incorporated into the capitalist sphere of production in the same way as a wage-earner: just as the latter is despoiled of his surplus labour by being forced to sell his labour power, so the peasant is unable to appropriate the extra labour contained in his products because he is forced to sell them to capital below their value.

The national market thus provides a striking expression of deepening capitalist contradictions: on the one hand, the relative, then absolute, decline in the proletariat's share of total product, and the spread of permanent unemployment and the industrial reserve army, reduced the market for agricultural products. The resulting decline in the purchasing power of the small peasants reduced the market for capitalist products. The continuing fall in the general purchasing power of the working and peasant masses thus came into more and more violent opposition with an increasingly abundant agricultural production, especially of products for mass consumption.

The existence of an endemic agricultural overproduction (clearly demonstrated by the figures for world wheat stocks, which tripled between 1926 and 1933), reinforces the elements of decomposition acting within the general crisis of capitalism. This is because agricultural overproduction is different from capitalist overproduction properly so-called, in that it cannot be counter-acted (other than by the "providential" action of natural causes), given the specific nature of agricultural production, which is still insufficiently centralised and capitalised, and occupies millions of families.

Having determined the conditions which strictly delimit the evolution of inter-imperialist contradictions, it is easy enough to discern the real nature of the "surprising" prosperity of the period of capitalism's "stabilisation". The considerable development of productive forces and production, the volume of world trade and the international movement of capital, which are the essential traits of the ascending phase of 1924-28, are explained by the necessity to erase the traces of war, to rebuild prior productive capacity so that it could be used for its fundamental objective: the completion of the economic and political structure of imperialist states, ensuring their competitiveness and the construction of economies adapted for war. It is now obvious that all the very uneven fluctuations of that economic conjuncture, although moving in a rising curve, did no more than reflect the changes in the imperialist balance of forces fixed by the Versailles Treaty's new division of the world.

The flourishing of technology and productive capacity took on gigantic proportions, especially in Germany. After the inflationary storm of 1922-23, the investment of British, French, and above all American capital was such that much of it could find no domestic field for action, and was re-exported through the banks, in particular towards the USSR to finance the Five Year Plan.

During this process of expanding productive forces, the law of the falling rate of profit acted all the more violently. Organic composition rose still more rapidly than the development of the productive apparatus, and this was true above all in the fundamental sectors. The result was a change within constant capital: the fixed part (machinery) increased powerfully relative to the circulating part (raw materials and consumables), to become a rigid element that weighed on production costs to the extent that the volume of production faltered and fixed capital represented the counter-part to borrowed capital. The most powerful companies thus became more sensitive to the slightest economic downturn. In 1929, in a USA at the height of economic prosperity, the maximum output of steel only used 85% of productive capacity; in 1933, the rate of use of productive capacity had fallen to 15%. In 1932, the value of the production of the means of production in the great industrial countries was not even equivalent to the normal wear-and-tear on fixed capital.

Such facts only express another contradictory aspect of imperialism's degenerating phase: the maintenance of a partially unused productive apparatus as an essential military potential.

In the meantime, to reduce production costs finance capital had recourse to the methods with which we are already familiar: reduction in the price of raw materials to reduce the value of the circulating part of constant capital; fixing sale prices above their value to obtain a super-profit; the reduction of variable capital, either by the direct or indirect reduction of wages, or by an intensification of labour equivalent to prolonging the working day and achieved by the rationalisation and organisation of factory production-lines. We can understand why these last methods have been most rigorously applied in the most technically developed countries - the USA and Germany - which are disadvantaged in periods of economic downturn, relative to less developed countries where production costs are much more sensitive to a fall in wages. However, rationalisation comes up against human limitations. Moreover, the fall in wages only allows an increase in the mass of surplus-value, as long as there is no decline in the number of workers employed. Consequently, the solution to the fundamental problem - how to preserve both the value and the profitability of invested capital by producing and realising the maximum surplus-value and super-profit (the parasitic extension of the former) - has to take other directions. In order to keep non-viable capitals alive and ensure them a profit, they must be fed with "fresh" money, which finance capital of course refuses to fund from its own reserves. It therefore draws either on the savings put at its disposal through the state, or on the purchasing power of consumers. Hence the development of monopolies, of state shareholding in mixed companies, the creation of costly "public utilities", loans, subsidies to unprofitable companies or state guarantees for their revenue. Hence also the control of budgets, the "democratisation" of taxation by extending the tax base, fiscal advantages for capital in order to re-animate the "living forces" of the nation, the reduction in "unprofitable" social costs, the conversion of unearned income, etc.

However, even this cannot suffice. The mass of surplus value produced remains inadequate; the field of production remains too narrow and must be extended. While war is the great outlet for capitalist production, in "peacetime" it is militarism (ie all the activities involved in the preparation for war) that realises the surplus value of the fundamental areas of production controlled by finance capital. The latter determines militarism's capacity for absorption by confiscating a part of the purchasing power of the working and peasant masses and transferring it through taxation to the state, which is the customer for the means of destruction and strategic public works. Capitalism's contradictions obviously cannot be resolved by the respite thus gained. As Marx already foresaw, "the contradiction between the general social power finally constituted by capital and the power of each capitalist to dispose of the social conditions of capitalist production develops more and more". All the internal antagonisms of the bourgeoisie must then be taken in hand by its apparatus of domination, the capitalist state, which is called upon to safeguard the whole bourgeois class’ fundamental interests from the danger threatening it, and to complete the fusion - already carried out in part by finance capital – of the particular interests of the various capitalist formations. The less surplus value there is to share out, the sharper the internal conflicts and the more vital this concentration. The Italian bourgeoisie was the first to resort to fascism, because its fragile economic structure threatened to break up under the pressure, not only of the crisis of 1921, but also of the shock of violent social contrasts.

Germany, a power without any colonies and with a weak imperialist foundation, was forced in the fourth year of the world economic crisis to concentrate all the resources of its economy within a totalitarian state, breaking the only force which could have opposed a capitalist dictatorship with its own: the proletariat. Moreover, the process of transforming the economic apparatus into an instrument of war was furthest advanced in Germany. By contrast, the most important imperialist groupings, such as France and Britain, still possessed considerable reserves of surplus value, and so have still not entered determinedly on the road towards state centralisation.

We have just seen that the expansion of the period 1924-28 was a function of the restoration and structural reinforcement of each of the imperialist powers, with a number of secondary states that have entered the former’s orbits according to their own interests and inclinations. But precisely because this expansion includes two contradictory - though closely linked - movements, one towards the expansion of production and the circulation of commodities, the other towards a splintering of the world market into independent economies, its saturation point could not be long delayed.

The world crisis, which the dreamers of economic liberalism wanted to see as a cyclical crisis which could be resolved thanks to the effects of “spontaneous” factors, and which capitalism could therefore escape from by applying some labour plan of the De Man variety, opens the period of inter-imperialist struggles, first economic and political, then violent and bloody once the crisis has exhausted all of capitalism's peaceful possibilities.

We cannot analyse here the process of this unprecedented economic collapse. During the crisis, all capitalism's attempts, which we have already described, to find a way out of its contradictions are used tenfold and with the energy of desperation: extension of monopolies from the home market to the colonies and attempts to form homogeneous empires protected behind a single tariff barrier (Ottawa); the dictatorship of finance capital and the strengthening of its parasitic activity; the retreat of international monopolies, forced to give way before the rise of nationalism (Kreuger crash); the exacerbation of antagonisms through tariff wars, to which are joined struggles over currencies involving the gold stocks of the central banks; in trade, the substitution of compensatory clearing offices, or even of barter, for the regulatory function of gold as a general equivalent for commodities; the annulment of irrecoverable “reparations”, and the repudiation of American debts by the “victorious” states, the suspension of the financial service of private loans and debts in the “vanquished” states, leading to the collapse of international credit and of capitalism's “moral” values.

If we consider the determining factors of capitalism's general crisis, we can understand why the world crisis cannot be absorbed by the “natural” action of capitalism's economic laws, and why on the contrary these laws have been emptied out by the combined power of finance capital and the capitalist state, which have compressed all manifestations of particular capitalist interests. We should consider from this viewpoint the multitude of “experiments” and attempts at correcting the situation, the “recoveries” that have appeared during the crisis. Their action is exercised, not at the international level as part of an improvement in the world conjuncture, but at the national level of the imperialist economies, and in forms adapted to the particularities of their structures. We cannot analyse here certain expressions such as deflation, inflation, or currency devaluation. Their interest is anyway secondary, because they are contingent and ephemeral. All these experiments in artificial reanimation of an economy in decomposition nonetheless produce common fruits. Those which propose, demagogically, to fight unemployment and increase the purchasing power of the masses, lead to the same result: not to the fall in unemployment which is vaunted in the official statistics, but to a sharing out of the available work among a greater number of workers, which can only cause a degradation of their living conditions.

The increase in production by basic industry (and not by consumer industry), which can be observed within each imperialism, is nourished solely by the policy of (strategic) public works and by militarism, whose significance we understand very well.

Wherever it turns, however it tries to escape the grip of the crisis, capitalism is pushed irresistibly towards its destiny of war. Where and how the war will break out is impossible to determine today. What it is important to say and to state clearly, is that it will explode over the division of Asia and that it will be world wide.

All the imperialisms are heading towards war, whether they are dressed in democratic suits or fascist uniforms; and the proletariat cannot let itself be drawn in to any abstract discrimination between “democracy” and fascism, which can only divert it from the daily struggle against its own bourgeoisie. To make its tasks and its tactics dependent on the illusory perspective of an economic recovery, or on the pseudo-existence of capitalist forces opposed to war, would lead the proletariat straight into war, or deprive it of any possibility of finding the road towards revolution.

Mitchell

In Poland, twenty years ago, in the summer of 1980, there began the most important movement of the world proletariat’s struggle since the end of the revolutionary wave, which broke out during World War I and continued until the beginning of the 1920s. In today’s conditions, when the dominant ideology dismisses the idea that the working class even exists, let alone that it can act as a force in defence of its interests, it is essential for revolutionary organisations to remind workers of the most extensive outbreak of working class struggle for almost 80 years.

For younger workers, the events of Poland 1980-81 could well come as a revelation of a recent past where the working class clearly demonstrated that it was a force to be reckoned with in capitalist society. For older workers who have, possibly, become more sceptical, a reminder of the working class’ potential power will act as an antidote to today’s poisonous lies about globalisation, the wonders of the ‘new economy’ and the so-called end of the class struggle.

The struggles in Poland 1980 were rich in lessons for the world proletariat, and we will return to some of them at the end of this article. But one which imposed itself forcefully at the time, and which today has been completely hidden by the bourgeoisie’s ideological campaigns, is that the workers’ struggles in the so-called “socialist” countries were fundamentally the same as those of the workers in the openly capitalist western countries. In this sense, they demonstrated clearly that the working class was exploited in the Eastern bloc, just as it was in the other capitalist countries. This came down to saying that from the workers’ point of view, “real socialism” was really capitalism. In fact, this lesson was not really new. Revolutionaries had not waited until 1980 to identify the capitalist nature of the self-proclaimed socialist countries. For decades, even before the formation of the “people’s democracies”, they had clearly said that the so-called “socialist fatherland” dear to the Stalinists was nothing other than an imperialist and capitalist country, where the workers were subjected to a ferocious exploitation to the profit of a bourgeois class recruited in the apparatus of the “communist” party. They had thus not been surprised in 1953 when the workers of East Berlin rose up against the German “socialist” regime, nor in 1956 when the workers of Poland, and above all Hungary, rose against the “socialist” state, in Hungary going as far as organising workers’ councils before being massacred by the tanks of the “Red” Army. In reality, the struggles in Poland 1980 had been prepared by a whole series of workers’ struggles, which we will go back to briefly here.

In June 1956 there were a series of strikes in Poland, which culminated in an insurrectional strike in Poznan that was put down by the army. When there were further strikes, demonstrations and clashes with the police in many parts of the country in October, the Polish state could no longer rely on brute repression alone. It was the nomination of the new “reformist” leadership of Gomulka that allowed the ruling class to control the situation with a nationalist strategy that prevented any link being forged with the struggle then going on in Hungary.

In the winter of 1970-71 workers responded massively to price rises of 30% and more. Alongside strikes there were clashes with the security forces and attacks on Stalinist party headquarters. Despite the state’s repression the government were outflanked by the extent of the workers’ movement and the price rises were withdrawn. During the strikes Gomulka had been replaced by Gierek, but without this diverting the course of the workers’ struggles.

In June 1976, in response to the first price rises since 1970, there were strikes and clashes with the security forces. The price rises were withdrawn, but then the repression of the state swung into operation with mass dismissals and hundreds of workers arrested.

With the experience of such struggles behind them, it was not surprising that workers revealed a remarkable understanding of the needs and means of their struggle when they embarked on the movement of 1980.

To get an idea of why the strikes in Poland were such an inspiration at the time, why the ICC immediately produced an international leaflet on the lessons of the movement, and why it is an experience of the working class that still cries out for attention two decades later, it is necessary to give an account of what happened. What follows is partly based on an article that appeared in International Review no.23 (although that issue should not be particularly singled out, as every Review from 23-29 is rich in the lessons of the movement).

“On 1 July 1980, after a major increase in meat prices [up to 60%], strikes broke out at Ursus (suburb of Warsaw) in the tractor plant which was at the heart of the confrontation with the authorities in 1976 and in Tczew [at a car component factory] in the Gdansk region [and at a paint factory and petrochemical plant in Wloclawek]. In Ursus the workers organised general assemblies, drew up a list of demands, elected a strike committee. They resisted the threat of firings and repression and carried on work stoppages throughout the following period to support the movement. Between 3-10 July agitation spread within Warsaw (electrical supplies factories, printers), to the aircraft factory at Swi, to the aircraft factory at Swidnick, [20,000 workers at] the car plant in Zeran; to Lodz, to Gdansk. Workers formed strike committees, their demands dealt with wage increases and the cancellation of the price rises. The government granted wage increases: 10% on average, sometimes as high as 20%; often granted preferentially to strikers in order to calm the movement.

“In mid-July the strike hit Lublin. Railroad workers, transport workers and finally all industries in the city stopped work. Their demands: free elections to the unions, a guarantee of safety for the strikers, keep the police out of the factories, wage increases. [Troops were called in to maintain food supplies to the city.]

“Work started again in some regions but strikes broke out in others. Krasnik, the Skolawa Wola steel mills [employing 30,000 workers], the city of Chelm (near the Russian border), [Ostrow-Wielkopolski, 20,000 workers at a helicopter factory in] Wroclaw, were reported to be affected ... [among over 100] strikes in the month of July. Department K1 of the shipyards at Gdansk had a work stoppage; also the steel complex a Huta-Warsaw. Everywhere the authorities gave in and granted wage increases. According to the Financial Times the government established a fund of 4 billion zlotys in July to pay these increases. Official agencies were instructed to make ‘good meat’ immediately available in factories where work stoppages threatened. Towards the end of July the movement seemed to recede; the government thought it had stopped the movement by negotiating factory by factory. It was mistaken.

“The explosion was merely incubating as the one-week strike of Warsaw’s dustmen at the beginning of August showed. On 14 August, the firing of a militant of the free trade union movement, a worker known for his combativity and sincerity, provoked the outbreak of a strike [by 17,000 workers] at the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk. The general assembly drew up a list of eleven demands; proposals were listened to, discussed and voted upon. The assembly decided to elect a strike committee mandated on the basis of the demands which included: the reinstatement of fired workers, increases in family allowances, wage increases of 2000 zlotys (average wage: 3000-4500 zlotys a month), the dissolution of the official unions, suppression of the privileges of the police and bureaucracy, the building of a monument to the memory of the workers killed by the militia in 1970, the immediate publication of truthful information about the strike. The management gave in to the reinstatement of Anna Walentynowicz and Lech Walesa and on the construction of the monument. The strike committee gave an account of its mandate to the workers in the afternoon and informed them of the management’s position. The assembly decided to form a workers’ militia; all alcohol was confiscated. A second round of negotiations with the management began. The workers took over the loud speaker system so that negotiations would be open for all to hear. Soon they developed a system whereby workers outside could be heard by the negotiators inside. Workers seized the microphone and made their voices heard. Throughout the greater part of the strike and up until the last days before the signing of the compromise thousands of workers intervened from outside to exhort, to approve, or to reject the strike committee’s decisions. All the workers who had been fired since 1970 could return to the shipyards. The management granted wage increases and guaranteed the safety of the strikers.

“On 15 August a general strike [of more than 50,000 workers] paralysed the Gdansk region. The Paris Commune shipyard at Gdynia came out. The workers occupied the shipyards and were granted an immediate increase of 2100 zlotys. They refused to go back to work, saying that ‘Gdansk must also win’. The movement at Gdansk fluctuated in a moment of hesitation: the shop floor delegates hesitated to go any further and seemed to want to accept the management’s proposals. Workers from other places in Gdansk and from Gdynia convinced the assembly of workers occupying the shipyard to maintain solidarity with them. There was a call for a new election of delegates who would be better able to express the general will. The workers from different plants in the region formed an inter-factory committee [the MKS] during the night of 15 August and elaborated twenty-one demands.

“The strike committee then had 400 members, two representatives per factory; at the height of the movement there were between 800 and 1000 members. Delegations went back and forth from their factories to the central strike committee, sometimes using cassettes to record the discussions. Strike committees in each factory took care of any specific demands, the whole was co-ordinated by the central strike committee. The strike committee of the Lenin shipyards had twelve members, one per shop, elected by a show of hands after discussion. Two were sent to the central inter-factory strike committee and reported back twice a day.

“On 16 August all telephone communication with Gdansk was cut off by the government. The central strike committee elected a presidium where the partisans of ‘free trade unions’ and dissidents predominated. The twenty-one demands settled upon on 16 August began with a call for free and independent unions and the right to strike. What had been point two in the eleven demands went to seventh place: the 2000 zloty increase for everyone”.

[On 17 August Gdansk local radio reported that “the climate of discussion in certain plants has become alarming.”]

“By 18 August seventy-five enterprises were paralysed in the Gdansk-Gdynia-Sopot region. There were about 100,000 strikers. There were movements in Szczecin, and at Tarnow, eight kilometres south of Krakow. The strike committee organised the food supply; power stations and food factories operated by request of the strike committee. The negotiations having become bogged down, the government refused to talk with the inter-factory committee. In the following days new strikes at Elblag, at Tczew, in Kolobrzeg and other cities broke out. On 20 August it was estimated that 300,000 workers were on strike [including 120,000 in the Gdansk area in more than 250 plants. By 22 August more than 150,000 workers in the Gdansk area, and 30,000 in Szczecin, were on strike]. The newspaper of the Lenin shipyards, Solidarnosc, came out daily; printing workers helped to put out leaflets and publications. [Stalinist publications spoke of “a danger of permanent social and political destabilisation”.]

“On 26 August workers reacted with caution to the government’s promises and remained indifferent to [Stalinist Party leader] Gierek’s speeches. They refused to negotiate until telephone communications were re-established.

“On 27 August safe conduct passes for travel to Gdansk issued by sources in the Warsaw government were granted to dissidents so that they could go to the strikers as ‘experts’ and calm this upside down world. The government agreed to negotiate with the presidium of the central strike committee and recognised the right to strike. The telephone lines were re-established. Parallel negotiations began at Szczecin near the border with East Germany. Cardinal Wysynski called for an end to the strike; parts of the speech were shown on TV. The strikers sent out delegations to the rest of the country for solidarity.

“On 28 August the strikes spread further. They affected the copper and coal mines of Silesia where workers have the highest standard of living in Poland. The miners, even before discussing the strike and agreeing on precise demands declared that they would stop work immediately ‘if the authorities touch Gdansk’. They went on strike for ‘the demands of Gdansk’. Thirty factories were on strike at Wroclaw, in Poznan (the factories where the movement began in 1956), in the steel mills of Nova-Huta and at Rzeszois. Inter-factory committees formed in various regions. Ursus sent delegates to Gdansk. At the heart of the generalisation Walesa declared: ‘We do not want the strikes to spread because they will push the country to the point of collapse. We need calm to conduct the negotiations’. The negotiations between the presidium and the government became private; the loudspeaker system increasingly began to break down at the shipyards. On 29 August the discussions and the presidium came to a compromise: the workers will be given ‘free trade unions’ if they accept 1. the leading role of the party; 2. the need to support the Polish state and the Warsaw Pact; 3. that the unions play no political role.

“The agreement was signed on 31 August at Szczecin and at Gdansk. The government recognised the ‘self-managed’ unions; as its spokesman said ‘the nation and the state need a well-organised and conscious working class’. Two days later, fifteen members of the presidium resigned from their workplaces and became officials of the new unions. Afterwards they were soon obliged to nuance their position because it was announced that they would receive salaries of 8000 zlotys. This information was later denied because of workers’ discontent.

“It took several days to get these agreements signed. Statements from workers at Gdansk showom workers at Gdansk show them to have been morose, suspicious and disappointed. Some workers on hearing that the agreements gave them only half of the increase they had already obtained by 16 August shouted ‘Walesa, you sold us out’. Many workers did not agree with the point recognising the role of the Party and the state.

“The strike in the coal mines of Upper Silesia and in the copper mines whose aim was to ensure that the Gdansk agreement would apply to the entire country lasted until 3 September. Throughout September strikes continued: in Kielce, at Bialystok among the cotton workers, in textiles, in the salt mines of Silesia, in the transport services of Katowice”. By mid October 1980 it was estimated that strikes had occurred in more than 4800 enterprises throughout Poland.

Although the mass strike had its most dramatic expressions in August 1980, the working class kept the initiative against the first incoherent responses of the Polish bourgeoisie for some months, into early 1981. Despite the agreements drawn up in Gdansk, workers’ struggles continued, with occupations, strikes and demonstrations. Workers’ demands broadened, with economic demands widening in scope and depth, and political demands becoming increasingly more radical. In November 1980, for example, there were, in actions centred on the Warsaw area, demands for control over police, army, security police and public prosecutors. Such demands, for limitations on the repressive apparatus of a capitalist government, would not be tolerated anywhere in the world, as it puts into question the very force that guarantees the bourgeoisie’s dictatorship.

At the economic level, there were occupations of government offices in protest at meat shortages. Elsewhere there were strikes and protests about the meat ration allowed over the Christmas period. Solidarnosc was explicitly against these actions as it had for some time been campaigning for the introduction of meat rationing.

Faced with these struggles the ruling class in Poland had been inept in its response. Because of the extent of the workers’ movement it was not initially able to risk resorting to direct repression. This did not mean that the threat of repression was not used constantly by Solidarnosc as grounds for discontinuing the struggle. The threat was not only from the Polish state but also from the forces of Russian imperialism. They were rightly concerned about the possibility of the movement inspiring struggles in neighbouring countries. The threat of intervention took a concrete form when, in November 1980, there were reports of concentrations of Warsaw Pact forces gathering on the Polish borders. Although leading figures in the US and western Europe issued the usual warnings against Russia intervening in Poland, as it had done in Hungary in 56 and Czechoslovakia in 68, these were empty words. Joseph Luns, the then Secretary-General of NATO, had already said, in October 1980, that the West was unlikely to make any military retaliation for a Russian invasion. When it came to class struggle on the scale undertaken by the workers in Poland the imperialist enemies had no real differences in wanting social order resumed and workers’ struggles crushed. In reality, these Western warnings had a very definite objective: they aimed to frighten the Polish of workers with the threat of intervention by Russian tanks. They knew what had happened in Hungary in 1956, when these tanks had left thousands dead. Nonetheless, the struggles continued.

In January 1981, when Solidarnosc were discussing Saturday working with the government, on the 10th, three million people failed to turn up for work and heavy industry came to a standstill. Lech Walesa appealed for there to be no confrontation with the government.

In January and February 1981 there were strikes demanding the removal of corrupt officials. The southern region around Bielsko-Biala was paralysed by a prolonged general strike involving 200,000 workers in ike involving 200,000 workers in some 120 enterprises. There were strikes in Bydgoszcz, Gdansk, Czestochowa, Kutno, Poznan, Legnica, Kielce. A leading figure in Solidarnosc said “we want to stop these anti-corruption strikes, Otherwise the whole country would have to go on strike”. On February 9th, in Jelenia Gora (in western Poland) there was a general strike involving 300,000 workers in 450 enterprises demanding that a government sanatorium reserved for bureaucrats be turned over to the local hospital. There were further actions in Kalisz, Suwalki, Katowice, Radom, Nowy Sacz, Szczecin and Lublin - these happened after Jaruzelski has been appointed as Prime Minister and Solidarnosc had responded enthusiastically to his proposal for a 90-day period of restraint from industrial action.

The replacement of Kania by Jaruzelski in February 81, and the previous replacement of Gierek by Kania in September 1980 were important re-orientations by the Polish bourgeoisie, but they did not, in themselves, deflect workers’ struggles. They had seen Gomulka come and go, and knew that a change at the top would not change the policies of the state.

In March there was the threat of a national general strike in response to police violence in Bydgoszcz. In the end this was called off by Solidarnosc after a deal with the government. The union accepted that “there was some justification for police interference in Bydgoszcz because of a climate of tension in the city.” In the period following Bydgoszcz seven joint commissions were set up to officially institutionalise government-Solidarnosc collaboration.

However, the struggles had not finished. In mid-July 1981 fuel and price rises of up to 400% were announced, as well as cuts in the meat rations for August and September. Strikes and hunger marches reappeared. Solidarnosc called for an end to the protests. Many other issues were also taken up - corruption, repression, as well as rationing. By late September two thirds of Poland’s provinces were affected. The strike wave continued developing into mid October 81.

Although the government’s summer announcements were clearly threatening, it was not until 13th December 1981 that the clamp down of military rule was undertaken. The police state had 300,000 troops and 100,000 police - but it was 17 months after the start of the movement before the Polish ruling class felt confident that it could physically attack workers’ strikes, occupations and demonstrations. This confidence came from its knowledge of the work that Solidarnosc had done in the gradual undermining of the ability of the working class to struggle.

The strength of the movement lay in the fact that workers took the struggle into their own hands and rapidly went beyond the confines of particular enterprises. Extending struggles beyond individual factories, holding general assemblies and ensuring that delegates could be recalled at a delegates could be recalled at any moment, all this contributed to the power of the movement. Partly this can be attributed to the fact that workers had no confidence in the official trade unions - which were identified as corrupt state organs. However, while this contributed to the strength of the movement, it also laid workers wide open to propaganda about ‘free’ or ‘independent’ trade unions.

Various dissident groups had for years put forward the idea of ‘free’ trade unions, as an alternative to those which were seen as part of the state. Such ideas came to the fore particularly at times of intense workers’ struggle. August 1980 was no exception. Right from the start, when workers were struggling against attacks on their living and working conditions, there were voices insisting on the need for ‘independent’ trade unions.

The actions of Solidarnosc in 1980 and 1981 demonstrated that, even when formally separated from the capitalist state, new unions, started from scratch, with millions of determined members and enjoying the confidence of the working class, act the same as official, bureaucratic state unions. As with unions everywhere else in the world, Solidarnosc (and the demands for ‘free trade unions’ that preceded its foundation) acted to sabotage struggles, demobilise and discourage workers and divert their discontent into the dead-ends of ‘self-management’, defence of the national economy and defence of the unions rather than workers’ interests. This happens, not because of ‘bad leaders’ such as Walesa, the influence of the Church or a lack of democratic structures, but because of the very nature of unionism. Permanent organisations cannot be maintained in an epoch where reforms are no longer possible, where the state tends to incorporate the whole of society, and where unions can only be instruments for defending the national economy.

In Poland, even at the height of the strikes, when workers were organising themselves, extending their struggles, holding assemblies, electing delegates and creating inter-factory committees to co-ordinate and make their actions more effective, there was already a movement that insisted on the need for new unions. As our account of the events shows, one of the first blows against the movement was the transformation of the inter-factory committees into the initial structure of Solidarnosc.

There was much suspicion of the actions of such as Walesa and the ‘moderate’ leadership, but the work of Solidarnosc was not accomplished by a handful of ‘compromising’ celebrities, but by the union structure as a whole. Certainly, Walesa was an important figure, and acknowledged by the bourgeoisie internationally. The award of the Nobel peace prize, and his subsequent elevation to the Polish presidency were undoubtedly in continuity with his activities in 1980-81. But it should also be remembered that he had once been a respected militant, who had, for example, been a leading figure in the struggles of 1970. This respect meant that his voice had a particular weight with workers, as a proven ‘opponent’ of the Polish state. By the summer of 1980 this ‘opposition’ was 80 this ‘opposition’ was a thing of the past. Right from the beginning of the movement he was to be found actively discouraging workers from striking. This started in Gdansk, then he went on to ‘negotiations’ with the authorities on the best way to sabotage workers’ struggles, and, eventually, took the form of rushing round the whole country, often in an army helicopter, urging workers, at every opportunity, to abandon their strikes.

Walesa not only relied on his past reputation, but gave new reasons for the suppression of the struggle. “Society wants order now. We have to learn to negotiate rather than strike”. Workers had to stop their struggles so that Solidarnosc could negotiate. The framework of the national economy was clear as “We are Poles first and trade unionists second”.

The role of Solidarnosc became more and more openly one of partnership with the government, particularly after it averted the threat of a general strike in March 1981. In August 81 there was a particularly good example, when Solidarnosc was trying to persuade workers to give up eight free Saturdays to help out the crisis-ridden economy. As an angry worker told representatives of Solidarnosc’s National Commission “You dare to call on people to work their free Saturdays because the government has to be propped up? But who says we have to prop it up?”.

But Solidarnosc did not only issue direct appeals for order. A typical leaflet, from Szczecin Solidarnosc, started by saying that:

“Solidarnosc means:

• the way to get the country back on its feet
• social calm and stability
• maintenance of standards and good organisation”,

but then went on to speak of “the battle for decent living standards”. This showed the two faces of Solidarnosc, as a force for social order, but also posing as the defender of workers’ interests. The two aspects of the union’s activity were mutually dependent. By claiming to have the interests of workers at heart they hoped that their appeals for order would have credibility. Many union activists who denounced Walesa’s ‘betrayals’ would still rush to the defence of Solidarnosc itself. In February 1981, following a period where many strikes were out of the control of Solidarnosc, the leadership issued a statement insisting on the need for a united union as its splintering “would herald a period of uncontrolled social conflict”. Such an appeal was a reminder that Solidarnosc would only function effectively for Polish capitalism so long as it posed as the defender of workers’ interests.

This role for Solidarnosc was recognised internationally, as unions from the West gave advice on how unions function within the framework of the national economy. To build up Solidarnosc western unions did not restrict themselves to verbal assistance, substantial financial support was provided by a number of union federations, in particular from those pillars of social responsibilityse pillars of social responsibility in the US and the UK, the AFL-CIO and the TUC. Internationally capitalism left nothing to chance.

The struggles of 1980-81 were enriched by the previous experience of the working class in Poland. However, they were not an isolated ‘Polish’ expression of the class struggle, being the culmination of an international wave of struggles from 1978 to 1981. Miners in the US in 1978, the public sector in Britain in 1978-79, French steel workers at the start of 1979, Rotterdam dockworkers autumn 1979, steelworkers in Britain in 1980, Brazilian metal workers, oil workers in Iran, massive workers’ movements in Peru, strikes across eastern Europe following the mass strikes in Poland: all these struggles demonstrated the combativity of the working class and a growing class consciousness. The main significance of the mass strike in Poland was that it provided the beginnings of an answer to the fundamental questions posed in all the other struggles - how does the working class fight and what are the basic obstacles it faces in its struggle.

As we have seen, during the summer of 1980 the Polish proletariat was able to create, spontaneously, the most powerful and effective forms of class struggle precisely because the social “buffers” that exist in Western countries were lacking. This thoroughly gives the lie to all those (Trotskyists, anarcho-syndicalists, and others) who claim that the working class cannot really develop its struggles unless it has first formed trade unions or any other kind of “workers’ associationism” (in the words of the Bordigists of the International Communist Party that publishes Il Comunista in Italy). The Polish proletariat’s moment of greatest strength, when it paralysed the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state and forced it to retreat, was when no trade union existed (the official unions being completely out of the running). When the union was formed, and as it bit by bit grew in strength and structure, so the proletariat began to weaken to the point where it was unable to react to the repression unleashed on 13th December 1981. When the class struggle develops, the workers’ strength ielops, the workers’ strength is not proportional to that of the unions, but inversely proportional. Any attempt to “renew” the old unions or to create new ones, comes down to supporting the bourgeoisie in its sabotage of the workers’ struggle.

This is a fundamental lesson for the world proletariat from the struggle in Poland 1980. however, the Polish workers themselves were unable to understand the lesson because they did not have a direct historical experience of union sabotage. A few months of Solidarnosc sabotaging the struggle convinced them at best that Walesa and his cronies were a bunch of bastards, but were not enough to teach them that the problem is trade unionism, not this or that “bad leader”.

These lessons could only truly be learned by sectors of the world proletariat who had already been confronted for a long time with bourgeois democracy, not immediately from the Polish experience, but from their own daily experience. In part, this is what happened in the period that followed.

In the international wave of struggles from 1983-89, particularly in western Europe, where the working class has the longest experience of ‘independent’ unions and the dictatorship of the democratic bourgeoisie, workers struggles were led increasingly to call into question the authority of the unions, to the point where in a whole series of countries (France and Italy in particular) “co-ordinations” were set up, supposedly springing from “rank-and-file assemblies”, in order to make up for the discredit of the official unions(1). Obviously, this tendency to call into question the union framework was strongly counter-acted by the general retreat of the working class following the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes in 1989. But in the struggles which will necessarily develop in the future against the capitalist crisis, workers in every country will have to recover the lessons of their previous struggles. Not only the lessons of struggles that they have been directly involved in, but also those of their class brothers in other countries, and in particular those of the proletariat’s struggle in Poland 1980.

For we can be certain that the working class’ relative passivity world wide today, does not call into question that general historic course of the proletarian struggle. May 68 in France, the Italian “hot autumn” of 1969, and may other movements around the world since then have shown that the proletariat has emerged from the counter-revolution that it suffered for 40 years(2). This course has not fundamentally been called into question since then: a historic period which has seen struggles as important as those in Poland can only be called into question by a profound defeat of the working class such as the bourgeoisie has so far been unable to inflict.

Barrow

1 See in particular our article “The co-ordinations sabotage the struggle” in International Review no.56

2 See our article “Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism” in this issue.

As we put this issue together, there have been major upheavals in ex-Yugoslavia and we want to take position on them immediately . It is our responsibility as a revolutionary organisation to do so . even if we can only be brief here. Our readers can be sure that we will quickly develop our analysis of these events, and our intervention in general, in particular through our various territorial publications.

Thus, if we are to believe the bourgeois media, and especially the images transmitted on the television networks of all the so-called great democracies, we have been seeing a major historical we have been seeing a major historical event in Belgrade over the last few days, a "democratic and peaceful revolution" accomplished by the Serbian people, and thus the fall of Milosevic i.e. of the "last communist dictatorship in Europe". Everything is for the best in the best of all possible capitalist worlds! And this "historic event" has been saluted and feted by all the heads of state and leaders of the great "democratic" powers, the very same people who, just one year ago, unleashed war, destruction and massacre on Kosovo and Serbia. Of course, this was all done in the name of the "humanitarian intervention" needed to stop Milosevic and his mad dogs carrying out their terrible atrocities in Kosovo.

Our organisation responded immediately to all these hypocrites and denounced them as "pyromaniac firemen", underlining the responsibility of all of them in the barbarism that swept this region:

"The politicians and media of NATO present the war as an action in defence of .human rights., against a particularly revolting regime which is responsible, amongst its other misdeeds, for the .ethnic cleansing. which has stained Yugoslavia in blood since 1991. In tained Yugoslavia in blood since 1991. In reality, the .democratic. powers care not a jot for the population of Kosovo, just as they are completely indifferent to the fate of the Kurd and Shiite populations of Iraq, which they left to be massacred by the troops of Saddam Hussein after the Gulf war. The sufferings inflicted by dictators on persecuted civilian populations have always been the pretext for the great .democracies. to unleash .just. war" (International Review 97)

A year later we asked:

"Who allowed the worst nationalist mafia cliques in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and now Kosovo, to unleash nationalist hysteria and bloody ethnic cleansing, if not the great imperialist powers? Who, if not Germany, pushed for the unilateral declaration of independence by Slovenia and Croatia, encouraging and precipitating the unleashing of nationalism in the Balkans which led to the massacres and exile of the Serbian, then the Bosnian population? Who, if not Britain and France, turned a blind eye to the repression and massacre of the Croat and Bosnian population, and the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Milosevic and the .Greater Serbia. nationalists? Who, if not the United States, supported and equipped the different rival gated and equipped the different rival gangs depending on how their rivals were positioned at any given moment? When they justify he bombing campaign on the grounds of .humanitarian interference., the .Allied. western democracies demonstrate an unlimited hypocrisy and duplicity" (International Review 98).

If today all these big imperialist gangsters haven.t got enough words to salute the "awakening" of the Serbian people who, we are told, have the "pride and the courage" to get rid of a bloody dictator, this is just a way of trying to get us to believe that the current events are a perfect justification for their bloody bombings a year ago. Le Monde, the eminent mouthpiece of the ruling class in France, says starightforwardly:

"by finally deciding to confront Serb power militarily, Europe and the USA undoubtedly weakened the master of Belgrade and isolated him further from his people"

Weren.t the so-called great democracies right, and won.t they be right in future, to intervene by force in the name of humanitarianism? In other words, they want to use the cover of "human rights" to free their hands and carights" to free their hands and carry out more massacre and destruction. From this point of view, what is happening in Belgrade (not ti mention the ideological use being made of it) is already a success for the bourgeoisie.

Another level on which the ruling class has tried to score some points is around the theme of "democracy" and its triumphant progress against all forms of dictatorship. According to the bourgeoisie, the days we are living through are striking proof of this. But this barrage is all the more effective in that, as the media have emphasised so strongly, among those who have played a leading role in the fall of Milosevic, in the "victory of democracy", is the Serbian working class which responded to the call for "civil disobedience" launched by the winner of the election, Kostunica . a big nationalist bourgeois who was for ages the accomplice of the murderous Karadic in Bosnia, and who is now presented as a great opponent of dictatorship. The columns of the bourgeois press have devoted a lot of space to those workers who, like the miners of Kolubra, went on strike in defence of the "democratic cause". If the international ruling class has one profound wish, it is that this example can be exported all over the world and above all to the big over the world and above all to the big working class centres at the heart of capitalism.

At this moment everyone is describing what.s happened in Belgrade as a "revolution" but this is a revolution of the duped. The victory of "democracy", i.e. of the bourgeois forces which represent it, can only be a victory for the capitalist class, in no way a victory for the working class.

Elfe 7.10.00

Over the last months the IBRP[1] [15]has published articles in its press on the need for the regroupment between revolutionary forces with a view to the construction of the international communist party of the future. One of these, "Revolutionaries, internationalists in the face of the perspective of war and the situation of the proletariat"[2] [16]is a document produced in the period following last year's war in Kosovo:

"The recent bellicose events in the Balkans, precisely because they took place in Europe, (…) represent a significant step forward in the process leading to generalised imperialist war. (…).

The war itself and the way it was opposed, forms the basis for adecantation and selection of revolutionary forces able to participate in the construction of the party.

They will be delimited by the basic points that follow, which are indispensable for any political initiative intending to strengthen the revolutionary front against capital and its wars".

Following this passage we find "21 basic points"[2] [16]which the IBRP defines as fundamental.

It was precisely these "bellicose events in the Balkans" that prompted our organisation, at the time of the war itself, to make an appeal to the various revolutionary organisations existing at an international level in which we said that:

"There are also differences of course, which are related to a different way of analysing imperialism in the present period and the relationship between the classes. But, without underestimating these differences, we think that what unites us is much more important and significant than that which differentiates us in relation to the tasks of the moment and it was on this basis that, on March 29 1999, we appealed to all of these groups to take acommon initiative against the war"[3] [17].

As this appeal, made over a year ago, fell on utterly deaf ears[4] [18],we have to ask why on earth the IBRP has only now come up with its "21 conditions" - with which we are completely agreed, with the exception of some reservations on two points[5] [19]- but did not accept our appeal at the time. The answer is to be found towards the end of the IBRP document, where there is a section that would seem to be addressed to the ICC (without once quoting us, of course), stating that "23 years after the1st International Conference, called by BattagliaComunista[6] [20] to launch an initial confrontation between the political groups that followed the general class and internationalist lines defended by the Communist Left from the second half of the '20s,it's possible- and therefore now necessary - to make an evaluation of that confrontation".

An evaluation? After 23 years? And why only now? The IBRP explains it thus: in more than two decades there has been "an acceleration in the process of decantation in the ‘proletarian political camp’ excluding all those organisations that, for one reason or another, have stumbled over the question of war by not coming up to the inalienable principle of revolutionary defeatism".

But the bit where they have it in for us (and for the Bordigist groups) comes immediately after this:

"Other groupings within this camp, although not falling into the tragic error of supporting the war front, (…) have nevertheless cut themselves off from the method and perspective for the work that will lead to adherence to the future revolutionary party, irretrievable victims of an idealistic or mechanistic framework" (our emphasis).

As we think that the accusations that the IBRP makes against us are unfounded - and as moreover we fear that they serve to hide a politically opportunist practice - we will try to develop a reply to these accusations by showing what has been the attitude of the marxist current of the workers' movement in terms of the "method and perspective for the work that will lead to adherence to the future revolutionary party". In doing so we will check concretely if, and to what extent, the IBRP and the groups that formed it have conformed to this line. In order to do so we will consider two questions thatare closely linked and which express the two levels at which the problem of the organisation of revolutionaries is posed today:

• how the future International should be conceived
• what policy should be followed for the construction of the organisation and the regroupment of revolutionaries.

International Communist Party or International of Communist Parties?

What will the future International be? An organisation conceived in a unitary way from the outset, that is, an international communist party, or an International of the communist parties of the various countries? On this point the thinking and the struggle of Amadeo Bordiga and the Italian Left is an indispensable reference point. For Bordiga, the Communist International should already have been, as he called it, the international party. Consistent with this conception, Bordiga even renounced certain "tactical" points that he defended (abstentionism, a regroupment that excluded the centrists) in order to make the predominance of the International over the individual national parties a living reality, in order to ensure that the Communist International was one organisation and not a federation of parties, that it had one single policy everywhere and not specific ones from country to country.

"Sowe assert that the highest level of international agreement not only has the right to establish the formulae that are in force and which must be in force for every country without exception, but it also has the right to involve itself in the situation of an individual country and can therefore say that the International thinks that - for example - in England it's necessary to do, act in this given way" (Amadeo Bordiga, address to the Congress of Livorno, 1921, in La Sinistra Comunista nel cammino della rivoluzione, Sociali editions, 1976).

Bordiga,in the name of the Italian Left, was even more correct to defend this conception against the degeneration of the International itself, when the policy of the latter became more and more confused with the policy and the interests of the Russian state:

"Its sister parties must help the Russian party resolve its problems even though it's true that they don't have direct experience of the problems of government; in spite of this they can contribute to their resolution by bringing a class, a revolutionary coefficient derived directly from the reality of the class struggle taking place in their own country" (Theses of the left for the 3rd Congress of the Communist Party of Italy, Lyon, January 1926, published in In defence of the continuity of the communist programme, "Il Programma Communista" edition, Milan, 1970).

Finally, in Bordiga's reply to Karl Korsch it emerges with still greater clarity what the International must be and what it failed to be:

"I think that one of the defects of the International today is to be 'an oppositional bloc' locally and nationally. We must reflect on this, it must be understood without exaggeration but rather in order to treasure these lessons. Lenin made a great deal of work depend on 'spontaneous’ elaboration, counting on regrouping materially and then moulding the various groups homogeneously afterwards in the heat of the Russian revolution. On the whole it wasn't a success" (from Amadeo Bordiga's letter to Korsch, published in Danilo Montaldi, Korsch and the Italian communists, Savelli).

In other words Bordiga regretted the fact that the International had been formed on the basis of a group of "oppositions" to the old social democratic parties, politically incoherent with one another and that Lenin's proposal to unify these diverse components did not have any substantial success.

It is on the basis of this conception that the revolutionary organisations of the counter-revolutionary years, in spite of the adverse political period, always saw themselves not only as internationalist but also as international organisations. And it is no accident that one of the tricks used to attack the Italian Fraction within Trotsky’s International Left Opposition was precisely to accuse them of following a "national" policy.[7] [21]

Now let us see what is the IBRP’s conception on this question:

"The IBRP was constituted as the only possible form of organisation and co-ordination, half way between the isolated work of the vanguard in various countries and the presence of a real International Party (…). New vanguards - released from the old schemas that have been shown to be useless to explain the present and from which to project the future - they undertake the task of the construction of the party (…). These vanguards have the duty, which they are fulfilling, to consolidate themselves and grow on the basis of a body of theses, a platform and an organisational framework which are coherent one with another and with the Bureau which, in this way, puts itself forward as a reference point for the necessary homogenisation of the forces of the future party"[9] [22].

Up to here the IBRP's discourse, apart from being too presumptuous in places, does not seem, on the whole, to contradict the above framework. But the next passage poses more than one problem:

"Reference point doesn't mean a structure that imposes itself. The IBRP doesn't intend to accelerate the time it takes for an international regroupment of revolutionary forces beyond the ‘natural’ time for the political growth of the communist vanguard in the various countries"[8] [23].

This means that the IBRP, or rather the two organisations that compose it, don't think that it's possible to build a single international organisation before the formation of the international party. Moreover the passage makes a strange reference to "the ‘natural’ time for the political growth of the communist vanguard in the various countries", the meaning of which becomes clearer if we see what is the vision from which the IBRP intends to demarcate itself, that of the ICC and the Italian Communist Left:

"We reject in principle, and on the basis of various congress resolutions, that the idea of creating national sections by grafting a pre-existing organisation is shared by us. You can't build a national section of the international party of the proletariat by creating within a country in a more or less artificial way a publication centre for publications drafted elsewhere and at any rate outside of the real political and social battle of the country itself" (our emphasis)[9] [22].

This passage obviously deserves an attentive response because in it is contained the strategic difference between the policy of international regroupment as applied by the IBRP and that of the ICC. Our strategy for international regroupment is of course ridiculed by referring to it as "grafting a pre-existing organisation", as the creation "within a country in a more or less artificial way a publication centre for publications drafted elsewhere" … so as to induce in the reader an automatic distaste for the strategy of the ICC.

But let's be concrete and try to take up a hypothetical case. For the IBRP, if a new group of comrades appears, let's say in Canada, who are moving towards internationalist positions, this group can benefit from critical fraternal contributions, even polemics, but it must grow and develop from the political context of its own country, inside "the real political and social battle of the country itself". This means that for the IBRP the current and local context of a given country is more important than the international and historical framework furnished by the experience of the workers' movement. What, on the other hand, is the strategy for the construction of the organisation at an international level which the IBRP tries deliberately to present in a bad light when it talks of the "creation of national sections by grafting a pre-existing organisation"? Whether there are one or one hundred aspiring militants in a new country, our strategy is not to create a local group that evolves locally, through the "real political and social battle of the country itself", but to integrate these new militants immediately into the international work of the organisation, an aspect of which is the centralised intervention in the country in which these comrades live. This is why, even if our resources are small, our organisation makes the effort to be present immediately with a local publication under the responsibility of the new group of comrades because we hold that this is the most direct and effective way, on the one hand to extend our influence and, on the other to proceed directly to the construction of the revolutionary organisation. What is artificial about that, what sense it makes to talk about “grafting a pre-existing organisation” has yet to be explained.

In fact, the roots of BC and the CWO’s organisational incomprehension lie in a deeper and more general incomprehension of the difference between the Second and Third Internationals due to the change in historic period:

• the second half of the 1800s constituted a favourable period for the struggle for reforms: capitalism was in full expansion and the International in this period was an international composed of national parties that fought within their respective countries with different programmes (democratic gains for some, the national question for others, the overthrow of Tsarism in Russia, "social" laws in favour of the workers in other countries, and so on);
• the outbreak of the World War I expressed the exhaustion of the potential for the capitalist mode of production, its inability to develop further in a way that could guarantee a future for humanity. And so an epoch of war or revolution opened up, in which the alternative of communism or barbarism is objectively posed. In this context, the problem is no longer posed in terms of the construction of individual national parties with specific local tasks but rather as the construction of a single world party with a single programme and a complete unity of action to direct the common and simultaneous action of the world proletariat towards the revolution[10] [24].

The remnants of federalism that persisted in the Communist International are the vestiges of the previous period (like the parliamentary question, for example) which still exerted a weight on the new International ("the weight of dead generations weighs on the brains of the living", as Marx wrote in The18th Brumaire).

Moreover we can add that throughout its history (even when it was normal for the international to have a more federalist structure) the marxist Left fought constantly against federalism. Let us recall the most significant episodes:

• Marx and the General Council of the First International (International Workingmen’s Association - IWA) fought against the federalism of the anarchists and their attempt to build a secret organisation within the IWA itself;
• In the Second International, Rosa Luxemburg fought to ensure that congress decisions were really applied in the diffecisions were really applied in the different parties;
• In the Third International (CI) it was not only the Left that fought for centralisation; Lenin and Trotsky themselves struggled against the "particularism" of certain parties who used it to hide their opportunist politics (for example, against the presence of freemasons in the French party).

We could also add that the process of the formation of a party at an international level before its components in the individual countries had been consolidated or even created, was indeed the process of the formation of the CI[11] [25].It is well known that there was a disagreement between Lenin and Luxemburg on this question. The latter was against the immediate foundation of the CI - and for this reason had mandated the German delegate, Eberlein, to vote against its foundation - because she held that the moment was not yet ripe: most of the communist parties had not yet been formed and consequently the Russian party would have too strong a weight within the CI. Unfortunately her fears about the excessive weight of the Russian party proved justified with the reflux in the revolutionary period and the degeneration of the CI, but we think that even so Lenin was right not to wait any longer before founding the CI: in fact its formation was already too late in relation to the needs of the class, though the communists could not have done any more since the war had finished just a few months beforehand.

It would be interesting to hear from the IBRP what is their opinion of this historic disagreement: do the IBRP perhaps think that Luxemburg was right against Lenin in maintaining that the time was not ripe for the foundation of the CI?

This federalist framework at a theoretical level is obviously reflected in the IBRP’s daily practice. For 13 years, from the time of its foundation up to 1997, the two organisations that form the IBRP had two politically distinct platforms, they had no instances involving the whole organisation (except for meetings of one of the individual components with the participation of a delegation from the other, which is not the same thing at all), there is no indication of a debate between them that can be seen, nor does it seem that they feel the need to have one, even though in the 16 long years that have passed since the formation of the IBRP striking differences have often been expressed in the analysis of the current situation, in the framework for their international work, etc. The reality is that this organisational model that the IBRP dares to elevate to the ranks of "the only possible form of organisation and co-ordination" at this moment, is in fact the opportunist organisational form par excellence, This organisational form enables the IBRP to pull new organisations into its orbit, assigning them the label of "Communist Left" without pushing them too much on the nature of their origins. When the IBRP makes sinister reference to the fact that it's necessary to wait for the maturation of "the ‘natural’ time for the political growth of the communist vanguard in the various countries", in fact it is only expressing its opportunist theory of not criticising too hard the groups with which it's in contact in order to avoid losing their confidence[12] [26].

We haven't invented all this, it's a simple assessment of the 16 years of the IBRP which, in spite of all the triumphalism that emerges from the press of this political formation, has not produced any significant results: two groups formed the IBRP in 1984, there are still only two groups in it today. So perhaps it would be useful for BC and the CWO to review the various groups who have approached or have joined them only for a brief period and to assess what happened to them or why they have not remained part of the IBRP. For example, what has become of the Iranians of SUCM-Komala? And the Indian comrades of Lal Pataka? And also the French comrades who actually constituted a third component of the IBRP for a brief period?

As we can see, an opportunist policy of regroupment is not just politically wrong, it doesn’t work either.

The policy of regroupment and the construction of the organisation

On this point of course we can do no better than to begin with Lenin,the great creator of the party and the first to push for the creation of the Communist International. One of Lenin’s most important contributions was probably the battle that he fought and won at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 on the first article of the statutes, to ensure strict criteria for membership of the party:

"To forget the difference that exists between the detachment of the vanguard and all the masses that gravitate towards it, to forget the constant duty of the detachment of the vanguard to raise broader and broader strata to the level of the vanguard, would only mean to fool oneself, to close one's eyes to the immensity of our task, to diminish this task. And this is what one does when cancelling the difference between those who adhere to and those who enter the party, between the conscious and active elements and those who lend a hand" (Lenin, "One step forward andtwo steps back", 1904, in Selected Works, edited byRiuniti).

Lenin's battle on this point, which led to the separation in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party between the Bolsheviks (the majoritarians) and the Mensheviks (the minoritarians) has a particular value historically because it preceded by several years the new model of the party, the party of cadres, tighter, more appropriate for the new historic period of "war or revolution", in comparison with the old model of the mass party, broader and less rigorous on the criteria for militancy, that was valid in the historic period of the expansion of capitalism.

In the second place the problem is raised of what attitude this party (or fraction or political group, whatever it is) should have to other existing proletarian organisations. In other words, how should it respond to the concrete need for the regroupment of revolutionary forces in the most efficient way possible? Here too we can refer to the historic experience of the workers' movement, starting with the debate within the International with the Italian Left on the question of the integration of the centrists in the formation of the Communist Party. The position of Bordiga is very clear and his contribution was fundamental in getting the International to accept the 21 conditions that stated that: "Party members who refuse in principle the conditions and the theses elaborated by the Communist International should be expelled from the party. This is particularly true for the delegates to extraordinary congresses"[13] [27].

In1920 Bordiga was concerned that some centrist components, who hadn't dirtied their hands too much in 1914, could find it convenient to work in the new communist party rather than in the old social-democratic parties, which had been greatly discredited:

"Today it's very easy to say that with a new war the same mistake wouldn't be made, that is the mistakes of the holy alliance and national defence. The revolution is still a long way away, the centrists could say, it isn't an immediate problem. And they would accept the theses of the Communist International: the power of the soviets, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the red terror (…). Elements of the right accept our theses but inadequately, with some reservations. We communists must demand that this acceptance must be total and without limits both at the level of theory and in the field of action (…). Against the reformists we must demand insurmountable barriers (…). In the face of the programme it's not a question of discipline: you either accept it or you don't accept it, and in the case of the latter you leave the party" (from Amadeo Bordiga's address on "Conditions for admission to the CI",1920, published in La Sinistra Comunista nel cammino dellarivoluzione, Sociali editions, 1976).

Among the contributions of Bordiga and the Italian Left this is one ofthe key questions. It was on the basis of this position that Bordiga later clashed with the International when it was in serious regression, fighting against the policy of integrating centrists into the communist parties as a corollary to making the defence of the Russian state the central question over all other problems[14] [28].In particular, it is well known that the International tried to force the Communist Party of Italy to integrate into its ranks the maximalist (left) wing of the Italian SP, Serrati’s so-called"terzini" (literally, "third internationalists"), from which the Italian CP had separated in 1921 when it was constituted.

However this rigour in relation to the moderate, centrist currents never meant a sectarian closure, a refusal to talk, to discuss, quite the reverse! In fact, from its inception as an abstentionist fraction in the Italian SP, the Italian Left always worked to recuperate revolutionary energies that had remained on centrist positions, both to strengthen its own ranks and to rescue these forces from the class enemy:

"Although it was organised as an autonomous fraction within the Italian SP, with its own press organ, the abstentionist fraction tried above all to win over the majority of the party to its programme. The abstentionists also believed that this was possible in spite of the crushing victory of the parliamentary tendency represented in the alliance between Lazzari and Serrati. The fraction could only become a party by working with all its strength to win over at least a significant minority. The concern of the ‘Bordigist’ movement was always never to abandon the terrain until the struggle had been waged to the end and because of this it never was a sect, which its adversaries accuse it of being"[15] [29].

We can therefore sum up by saying that there are two fundamental elements that characterise the politics of the Italian Left (in the Bolshevik tradition):

• rigorous criteria on party membership, based on:
• militant commitment (article 1 of the statutes of the RSDLP);
• clarity on the programme and the selection of militants;
• openness in its policy of discussion with the other political currents of the workers' movement (see, for example, the Italian Left's participation in the conferences that were held in France between 1928 and 1933, or its lengthy discussions with the Ligue Communiste Internationaliste de Belgique with the publication in the review Bilan of articles written by militants of the LCIB).

It is worth mentioning that there is a link between the programmatic and organisational rigour of the Italian Left and its openness to discussion: in line with the tradition of the Left, it developed a long term policy based on clarity and political solidarity, rejecting immediate "successes" based on ambiguities that laid the ground for future defeats by opening the door to opportunism ("Impatience is the mother of opportunism",as Trotsky said); they weren't afraid to discuss with other currents because they had confidence in the solidity of their positions.

Similarly, there is a link between the confusion and ambiguity of the opportunists and their "sectarianism" which is generally aimed at the left and not the right.

When one is aware of the lack of solidity of one's own positions, one is obviously afraid to measure them against those of the Left (see, for example, the policy of the CI after the Second Congress, which opened up to the centre but became "sectarian" in relation to the Left with, for example, the exclusion of the KAPD; the policy of Trotsky, who bureaucratically excluded the Italian Left from the International Opposition in order to put into action an entryist policy in relation to social democracy; the policy of the PCInt in 1945 and after it had excluded the French Communist Left in order cheerfully to regroup with elements of the most opportunist variety who refused even to criticise their past errors).

Among the oppositions, the Italian Fraction gives us a magnificent lesson on method and revolutionary responsibility by fighting for the regroupment of revolutionaries, but above all through its clarity in terms of political positions. The Italian Left has always brought out the need for a programmatic document against the political manoeuvres which have, on the other hand, ruined the Left opposition. In this way, if there had to be a break, it would take place on the basis of texts.

The Italian Left made this method its own from its inception during the First World War within the Second International; they followed it during the degeneration of the CI from 1924 to 1928, when they constituted themselves as a fraction at Pantin (France).

Trotsky himself paid homage to this policy in his last letter to the fraction in December 1932. "The separation with an honest revolutionary group like yours doesn't necessarily need to be accompanied by animosity, by personal attacks or poisonous criticisms" (our emphasis).

Onthe other hand Trotsky’s method within the opposition had nothing to do with that of the workers' movement. The exclusion ofthe Italian Left was accomplished using the same procedures that were used by the Stalinised CI, without a clear debate to explain the break. It was neither the first nor the last time: Trotsky often supported "adventurers" who were able to win his confidence. By contrast, all the groups like the Belgian, German, Spanish Left and all the valuable, revolutionary militants like Rosmer, Nin, Landau and Hennaut were eliminated or expelled one after another until the International Left Opposition became a purely "Trotskyist" current[16] [30].

By virtue of this hard struggle to defend the patrimony of the marxist experience and, with it, its own political identity the Italian Left became, at an international level, the political current that best expressed the need for a coherent party, excluding those who were in doubt and also the centrists but at the same time developing the greatest ability to establish a policy of joining up revolutionary forces because this was based on clarity in both positions and action.

Is the IBRP (and before it the PCInt from '43 onwards) - which claims to be the only real political descendent of the Italian Left - up to the level of our political forerunners? Are their criteria for membership of the party as strict as Lenin rightly insisted they should be? Frankly, we don't think so. The whole history of this group is littered with episodes of opportunism on organisational questions and, rather than applying the orientations that it claims to adhere to, the IBRP’s political practice is in fact much closer to that of the CI in its degenerative phase, and of the Trotskyists. We will take up just a few historic examples to demonstrate what we mean.

1943-46

In 1943 the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt) was formed in the north of Italy. The news roused high hopes. The leadership of the new party’s opportunist practice began with the mass entry into the PCInt of various elements from the partisan struggle[17] [31]or from various groups in the south, some of whom came from the Italian SP and the Italian CP, still others from Trotskyism; then there was a series of militants who had openly broken with the programmatic and organisational framework to which they had been committed, to throw themselves into explicitly counter-revolutionary adventures, such as the minority of the Fraction Abroad of the Italian CP who went to "participate" in the War in Spain in '36, Vercesi who took part in the"Antifascist Coalition" in Brussels during 1943[18] [32]. Of course no insistence was made that these militants, who swelled the ranks of the new party, give a real account of their previous political activity. And, talking of adhesion to the spirit and letter of Lenin, what can we say of Bordiga himself, who took part in the party's activity up to 1952[19] [33],contributed actively to determining its political line and even wrote the political platform approved by the party - without even being a member of it?

In this period it was the French Fraction of the Communist Left (FFCL, Internationalisme) who took up the heritage of the left line, by salvaging and strengthening the political inheritance of the Italian Fraction Abroad (Bilan). And it was the FFCL that raised with the PCInt the problem of having integrated Vercesi and the minority of Bilan without asking them to account politically for their past errors, and also the fact that in forming the party in Italy they had completely ignored the work of "making a balance sheet" carried out over ten years by the Fraction Abroad.

In 1945 an International Bureau was formed, uniting the PCInt, the Belgian Fraction and a French Fraction, a "duplicate"of the FFCL. In fact this “FFCL-number 2” was constituted on the basis of a split by two elements who were part of the Executive Commission (EC) of the FFCL; they had contacted Vercesi in Brussels and were probably convinced by his arguments, although beforehand they supported the position that he should be excluded immediately, without discussion[20] [34]. One of the two was very inexperienced (Suzanne), while the other came from the Spanish POUM (and later ended up in the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie). The “FFCL-number 2” was "reinforced" when elements from the minority of Bilan and the old Union Communiste (Chazé, etc) joined it, elements who had been seriously criticised by the Fraction becauseof their concessions to antifascism during the war in Spain.

In fact the creation of this duplicate Fraction served the need to reduce the credibility of Internationalisme. As we can see history repeats itself, in as far as the PCInt simply repeated the Left Opposition’s manoeuvres against the Italian Fraction in1930, when it formed the “New Italian Opposition” (NOI), a group made up of ex-Stalinists who just two months previously had dirtied their hands by expelling Bordiga from the PCI and expelling Bordiga from the PCI and whose political function could only have been to create a provocative political competitor to the Fraction.

On 28th November 1946 the GCF wrote a letter to the PCInt with an appendix that lists all the questions that needed to be discussed and which concerned a series of shortcomings forwhich various components of the Italian Communist Left had beenresponsible during the war (Internationalisme no.16). The PCInt replied curtly to this ten page letter in the following words:

"Meeting of the International Bureau - Paris: As your letter once again demonstrates the continual deformation of facts and the political positions taken both by the PCI of Italy as well as by the Belgian and French Fractions; that you do not constitute a revolutionary, political organisation and that your activity is limited to throwing confusion and mud at our comrades, we have unanimously excluded the possibility of accepting your request to participate in the international meetings of the organisations of the GCI".

It's certainly true that history repeats itself but in a farcical way, the GCI was bureaucratically excluded from the CI after 1926, it was likewise excluded from the Left Opposition in 1933 (cf our pamphlet on the Italian Communist Left), now it was the turn ofthe GCI to bureaucratically exclude the French Fraction from its ranks in order to avoid a political confrontation.

The 50s

Eclecticism in terms of positions means that at an international level “each is master in his own house". In1952, the PCInt broke in two; on the one hand, the Bordigists reduced the intransigence of the Italian Left to a caricature,refusing to discuss with anyone else. On the other hand was the “openness” of the PCInt (Battaglia Comunista): in Autumn 1956, BC, along with the GAAP[21] [35], the Trotskyists of the Gruppi Communisti Rivoluzionari (GCR) and Azione Comunista[22] [36],constituted a Movement for the Communist Left, whose most prominent features were heterogeneity and confusion. Bordiga ironically named these four groups the "quadrifoglio" (four-leafed clover).

The 70s

In the early months of 1976 Battaglia Comunista launched "a proposal to make a start", directed "at the international groups of the Communist Left", whom they invited:

• to an international conference to take stock of the state of the groups who lay claim to the International Communist Left;
• to create a centre for contact and international discussion.

The ICC joined the conference with conviction but asked that the political criteria for participation be defined. BC, being used to conferences of a very different type (see above), was reluctant to draw stricter lines, they were evidently afraid of closing the door to someone.

The first Conference was held in Milan in May 1977 with only two participants, BC and the ICC, but BC was opposed to any public declaration, even one criticising the groups invited who had not attended the conference.

At the end of 1978 the secondConference was held in Paris, where finally various other groups participated in the work. At the end of the conference the question of the criteria for participation came up again and this time BC suggested stricter criteria:

"The criteria must enable us to exclude councilists from these conferences so we must insist on the recognition of the historic need for the Party as an essential criterion", to which we replied by recalling "our insistence that there be criteria at the time of the first Conference. We don't think that the addition of supplementary criteria today is opportune. It isn't for the lack of clarity, as much on the question of the criteria themselves as on the national or union question, but because it's premature. Great confusion still weighs on the whole of the revolutionary movement on these questions; and the NCI is right to insist on a dynamic vision of the political groups to whom we could close the door prematurely"[23] [37].

In the first half of 1980 theThird and last International Conference was held, whose atmosphere made clear from the outset how it was to end. Over and above the merits of the discussion itself, this conference demonstrated the specific will on the part of BC to exclude the ICC from possible further conferences. In one of Aesop’s fables the wolf tries unsuccessfully to accuse the lamb of having dirtied the river water from which he is drinking; he ends up by putting the blame on the lamb's father and so finds an excuse for tearing him to pieces. In the same way, BC began increasingly to see the ICC, not as a group on the same side with whom they could eventually arrive at a clarification to the advantage of all the comrades and of the new groups in the process of formation, but rather as a dangerous rival in grabbing these comrades and new groups, and in the end they found an expedient for getting the conference to approve a stricter and more selective political criterion for acceptance in order definitively to exclude the ICC[24] [38].

In conclusion we go from the First Conference, in which not only were no political criterion for participation put forward but even the suggestion of such was actually opposed, to the Third Conference, at the end of which criteria created in an ad hoc manner were put forward in order to eliminate the ICC, that is to say the left component within the conferences. The Third Conference was a remake of the exclusion of the GCF in '45 and so the inauspicious extension of the preceding episodes excluding theItalian Communist Left from the CI (1926) and from the Opposition(1933).

The political responsibility assumed by BC (and by the CWO) in these circumstances is enormous: only a few months later (August '80) the mass strike broke out in Poland and the international proletariat lost any chance of a co-ordinated intervention on the part of all the groups of the communist left.

But it doesn't end there. After some time BC and the CWO, in order to show that they hadn't destroyed a cycle of three conferences and four years of international work for nothing, invented a fourth conference in which, as well as themselves, there appeared a so-called revolutionary Iranian group, whom we had even warned BC against. It was only after some years that the IBRP finally recognised their error by acknowledging that this group of Iranians certainly wasn't revolutionary…

The 90s

And so we arrive at the recent phase in the last few years, in which we had noted a small but encouraging opening up to dialogue and confrontation within theproletarian, political camp[25] [39].In some ways the most interesting aspect was an initial integration at the level of intervention which was taking place between the ICC and the IBRP (through its English component, the CWO). An intervention that was planned together when not actually carried out together in relation, for example, to the conferences on Trotskyism held in Russia, a public meeting on the 1917 Revolution organised and held together in London, a common defence against the attack of certain parasitic formations, etc, etc. We always carried out these interventions with the clear intention not to absorb anyone, not to create a wedge within the IBRP between BC and the CWO. Certainly the greater openness of the CWO and the indifferent absence of BC always worried us. And in the end, when BC judged that enough was enough, they demanded that their partners toe the Party - sorry, the IBRP - line. From that moment onwards everything that had previously seemed reasonable and normal to the CWO began to change. No more co-ordination of the work in Russia, no more joint public meetings, etc, etc. And once more a heavy responsibility fell on the shoulders of the IBRP, who for the sake of shop-keeper opportunism, allowed the working class to confront one of the most difficult episodes in the present historic period, the war in Kosovo, without its vanguard being able to express a common position.

In order to weigh the full measure of the IBRP's opportunism in relation to its refusal of our appeal in relation to the war, it's instructive to re-read an article that appeared in the November 1995 issue of Battaglia Comunista, "Misunderstandings on the Balkan war". BC relates that it has received a letter/invitation from the OCI[26] [40]to a national assembly against the war to be held in Milan. BC judged "the content of the letter interesting and a welcome corrective to the position adopted by the OCI on the Gulf war, when it supported the ‘Iraqi people under attack from imperialism’ and was very polemical in relation to our so-called indifferentism (…) It lacks reference to the crisis in the accumulation cycle (…) and the essential examination of its consequences on the Yugoslav Federation (…). But it doesn't seem to preclude the possibility of a joint initiative on the partof those who oppose war on a class basis" (our emphasis). As we can see, only four years ago, in a situation even less serious than that at the time of the war in Kosovo, BC would have been ready to promote a joint initiative with a group that was already clearly counter-revolutionary[29] [41] just to satisfy its activist bent, whereas it had the courage to say no to the ICC because… it has positions that are too different. That certainly is opportunism.

Conclusion

We have devoted this article to replying to the thesis of the IBRP that organisations such as ours are “estranged from the method and perspectives of the workthat leads to the formation of the future party”. In order to do so we have taken into consideration the two levels at which the organisational problem is posed, and in terms of both we have shown that it is the IBRP, not the ICC, that has abandoned the tradition of the Italian and the international Communist Left. In fact the eclecticism that guides the IBRP's policy of regroupment is similar to that of Trotsky when he was taken up with building the IVth International; the vision of the ICC on the other hand is that of the Italian Fraction, which always fought for regroupment with clarity and on a basis that would make it possible to salvage elements of the centre and those with hesitations.

In spite of its various aspiring heirs, the real continuity with the Italian Fraction is represented today by the ICC, an organisation that lays claim to and makes its own all thestruggles of the 20s, 30s and 40s.

31st August 2000, Ezechiele

Notes

Published in Battaglia Comunista no.1, January 2000 and inInternationalist Communist no.18, winter 2000.

, EDI, Paris 1974, pg 35-36).

.

We stand at the dawn of the 21st century. What will it bring humanity? Following the bourgeoisie's celebrations of the year 2000, we wrote in no.101 of our Review: "So ends the 20th century, the most tragic and barbaric in human history: in social decomposition. The bourgeoisie has celebrated the year 2000 in pomp: it is unlikely to do the same in 2100. Either it will have been overthrown by the proletariat, or humanity will have been destroyed or returned to the Stone Age". And so we stated clearly what is at stake: the 21st century's outcome depends entirely on the proletariat. Either it will make the revolution, or all civilisation, even humanity, will be destroyed. Despite all today's fine humanist speeches and euphoric declarations, the ruling classes will do nothing to prevent such an outcome. Not because they or their governments do not want to. The insurmountable contradictions of the capitalist system are driving society to its inevitable fate. For a decade, we have been inundated with daily campaigns on the "death of communism", or even of the working class. It is therefore necessary to reassert with all our strength that whatever difficulties the proletariat may encounter, there is no other force in society capable of resolving its contradictions. Because the proletariat was unable to fulfil its historic task of overthrowing capitalism, the 20th century foundered in barbarism. It will be unable to gather its strength to meet its responsibility in this century unless it is able to understand the reasons why it missed its appointment with history during the century that has just ended. This article proposes to make a modest contribution to that understanding.

Before we examine why the proletariat was unable to fulfil its historic task during the 20th century, we need to return to a question that revolutionaries themselves have not always expressed very clearly:

Is communist revolution inevitable?

The question is a fundamental one, for the working class' ability to fully measure its responsibility depends partly on the answer. A great revolutionary like Amadeo Bordiga[1] could declare, for example, that "The revolution is as inevitable as if it had already taken place". Nor is he alone in defending this idea, since it is to be found in certain writings of Marx, Engels, and other marxists that came after them.

For example, we find an assertion in the Communist Manifesto that encourages the idea that a proletarian victory is not inevitable: "oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes"[2]. However, this observation is only applied to classes in the past. There is no doubt as to the outcome of the confrontation between proletariat and bourgeoisie: "The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable"[3].

In reality, revolutionaries' terminology has often confused the fact that the communist revolution is absolutely necessary, vital for humanity's salvation, with its inevitability.

More important of course is to show, as marxism has done from the outset:

- that capitalism is not a definitive mode of production, the "finally discovered form" of the organisation of production which could ensure ever-increasing wealth to all human beings;

- that at some point in its history, this system cannot help but plunge society into increasing convulsions, destroying the progress that it had itself created previously;

- that the communist revolution is vital to allow society to continue its march towards a real human community, where all human needs will be fully satisfied;

- that capitalist society has created within itself the objective conditions, and can create the subjective conditions, that make such a revolution possible: the material productive forces, a class able to overthrow bourgeois order and to lead society, and the consciousness that will allow this class to carry out its historic task.

However, the whole 20th century bears witness to the enormous difficulty of this task. In particular, it shows us that for the communist revolution, absolute necessity does not mean certainty, that the winning hand is not necessarily dealt in advance, that proletarian victory is not yet written down in the great book of history. Apart from the barbarity that overwhelmed the 20th century, the threat of nuclear war that hung over the planet for 40 years showed clearly that capitalism could very well destroy society. For the moment, this threat has faded with the disappearance of the great imperialist blocs, but the weapons that could put an end to the human species are still there, as are the antagonisms between states which could one day cause these weapons to be used.

Even at the end of the 19th century, Engels, co-author with Marx of the Communist Manifesto, had gone back on the idea of the inevitability of the revolution and the victory of the proletariat. Today, it is important for revolutionaries to say clearly to their class that there is no such thing as fate, that victory is not guaranteed in advance, and that what is at stake in the proletarian struggle is nothing less than the survival of humanity itself. Only if it is conscious of how much is at stake, will the working class find the determination to overthrow capitalism. Marx said that will is an expression of necessity. The proletariat's will to make the communist revolution will be all the greater, the greater in its eyes is the necessity of such a revolution.

Why is the communist revolution not inevitable?

"Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the 18th century, storm swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit; but they are short-lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long crapulent depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the 19th century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: ‘Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is Rhodes, jump here'"[4].

This well-known quotation from Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written at the beginning of 1852 (in other words a few weeks after the coup d'etat of 2nd December 1851) aimed to account for the difficult and tortuous course of the proletarian revolution. Almost 70 years later, Rosa Luxemburg took up a similar idea in an article written on the eve of her assassination following the crushing of the Berlin insurrection of January 1919:

"This contradiction between the demands of the task and the inadequacy of the pre-conditions for its fulfilment in a nascent phase of the revolutionary development results in the individual struggles of the revolution ending formally in defeat. But the [proletarian] revolution is the sole form of ‘war' - and this is also its most vital law - in which the final victory can be prepared only by a series of ‘defeats'! (...) The revolutions have until now brought nothing but defeats, but these inevitable defeats virtually pile guarantee upon guarantee of the future success of the final goal.

To be sure, there is one condition! The question is, under which circumstances was each respective defeat incurred?"[5].

These quotations deal essentially with the painful course of the communist revolution, the series of defeats which mark its path until the final victory is achieved. But they allow us to highlight two essential ideas:

- the difference between the proletarian and the bourgeois revolutions;

- that a precondition for the proletariat's victory, which is not given in advance, is the class' ability to develop its consciousness by learning the lessons of its defeats.

It is precisely the difference between the proletarian and the bourgeois revolutions which allows us to understand why the victory of the working class cannot be considered as inevitable.

A specificity of bourgeois revolutions, in other words of the seizure of exclusive political power by the capitalist class, is that they are not the starting, but the finishing point of a whole process of economic transformation within society. An economic transformation during which the old, feudal, relations of production are progressively replaced by capitalist relations of production which serve as a basis for the bourgeoisie's conquest of political power:

"From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burghesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of the division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and industry revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois (...)

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune; here, independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable ‘third estate' of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway"[6].

Very different is the process of the proletarian revolution. Whereas capitalist relations of production were able to develop progressively within feudal society, communist relations of production cannot develop within capitalist society, dominated by commodity relationships and ruled by the bourgeoisie. The idea of a progressive development of "islands of communism" belongs to utopian socialism, which marxism and the workers' movement have fought since the middle of the 19th century. The same is true for another variation on this idea: that of producers' or consumers' co-operatives, which have never, and will never be able to escape from the laws of capitalism, and which at best transform the workers into small capitalists, when it does not lead them to become their own exploiters. In reality, because it is the exploited class within the capitalist mode of production, deprived by definition of all the means of production, the working class does not and cannot possess any economic basis within capitalism for the conquest of political power. On the contrary, the first act in the communist transformation of society consists in the world wide seizure of political power by the entire proletariat organised in workers' councils, in other words in a deliberate and conscious action. This position of power, the proletarian dictatorship, is the starting point for the working class progressively and consciously to transform economic relationships, socialise the whole of production, abolish commodity exchange, and in particular the foremost among them, wage labour, so creating a classless society.

The bourgeois revolution, the seizure of exclusive political power by the capitalist class, was inevitable to the extent that it flowed from an economic process which was itself inevitable at a given moment in the life of feudal society, a process in which conscious human political will played little part. Depending on the particular circumstances of each country, it occurred earlier or later in different countries, and took different forms: the violent overthrow of the monarchical state as in France, or the bourgeoisie's progressive conquest of political positions within the state as was more the case in Germany. It ended up as a republic, as in the United States, or as constitutional monarchy, the first capitalist state, Britain, being the typical example. However, in all these cases the bourgeoisie's eventual political victory was guaranteed. And even when the bourgeoisie's revolutionary political forces suffered a setback (as was the case for example in France with the Restoration, or in Germany with the defeat of the 1848 revolution), this had but little effect on its forward march, economically or even politically.

Of course, the precondition for the success of the proletarian revolution is the existence of the material conditions for the communist transformation of society - conditions which are created by the development of capitalism itself.

The second precondition for the proletarian revolution is the open crisis of bourgeois society, clearly proving that capitalist relations of production must be replaced by others.

However, the presence of these material conditions does not necessarily mean that the proletariat will be able to make the revolution. Since it has no economic basis within capitalism, its only real strength apart from its numbers and organisation, is its ability to become clearly aware of its nature, of its struggle's ends and means. This is precisely the meaning of Rosa Luxemburg's words quoted above. And this ability of the proletariat to gain in awareness does not spring automatically from the material conditions it is confronted with, just as it is nowhere written that it will come to consciousness before capitalism plunges society into barbarism or destruction.

One of its means for avoiding, both for itself and for society as a whole, this outcome, is precisely to learn the lessons of its defeats, as Rosa Luxemburg reminds us. And in particular, it needs to understand why it proved unable to make its revolution during the 20th century.

Revolution and counter-revolution

It is typical of revolutionaries that they over-estimate the proletariat's potential at any given moment. Marx and Engels did not escape this tendency when they drew up the Communist Manifesto at the beginning of 1848; they thought that the proletarian revolution was imminent, and that the bourgeois revolution which was looming in Germany would be the stepping-stone for the proletariat to take power there. This tendency is readily explained by the fact that revolutionaries - by definition - aspire with all their heart to the overthrow of capitalism and the emancipation of their class, which often gives rise to a certain impatience. However, unlike those elements influenced by the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, they are capable of quickly recognising the immaturity of the conditions for revolution. Politically, the petty bourgeoisie is par excellence a class which lives from day to day, since it has no political role to play. Immediatism and impatience ("revolution right now", as the rebellious students of the sixties used to demand) are characteristic of this social category, some of whose elements may join the struggle of the working class, but which rallies to the strongest side - ie the bourgeoisie - as soon as the wind turns. By contrast, proletarian revolutions, the expression of a historic class, are able to overcome their impatience and to harness themselves to the patient and difficult task of preparing the future struggles of the class.

This is why in 1852, Marx and Engels recognised that the conditions for revolution had not been ripe in 1848, and that capitalism had a long period of evolution to go through for them to become so. They considered it necessary to dissolve their organisation, the Communist League, which had been founded on the eve of the 1848 revolution, before it fell under the influence of impatient and adventurist elements (the Willich-Schapper tendency).

When they took part in the foundation of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) in 1864, they thought once again that the hour for revolution had struck; but even before the Paris Commune in 1871, they had realised that the proletariat was still not ready, for capitalism still had before it the potential for massive economic development. Following the crushing of the Commune, which was a serious defeat for the whole European proletariat, they understood that the IWA in turn had ended its historic task, and that it was necessary to preserve it too from impatient and adventurist elements, and even from adventurers like Bakunin, represented essentially by the anarchists. This is why they both intervened at the 1872 Hague Congress (this in fact was the only Congress that both of them attended), to win the exclusion of Bakunin and his "Alliance for Socialist Democracy", just as they proposed, and defended the decision, to transfer the IWA's General Council from London to New York, far from the intrigues which a whole series of elements were setting in motion to lay hands on the International. In fact this decision came down to putting the IWA into abeyance, and it was finally dissolved at the Philadelphia conference in 1876.

Up to then, both revolutions - 1848 and the Commune of 1871 - had failed because the material conditions for proletarian victory did not exist. They were to blossom during the period that followed, as capitalism underwent the most powerful development in its history.

This period corresponded to a stage of great development in the workers' movement. It saw the creation of trade unions in most countries, and the foundation of the mass socialist parties, which in 1889 regrouped within the 2nd (Socialist) International.

In most West European countries, the organised workers' movement was getting under way. Although at first some governments persecuted the socialist parties (as was the case in Germany between 1878 and 1890, under the "anti-socialist laws"), this policy tended to be replaced by a more tolerant attitude. The socialist parties became a real power in society, to the point where in some countries they were the most powerful group in parliament and gave the impression that they would shortly hold an absolute majority there. The workers' movement seemed invincible. For many, the time was coming when it would be able to overthrow capitalism through the specifically bourgeois institution of parliamentary democracy.

Parallel with the rising strength of the workers' organisations, capitalism enjoyed a period of unprecedented prosperity, giving the impression that it had achieved the ability to overcome the cyclical crises which had affected it during the previous period. Within the socialist parties themselves, reformist tendencies developed, which thought that capitalism had succeeded in overcoming its economic contradictions and consequently that it was an illusion to think of overthrowing it by revolution. Theories like Bernstein's made their appearance, which considered that marxism should be "revised", in particular by abandoning its "catastrophist" vision of history. The proletariat's victory would be the result of a whole series of conquests won at the parliamentary or trade union level.

In reality these two antagonistic forces, capitalism and the workers' movement, whose power seemed to be developing in parallel, were being sapped from within.

For its part, capitalism was living its last hours of glory (which would leave their mark in the collective memory as "La Belle Époque"). Although on the economic level its prosperity seemed unassailed, especially in the emerging powers like Germany and the USA, the approach of its historic crisis could be felt in the rise of imperialism and militarism. As Marx had pointed out 50 years before, the colonial markets had played a fundamental role in capitalism's development. Every advanced capitalist country, even little countries like Holland and Belgium, had acquired a colonial empire as a source of raw materials and an outlet for their manufactured goods. But, by the end of the 19th century the whole non-capitalist world had been shared out among the old bourgeois nations. Henceforth, for any one of them to gain access to new outlets and new territories would mean conflict with its rivals. The first confrontation occurred between Britain and France, in September 1898 at Fashoda, where the two oldest colonial powers almost came to blows when the aims of the former (control of the upper Nile and colonisation on an east-west axis between Dakar and Djibouti) blocked the ambitions of the latter (to join up its empire from Cairo to Cape Town on a north-south axis). In the end, France gave way and the two rivals formed the "Entente Cordiale" against a third bandit, whose ambitions were as big as its colonial empire was small: Germany. German imperialism increasingly coveted the colonial possessions of the other powers, and this was to take shape a few years later, notably with the Agadir incident of 1911 where a German frigate put a spanner in the works of French ambitions in Morocco. The other aspect of Germany's colonial appetite was the formidable development of its navy, whose ambition was to compete with the British in the control of the seaways.

This was the other element in the fundamental change taking place in capitalism at the turn of the century: the proliferation of military tension and armed conflicts involving the European powers, the latter were also increasing both the size (for example the increase in French military service to three years) and strength of their armed forces.

The rise in militarism and imperialist tensions, as well as the great diplomatic manoeuvres among the major European nations, to strengthen their alliances in preparation for war, obviously attracted serious attention from the parties of the 2nd International. At its Stuttgart Congress in 1907, the International devoted an important resolution to the question, including an amendment proposed notably by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg which stated that "Should war nonetheless break out, the socialists have the duty to work for it to end as rapidly as possible, and to use by every means the economic and political crisis provoked by the war to awaken the people and so to hasten the downfall of capitalist rule"[7].

In November 1912, the Socialist International even called an extraordinary conference (the Basle Congress) to denounce the threat of war and to call the proletariat to mobilise against it. This Congress' Manifesto warned the bourgeoisie: "The bourgeois governments should not forget that the Franco-German war gave birth to the revolutionary insurrection of the Commune and that the Russo-Japanese set the revolutionary forces in movement in Russia. In the eyes of the proletarians, it is criminal to shoot each other for the profit of capitalists, or the pride of dynasties, or the machinations of secret treaties".

In appearance then, the workers' movement was ready to confront capitalism should it unleash the barbarity of war. Indeed at the time, the idea was widespread among the European populations and not just in the working class, that the Socialist International was the only force in society able to prevent the outbreak of war. In reality, just as the capitalist system was sapped from within and on the point of revealing the extent of its historic bankruptcy, so the workers' movement itself, despite its apparent strength with its powerful trade unions and its "growing electoral successes", was seriously weakened and on the verge of a catastrophic collapse. Worse still, this apparent strength of the workers' movement was in fact its greatest weakness. The socialist parties' electoral success had given an unprecedented impetus to democratic and reformist illusions in the working masses. Similarly, the power of the union organisations, especially in Germany and Britain, had in reality been transformed into an instrument for the defence of bourgeois order and the enrolment of the workers for war and arms production[8].

At the beginning of the summer of 1914, after the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne in Sarajevo, tension grew in Europe and the spectre of war loomed rapidly larger. The workers' parties not only demonstrated their impotence but, for the most part, they also offered their support to their own national bourgeoisie. In France and Germany, there were even direct contacts between the socialist leaders and the government to discuss how to bring the workers into the war. And as soon as war broke out, these parties with one accord offered their full support to the bourgeois war effort, and succeeded in dragging the working masses into the slaughter. While the governments in power sang hymns to the "glory" of their respective nations, the socialist parties adopted arguments better adapted to their role of controlling the workers. This was not a war, they said in France, in the service of bourgeois interests, or to recover Alsace-Lorraine, but a war to protect "civilisation" against "German militarism". On the other side of the Rhine, it was not a war for German imperialism, but for "democracy and civilisation" against the "tyranny of the Tsarist knout". But though the words were different, the socialist leaders shared the same aim as the bourgeoisie: "National Unity" to send the workers to the slaughter and justify the state of siege, in other words military censorship, the ban on workers' strikes and demonstrations, and on publications or meetings to denounce the war.

The proletariat thus proved unable to prevent the outbreak of world war. It was a terrible defeat, but one which it suffered without an open struggle against the bourgeoisie. And yet, the struggle against the degeneration of the socialist parties, which had led to their betrayal in August 1914 and to the imperialist bloodbath that followed, had begun well beforehand, at the turn of the century. In the German party, Rosa Luxemburg had taken up the fight against Bernstein's revisionist theories, which provided a justification for reformism. Officially, the party rejected these theories; nonetheless, a few years later she had to take up the fight again, this time not only against the right but also against the centre, represented principally by Kautsky whose radical language in fact covered an abandonment of the revolutionary perspective. In Russia in 1903, the Bolsheviks entered the struggle against opportunism within the social-democratic party, first on questions of organisation then on the nature of the 1905 Russian revolution and the policy to be adopted within it. But these revolutionary currents within the Socialist International remained on the whole extremely weak, even though the congresses of the socialist parties and the International often adopted their positions.

When the moment of truth came, the socialist militants defending internationalist and revolutionary positions found themselves tragically isolated, to the point that when an international conference against the war was held in September 1915 in Zimmerwald in Switzerland, the delegates (including those from the centre, hesitating between the left and the right) could fit into four taxis, as Trotsky remarked. This terrible isolation did not prevent them from continuing the struggle, despite the repression that descended on them (in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the two main leaders of the internationalist "Spartakus" group, suffered imprisonment in gaol and military fortress).

The terrible trials of the war, the massacres, the hunger, the ferocious exploitation in the factories on the home front, began to undermine the workers who in 1914 had let themselves be sent so lightly to the slaughter. The speeches about "democracy" and "civilisation" wore thin in the face of the awful barbarism submerging Europe, and the repression of any attempt at workers' struggle. In February 1917, the Russian proletariat, with the revolutionary experience of 1905 behind it, rose against the war and hunger. It concretised in action the resolutions adopted by the Socialist International's Basle and Stuttgart congresses. Lenin and the Bolsheviks understood that the hour of revolution had struck, and they summed the workers of Russia not to be satisfied with the fall of Tsarism and the establishment of a "democratic" government. They had to prepare for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the seizure of power by the Soviets (the workers' councils) as a prelude to the world revolution. This is the perspective that became reality in Russia in 1917. Immediately, the new power called on the world proletariat to follow its example to put an end to the war and overthrow capitalism. We might say that the Bolsheviks, joined by the revolutionaries in other countries, summoned the world proletariat to a new appointment with history, after the one that it had missed in 1914.

In other countries the working class followed the Russian example, and especially in Germany, where one year later the uprising of workers and soldiers overthrew the imperial regime of Wilhelm II and forced the German bourgeoisie to call a halt to the war, putting an end to more than four years of a barbarity such as humanity had never seen before. But the bourgeoisie had already learnt the lessons of its defeat in Russia, where the Provisional Government set up after the revolution of February 1917 had proven unable to satisfy one of the workers' most essential demands: peace. Under the urging of its French and British allies, the government had kept Russia in the war, which rapidly disillusioned and radicalised both the working masses and the troops. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie, not just of Tsarism, appeared to them as the only way to put an end to the slaughter. In Germany by contrast, the bourgeoisie hurriedly put an end to the war during the first days of the revolution. It presented the overthrow of the imperial regime and the establishment of the republic as a decisive victory. It immediately called on the Socialist Party to take the reins of power, and the latter received the support of the congress of workers' councils, which were still dominated by the same socialists. Above all, the same government immediately requested an armistice from the allies of the Entente, which was granted without delay. Moreover, the Entente powers did everything to help the German government confront the working class. France rapidly returned to Germany 16,000 machine-guns which it had seized as war booty, and which were to prove useful later to crush the working class.

In January 1919, the German bourgeoisie, with the Socialist Party at its head, dealt a terrible blow to the proletariat. It knowingly organised a provocation, which led to a premature insurrection by the Berlin workers. The revolution was drowned in blood, and the main revolutionary leaders (Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leo Jogisches) were assassinated. Nonetheless, the German workers were still not definitively crushed. Their attempts at revolution continued until 1923[9]. Their efforts were defeated, as were other powerful class movements that took place in other countries during the same period (notably Hungary and Italy in 1919)[10].

In fact, the defeat of the proletariat in Germany meant the defeat of the world revolution; although another last rising did take place in China in 1927, it too was drowned in blood.

At the same time as the revolutionary wave was developing in Europe, the Communist, or Third, International (CI) was founded in Moscow in March 1919, regrouping revolutionaries from all over the world. Only two large communist parties existed at its foundation, in Russia and in Germany; the latter was formed a few days before the defeat of January 1919. This International encouraged the creation in every country of communist parties that rejected the chauvinism, reformism, and opportunism which had engulfed the Socialist parties. The communist parties were intended to be the leadership of the world revolution, but they were formed too late due to the prevailing historic conditions in which they were formed. When the International was really founded, in other words at its 2nd Congress in 1920, the high point of the revolutionary wave had already passed, and capitalism had shown itself capable of taking the situation in hand, both economically and politically. Above all, the ruling class had succeeded in breaking the impetus of revolution by putting an end to its main fuel, the imperialist war. With the defeat of the world wide revolutionary wave, the parties of the Communist International which had been formed against the degeneration and betrayal of the Socialist parties, were unable to escape their own degeneration.

Several factors underlay this degeneration. The first is that the Communist parties accepted into their ranks a whole series of "centrist" elements who had left their Socialist parties and adopted a revolutionary phraseology in order to profit from the world proletariat's immense enthusiasm for the Russian revolution. Another factor, still more decisive, was the degeneration of the International's biggest party, the Bolsheviks who had led the October revolution and been the principal protagonists of the International's creation. The Bolshevik party was progressively absorbed by the state it headed; because of the revolution's isolation, it became increasingly a defender of Russian interests, to the detriment of its role as a bastion of the world revolution. Moreover, since there can be no "socialism in one country" and because capitalism can only be abolished on a world scale, the Russian state was gradually transformed into a defender of Russian national capital, a capital whose bourgeoisie was to be formed essentially by the state and therefore the party bureaucracy. From being a revolutionary organisation, the Bolshevik party was thus bit by bit transformed into a bourgeois and counter-revolutionary party, despite the resistance of many real communists, like Trotsky, who intended to keep the flag of world revolution flying. In 1925, despite Trotsky's opposition, the Bolshevik party adopted the programme of the "construction of socialism in one country", a programme promoted by Stalin and a real betrayal of proletarian internationalism, which in 1928 he imposed on the Communist International, thus signing its death warrant.

Thereafter, despite the resistance of a whole series of left fractions, excluded one after the other, the communist parties passed into the service of their respective national capitals. From being spearheads of the world revolution, the Communist parties had become spearheads of counter-revolution: the most terrible counter-revolution in history.

Not only had the working class missed its second appointment with history, it was to plunge into the most terrible period it had ever known. As Victor Serge wrote, it was "midnight in the century". In Russia, the communist party had become both the exploiting class, and the instrument of an unprecedented repression against the worker and peasant masses. Outside Russia, the communist parties played their counter-revolutionary role by preparing the proletariat's enrolment in World War II, in other words the bourgeoisie's response to capitalism's return to open crisis after 1929.

This open crisis and the terrible misery that battened on the working masses during the 1930s, could have been a powerful factor in radicalising the world proletariat, and developing its consciousness that capitalism had to be overthrown. But the proletariat was to miss this third appointment with history.

The situation of the working class in Germany, the most concentrated and experienced in the world, in a key country for the revolution, was similar to that in Russia. As in Russia, the working class had launched a revolution, and its defeat was therefore all the more terrible. The German revolution was not crushed by the Nazis, but by the "democratic" parties, and with the Socialists first among them. Precisely because the proletariat had suffered this defeat, the Nazis (who at the time corresponded best to the economic and political requirements of the German bourgeoisie) were able to complete the work of the left. Their terror annihilated any attempt at proletarian struggle, and essentially by the same means enrolled the workers in the war.

In the countries of Western Europe, where the proletariat had not mounted a revolution, and so had not been crushed physically, terror was not the method best adapted to take the workers into war. The bourgeoisie had to use mystifications similar to those used for World War I in 1914. Here, the Stalinist parties played their bourgeois part in exemplary fashion. In the name of the defence of "democracy" and the "socialist fatherland" against fascism, these parties systematically diverted the workers' struggles into dead-ends, wearing down the proletariat's morale and combativity.

This morale had already been profoundly shaken by the failure of the world revolution during the 1920s. After a period of enthusiasm for the idea of a communist revolution, many workers had turned away from any revolutionary perspective. One factor in their demoralisation was the realisation that the society created in Russia was not the paradise that the Stalinists claimed, and this made it easier for the Socialist parties to bring them back into the fold. Most of those who still wanted to believe in the possibility of revolution fell into the coils of the Stalinist parties, and the idea that the revolution's victory depended on the "defence of the socialist fatherland" and victory over fascism in Italy and Germany.

A key moment in this derailment of the world proletariat was the war in Spain, which far from being a revolution, was in fact a part of the military, diplomatic, and political preparation for World War II.

All over the world, workers wanted to show their solidarity for their class brothers in Spain, who had risen spontaneously against the fascist putsch of 18th July 1936. This was channelled into recruitment for the International Brigades (mostly officered by Stalinists), into the demand for "arms for Spain" (in reality for the bourgeois Popular Front government), and into anti-fascist demonstrations which in fact prepared the enrolment of workers in the "democratic" countries into war against Germany.

On the eve of World War I, the supposed strength of the proletariat (the powerful unions and workers' parties) had turned out to be its greatest weakness. The same scenario was played out in World War II, though the actors were somewhat different. The great strength of the "workers' parties" (the Stalinist and socialist parties, united in the anti-fascist alliance), the great "victories" against fascism in Western Europe, the supposed "socialist fatherland", were all marks of the counter-revolution, of an unprecedented proletarian weakness. A weakness that would deliver it up, bound hand and foot, to the second imperialist massacre.

The proletariat confronted with World War II

The horror of the First World War was nothing compared to the Second. Capitalism plunged into its decadence, and into a new barbarity. But whereas in 1917 and 1918, the proletariat had brought the war to an end, this was not to happen in 1945. The war continued until one imperialist camp completely crushed the other. Not that a proletarian response was completely lacking during the slaughter. During 1943, a vast strike movement developed in the industrial north of Mussolini's Italy, while during 1944 and 1945 several German cities saw movements of revolt against hunger and the war. But nothing during the Second World War was comparable to the revolts that had taken place against the First. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, because the bourgeoisie had learnt the lessons of World War I, and had taken care to crush the proletariat both physically and above all ideologically. An expression of this difference was the fact that, whereas the Socialist parties betrayed the class at the very outset of World War I, the Communist parties had betrayed well before the outbreak of the Second. As a result, the latter did not contain the least revolutionary current, whereas during the first war most of the militants who were to form the Communist parties were already socialist militants. In the terrible counter-revolution of the 1930s, the militants who continued to defend communist positions were a mere handful, and deprived of any direct link with a working class completely subjected to bourgeois ideology. It was impossible for them to develop any work within the parties that influenced the working class, as revolutionaries had been able to do during World War I, not only because they had been expelled from the party, but because the party itself no longer contained the slightest spark of proletarian life. Those, like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who had stood firm on revolutionary positions during the first war had encountered a growing echo for their propaganda among the militants of the social-democracy, the more war destroyed their illusions. Nothing like this was possible in the Communist parties. By the 1930s, they had become a completely sterile ground for the growth of any revolutionary or internationalist thinking. During the second war, the working class had fallen completely into the trap of anti-fascist ideology, and the impact of the tiny revolutionary groups, which continued to defend internationalist principles remained utterly insignificant.

The other reason for the absence of the slightest proletarian upsurge during the second imperialist war is that the world bourgeoisie, after the experience of World War I, took care to prevent systematically any rising in the defeated countries, where the bourgeoisie was at its most vulnerable. In Italy for example, the ruling class overcame the rising of 1943 by a division of labour between the German army, which occupied northern Italy and restored Mussolini to power, while the Allies landed in the south. In the north, German troops restored order with such brutality that the workers who had been most visible in the movements of early 1943 were forced to take refuge in the countryside, where they were cut off from the class base, and fell easy prey to the ideology of anti-fascism and "national liberation". At the same time, the Allies halted their northward advance, leaving Italy to "stew in its own juice" (to use Churchill's words), leaving Germany to do the dirty work of repression and allowing the democratic forces, and the Stalinist party in particular, to gain an ideological control over the working class.

The same tactics were used in Poland, where Stalin kept the Red Army immobile a few kilometres outside Warsaw when the insurrection broke out. The German army drowned the rising in blood, and flattened the city. When the Red Army entered Warsaw a few months later, the workers were massacred and disarmed.

In Germany itself, the Allies took care to crush any attempt at a workers' rising by an abominable bombing campaign against working class districts (the bombing of Dresden, from 13th to 14th February 1945, caused 250,000 deaths, three times more than Hiroshima). The Allies refused all the armistice proposals from different fractions of the German bourgeoisie, and from famous military men such as Marshal Rommel and Admiral Canaris, head of the secret service. For the victors, there could be no question of leaving Germany in the hands of the German bourgeoisie alone, not even its anti-Nazi fractions. Bourgeois politicians still remembered the experience of 1918, when the government that had taken over from the imperial regime had had the greatest difficulty in re-establishing order. The victors thus decided to administer a defeated Germany directly, and to establish a military occupation of every inch of German territory. The German proletariat, the giant which from 1918 to 1923 had shaken the whole capitalist world, was now prostrate, shattered, reduced to wandering the ruins in search of its dead, or a few familiar objects, subject to the goodwill of its conquerors to eat. In the victorious countries of the European continent, many workers had joined the Resistance with the illusion - encouraged by the Stalinist parties - that the armed struggle against Nazism would be the prelude to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. The reality was to be very different. In the countries which came under the domination of the USSR, the workers were led to support the creation of Stalinist regimes (for example during the Prague coup of 1948) which, once consolidated, hastened to disarm the workers and to exercise the most brutal terror over them. In countries dominated by the USA, such as France and Italy, the Stalinist parties took part in government, and called on the workers to give up their weapons, since the task in hand was not revolution, but "national reconstruction".

And so, throughout a Europe in ruins, hundreds of millions of proletarians suffered conditions of life and exploitation even worse than during World War I; famine roamed, capitalism wallowed in barbarism. The working class was unable to find the strength to engage a struggle of any importance against capitalist rule. World War I had won millions of workers to internationalism. World War II left them in the depths of the most abject chauvinism.

The proletariat had reached rock bottom. What it was told, what it thought, was its greatest victory - the triumph of democracy over fascism - was in fact its most utter historic defeat. Capitalist order was guaranteed by the workers' euphoric belief in their "victory", and their resulting belief in the "sacred virtues" of bourgeois democracy: the same democracy which had led them twice into imperialist butchery and crushed their revolution in 1920. And during the reconstruction period, the post-war economic boom, and the temporary improvement in the workers' living conditions, left them unable to appreciate the real defeat that they had suffered.

Once again, the working class had missed its appointment with history. But not this time because it had arrived too late or ill-prepared: this time, it was completely absent from the stage of history.

In the second part of this article, we will see how the proletariat has managed to return to the scene, but also what a long road it has still to travel.

Fabienne

[1] For a presentation of Bordiga's ideas, see our polemic with the IBRP in this issue.

[2] Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, 1970.

[3] Ibid. This sentence from the Manifesto also serves as a conclusion to Book 1 of Capital, the only one to be published in Marx's lifetime.

[4] 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: the expression at the end of the quotation is a reference to one of Aesop's fables, where a man boasted of a tremendous leap he had once made on the island of Rhodes; unimpressed, an onlooker answered: "Here is Rhodes, jump here".

[5] Order reigns in Berlin, in Selected Political Writings, Jonathan Cape, 1972, page 304-305.

[6] The Communist Manifesto, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, 1970.

[7] The passage is quoted in the "Resolution on the position towards the socialist currents and the Bern conference" of the 1st Congress of the Communist International.

[8] Rosa Luxemburg expressed this clearly when she wrote: "In Germany, for four decades we had nothing but ‘victories' on the parliamentary level; we flew literally from one victory to the next. And what was the result of the great historic test of 4th August 1914? A crushing moral and political defeat, an incredible collapse, an unprecedented bankruptcy".

[9] See our series of articles on the German revolution in the International Review, between nos.81 and 99.

[10] See our article on the first revolutionary wave in International Review no.80.