In recent years world capitalism has supposedly been battered by widespread popular struggles particularly in what the bourgeoisie likes to call the “developing world”.

In South America it would seem that for some years the Argentinean masses have been engaged in a popular movement against the system. The piquetero movement has thrown up soup kitchens, self managed enterprises and aid co-ops to “organise” the masses in revolt. In China, the state has officially announced that in 2004 74,000 mass incidents of unrest took place, many of them resulting in civilian deaths at the hands of the police (the most recent led to the shooting dead of 20 civilians in Dongzhou village in the coastal Guangdong Province near Hong Kong) and the declaration of martial law.  Since 1989 the Chinese authorities have invested heavily in training and equipping riot police to suppress such movements. And the now traditional riots that follow the World Trade Talks around the globe, most recently flaring up in Hong Kong, symbolise the image of a world in revolt.

To this list must now be added a country at the centre of the capitalist system: France. For several weeks during the autumn of 2005 the suburbs of Paris and other major French cities were hit by the most violent social movement since the events of May 1968. Eight thousand vehicles were torched, hundreds of prison sentences handed down, and the French state invoked draconian laws, not used since they were invoked in 1955 against the Algerian independence movement.

All these social movements, with disparate causes and agendas, have received widespread, often front-page publicity in the world’s media. It is high time that revolutionary marxists contrast this chimera of revolution with the authentic movement of social transformation that is usually starved of media attention: the class struggle of the world proletariat.

Causes and nature of the social revolts

The general cause of all these social movements is not a great secret. World capitalism is suffering from a long term and insoluble economic crisis that expresses itself at every level of society and affects every section of the non-exploiting population: grinding poverty and long term unemployment resulting from the austerity plans of capitalist states in the advanced countries, destitution brought about by the collapse of entire economies in Latin America, ruination of small peasants and farmers everywhere in the Third World, ethnic discrimination as a result of the deliberate policy of divide and rule by the ruling class, brutal terror instilled in countries occupied by imperialist armies.

However the fact that social revolts have a common root in the oppression by capitalism does not mean that they therefore provide a common answer to it, or indeed any answer. On the contrary.

Despite the immense variety of the social revolts presently developing, none of them provide, even in embryo, an alternative political, economic and social perspective to that of capitalist society in decline, whose symptoms they are protesting. This is particularly true of the recent riots in France. The anger of the rioters was turned inward rather than towards the cause of their misery.

“Day by day they have been subjected to crude and intrusive identity controls and body searches, accompanied by racist insults; it’s perfectly logical for them to see the cops as their persecutors. But here the main victims of their violence are their own families or those close to them: younger brothers and sisters who can’t go to their usual school, parents who have lost cars, for which they will get pathetic insurance pay-outs because the cars are old and cheap, and who will now have to shop away from where they live because the nearer and cheaper shops have been burned out.” (ICC statement “Riots in the French suburbs: in the face of despair, only the class struggle offers a future”. November 8th 2005).

However even in those revolts that are less elemental expressions of despair, where violence is directed toward the guardians of the regime that oppresses them and which even, as in China, temporarily push back the police, there is no perspective beyond this immediate protest. While the violence of such social revolts can often appear spectacular they have necessarily been poorly equipped and coordinated and no match for the well-armed and organised forces of the capitalist state. 

In the case of the piqueteros in Argentina or the Zapatistas in Mexico, social revolts have been directly harnessed by particular fractions of the bourgeoisie, to mobilise the population for their solution to the economic crisis, and their search for power within the bourgeois state.

It is not surprising then that the bourgeoisie can draw some satisfaction from the impotence of social revolts even if the latter reveal the inability of capitalism to offer the least hope to huge swathes of the world’s population. The social revolts pose no political threat to the system, they have no demands or perspective that could unite a serious challenge to the status quo. They never go beyond a national framework and are usually isolated or dispersed locally. And while the bourgeoisie is anxious about generalised social instability, as it has increasingly less room for manoeuvre at the economic level, it feels it can rely on repression to stifle and neutralise the nuisance of social revolt. In France for example, the unrest in the suburbs is itself a reflection of cuts in the social budget that had been imposed over a long period beforehand. Severe reductions have been made in the money for renovating run down housing and creating even temporary jobs. The numbers of teachers and social workers have been reduced, along with grants to voluntary organisations etc. The riots have not obliged the bourgeoisie to seriously reverse this austerity policy and instead allowed it to present the tightening of law and order as the solution.  The famous call of the French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy for the sink estates to be power-cleansed of their “rabble” was emblematic.  The French bourgeoisie has been able to use the riots to strengthen its repressive forces and prepare for the future threat of the working class struggle.

In Argentina the social revolt of December 19th/20th 2001 was famous for its mass looting of supermarkets and attacks on government and financial buildings. But the ensuing popular movement has not been a brake on the vertiginous decline of the living standards of the oppressed masses in Argentina, where the number living below the official “poverty line” has increased from 24% of the population in 1999 to about 40% today. On the contrary it is the organisation of these pauperised masses into a popular movement tied to the capitalist state that helps the bourgeoisie today to talk about an “Argentine Spring” and to pay its debts on time to the IMF.

Numerous social strata are the victims of the decline of the capitalist system and react violently to the terror and destitution that it brings. But such violent protests never bring into question the capitalist mode of production; they can only react to its consequences.

As capitalism sinks further into its final phase of social decomposition, the complete absence of any political, social, or economic perspective within the system seems to infect every thought and action that encourages the violent despair of social revolts.

The autonomy of the proletariat

At first sight it might seem unrealistic to claim that the unfashionable working class struggle, that is only just beginning to rediscover the path of combativeness and solidarity after the huge disorientation caused by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, is the real movement for social change. But the proletarian struggle, unlike popular revolt, does not exist only in the present: it has a history and a future.

The working class in struggle today is the same working class whose revolutionary movement shook the world from 1917-23, that led to the seizure of political power in Russia, the ending of the First World War, the formation of the Communist International and near proletarian victories in several other European countries.

In the late 1960s and 70s, the world proletariat reappeared on the historical scene after a half century of counter-revolution.

Massive strike waves in defence of workers’ living standards, beginning in France in 1968, swept through the central capitalist countries. The bourgeoisie had to adapt its political strategy to head off the threat by installing its left teams in government.  In some countries the class movement took a near insurrectional form as in Cordoba in Argentina in 1969. In Poland in 1980 it reached a decisive moment.  The working class broke down its local divisions and united through mass assemblies and strike committees. It was only after a year of sabotage by the trade union Solidarnosc that the Polish bourgeoisie, strongly advised by Western governments, felt able to declare the martial law that finally crushed the movement. But the international class struggles continued, notably in Britain with the year long miners’ strike of 1984-5.

Despite the reverses that it has suffered the working class has not been decisively defeated in the past 35 years, in the way it was in the 1920s and 30s. The way is still open for the expression of the revolutionary nature and characteristics of the proletariat.

The working class is revolutionary in the real sense of the term because its interests correspond to a completely new mode of social production. It has an objective interest in reorienting production away from the exploitation of its labour and for the satisfaction of all human needs in a communist society. And it has in its hands – but not in its legal possession! – the mass means of production to make this happen.  These means of production, already completely interdependent on a world scale, mean that the working class is a truly international class without any competing and conflicting interests, whereas all the other strata, groups and classes that suffer within capitalism contain insurmountable divisions.

Even if the defensive struggle of the working class to try and protect its meagre living standards is today isolated and divided by the trade unions, and therefore much less spectacular than the social revolts, it nevertheless contains, unlike the latter, the seeds of an offensive assault on the capitalist system. This can be seen in the recent solidarity strikes at London’s Heathrow Airport in August 2005, the wave of workers’ struggles in Argentina during the same summer, and the recent New York transit strike.

It is for these underlying reasons that the working class over the past 150 years has been able to develop a revolutionary political alternative to capitalist rule. The socialist alternative necessarily pits the working class against the capitalist legalisation of exploitation that is defended by a dazzling array of armed and punitive forces. In this sense, working class violence, unlike the despairing gestures of other oppressed strata, can only be seen as the midwife to the painful delivery of a new society.

Today the nascent class struggle appears to be upstaged in the media by a much more important social struggle. At most it seems to have a supporting role to the main attraction.

In this context it is vitally important for revolutionaries to defend the fundamental role of the proletariat and its necessary autonomy not only from the forces of the bourgeoisie that pretend to defend it, like the left parties and the trade unions, but also from the despairing revolts of the disparate oppressed strata and groups within capitalism.

The bourgeoisie, whose most intelligent representatives are well aware of the latent threat posed by the proletariat, are therefore particularly concerned to publicise the instances of social revolt and minimise or ignore, when it can, the genuine movements and actions of the proletariat. 

By identifying the violent chaos of the social revolts with all the other manifestations of the social decomposition of society the bourgeoisie hopes to discredit any resistance to its rule, including and especially the class struggle of the proletariat.

By presenting social revolt as the main expression of opposition to capitalist society the bourgeoisie hopes to persuade members of the proletariat, particularly its youth, to see in these doomed actions the only outlet for its struggle. And by showing in great detail the obvious limitations and inevitable failures of such revolt the bourgeoisie intends to demoralise, pacify and disperse the threat of proletarian unity, a unity that particularly requires solidarity between the young and older generations of the class.

And this tactic against the working class has brought some successes particularly among young and long term unemployed, and among ethnic minorities within the proletariat. Many of these sectors were drawn into the French riots. In Argentina the piqueteros movement has managed to “organise” the unemployed behind the state and divert some of the efforts of the recent strike wave in Argentina in 2005 into this and similar dead ends.

The left wing of the bourgeoisie and its extreme left forces in particular, have a special role in trying to demobilise the working class in this way and use it as cannon fodder for the campaign to provide an alternative management of the capitalist regime.

Unfortunately even some forces of the Communist Left, while able to see the “limitations” of the social revolts, have been unable to resist the temptation to see something positive in them. The International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party for example has already been seduced by interclassist movements during December 2001 in Argentina, and in Bolivia shortly afterwards, seeing them as actual or potential expressions of the working class. In their statement on the French riots, the IBRP despite its criticisms of their futility, see the possibility of turning such revolts into a genuine class struggle through the agency of the revolutionary party. The other groups which claim their descent from the Italian Left, and which all call themselves “International Communist Party” also sing, more or less in tune, from the same hymn sheet.

Of course one can always fantasise about the existence today of a class party and the miracles it could perform, according to the old Russian saying “if there is no vodka, talk about vodka”.  But today the revolutionary party does not yet exist precisely because the working class has still to develop its political independence and autonomy from all the other social forces in capitalist society. The conditions for the working class to create its own revolutionary party will be created, not by desperate social explosions but on the basis of the development of the proletariat’s class identity, above all through the development and extension of its struggles, and the intervention of revolutionaries within them. When we are in this historical situation then it will be possible for the proletariat, with its political party, to draw behind it the discontent of all the other oppressed strata in society but only on the basis  that such strata recognise the leading and pivotal role of the working class.

Today the task of revolutionaries is to insist on the necessity to create the political autonomy of the proletariat, not to help the bourgeoisie obscure it with delusions of grandeur about the role of the revolutionary party.

Como (20th December, 2005)

In International Review n° 123 we announced the beginning of a third volume of the communism series. The article in that issue went back to the work of the young Marx in 1843 in order to examine the origins of his method for elaborating the communist programme, although it is the intention of the third volume to take up the chronological thread at the point where the second volume finished: the opening of the counter-revolutionary period that followed the defeat of the international revolutionary wave between 1917 and 1927.   But given that it is now some 15 years since the series began, we think it is worthwhile to remind ourselves of the contents of the first two volumes, and this will be the aim of the next two articles. We hope that this summary will encourage readers to go back to the original articles, which we will be reissuing presently in the form of a book, as well as putting them online.  There has as yet been little written response to these articles from within the proletarian political camp, but we nevertheless offer them as a source of study and reflection to all those who are seeking to clarify the real meaning and content of the communist revolution.   

The first volume – with the exception of the first article which looks at communist ideas prior to the emergence of capitalism, and concludes with the earliest forms of proletarian communism – focuses essentially on the evolution of the communist programme in the ascendant period of capitalism, when the communist revolution was not yet on the agenda of history. The volume’s title is a polemical answer to the very common argument which, while perhaps acknowledging that the so-called communism of the Stalinist regimes isn’t exactly what Marx and others had in mind, still dismisses arguments for communism with the retort that it may be a very nice idea in theory, but it could never work in the real world. The marxist view, by contrast, is that communism is not a nice idea in the sense of something invented by well-meaning souls or individual geniuses. Communism is certainly a theory, or rather it is a movement which encompasses the theoretical dimension; but communist theory derives from the real practice of a revolutionary social force. And central to this theory is that communism as a form of social life becomes a necessity at the point where capitalism itself no longer works, when it becomes increasingly antithetical to human needs. But well before this point has been reached, the proletariat and its political minorities were obliged not only to sketch out the overall, historical goals of their movement, but also to develop and elaborate the communist programme in the light of experience gained through the practical struggles of the working class.

1. “From primitive communism to utopian socialism”. (International Review n°68)

A glance at the contents list on the front cover of this International Review, which came out in the first quarter of 1992, reminds us of the historical context in which this series began. The editorial focused on the explosion of the USSR and the massacres in Yugoslavia; another text was entitled “Notes on imperialism and decomposition: towards the greatest chaos in history”. In short, the ICC had recognised that the collapse of the Eastern bloc had definitively opened up a new phase in the life (or death) of decadent capitalism, the phase of decomposition, bringing with it new dangers and trials for the working class, and thus for its revolutionary minorities. At the same time, the spectacular downfall of the Stalinist regimes had allowed the ruling class to unleash a massive propaganda campaign aimed at dulling and demoralising the working class, whose struggles had plagued it for the previous two decades. Departing from the utterly false premise that Stalinism=communism, we were told with arrogant certainty that we were witnessing the end of communism, the definitive bankruptcy of marxism, the disappearance of the working class, even the end of history…The communism series was thus initially conceived as a response to this pernicious campaign and was to focus on demonstrating the fundamental difference between Stalinism and the authentic vision of communism defended throughout the history of the workers’ movement. It was envisaged as a short series of five or six articles. In fact, the first article already showed that a more profound approach was required, for two reasons. First, the task of clarifying the goals of communism has been a constant feature of the revolutionary marxist movement from its inception; the task remains just as valid today, and is not dependent on the demands of an immediate historical event, even one as epoch-making as the collapse of the Eastern bloc. Second, the history of communism is by its very nature a history not only of marxism, and indeed not only of the workers’ movement, but a history of mankind.

In the article in International Review n°123, we paid particular attention to a phrase that appears in Marx’s 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge: “the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality”. The first article thus attempts to summarise the communist dreams of mankind. These dreams were first elaborated in theoretical form in ancient society; but we also had to go further back in time, because these early speculations were to some extent based on an actual memory of the real, if restricted, communism of primitive tribal society.

The discovery that human beings had lived for hundreds of thousands of years in a society without classes and a state was to become a powerful weapon in the hands of the workers’ movement, providing a counter-weight to all the claims that the love of private property and the need for hierarchical domination are an intrinsic part of human nature. At the same time, the approach of the first communist thinkers had a strongly backward-looking, mythical element, appearing as a lament for a lost community which could never return. This was the case, for example, with the “communism of possessions” of the early Christians, or the slave revolts led by Spartacus, inspired by the search for a lost golden age. It was also true to a large extent of the communist sermons preached by John Ball during the English peasant’s revolt, although here it was already clear that the only cure for social injustice was the common ownership of land and the instruments of production.

The communist ideas that appeared under nascent capitalism were more able to develop a forward-looking standpoint that progressively emancipated itself from this fixation on a mythical past. From the Anabaptist movement led by Munzer in 16th century Germany, to Winstanley and the Diggers in the English civil war, to Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals in the French revolution, there was a move away from a religious/apocalyptic view of communism and a growing emphasis on humanity’s capacity to liberate itself from an exploitative social order. This in turn reflected the historical advance made possible by capitalism, in particular the development of a scientific world outlook, and the slow emergence of the proletariat as a specific class in the new social order. This arc of development reached its high point with the appearance of the utopian socialists such as Owen, St Simon and Fourier, who made many penetrating critiques of the horrors of industrialised capitalism, and saw the possibilities already opening up beyond it, without however succeeding in recognising the real social force capable of bringing about a more human society: the modern proletariat.               

2. “How the proletariat won Marx to communism” (International Review n°69)

Thus, contrary to the vulgar interpretation, communism was not a movement “invented” by Marx. As the first article showed, communism predates the proletariat, and proletarian communism predates Marx. But just as the communism of the proletariat represented a qualitative leap beyond all previous forms of communism, so the “scientific” communism elaborated by Marx and those who subsequently took up his method represented a qualitative step beyond the hopes and speculations of the utopians.

This article traces the steps that Marx took towards communism from an initial starting point in critical Hegelian philosophy and radical democracy. As we re-emphasised in the article in International Review n°123, this was a very rapid evolution, but by no means a superficial one: Marx insisted on a thorough investigation of all the existing communist currents that were beginning to flourish in Germany and France, and particularly in Paris, where Marx settled in 1844 and where he came into contact with groups of communist workers. These groups necessarily bore with them a host of confusions, ideologies inherited from the revolutions of the past. But, alongside the first embryonic signs of the more general class struggle of the workers, these first manifestations of a deeper historical movement were enough to convince Marx that the proletariat was the real social force that was not only uniquely capable of inaugurating a communist order of society, but that would be obliged by its very nature to do so. Thus Marx was won over to communism by the proletariat, bringing with him the theoretical weapons he had acquired from the bourgeoisie.

From the very beginning (particularly in The German Ideology, directed at the idealist philosophy that saw consciousness standing outside crude material reality), Marx insisted that communist consciousness emanates from the proletariat, and that the communist vanguard was a product of this process, not its demiurge, even if it was produced precisely to become an active factor upon it. This was already a refutation of a thesis that was to be taken up by Kautsky half a century later, according to which it is the socialist intelligentsia who inject communist consciousness into the working class “from the outside”. 

3. “The alienation of labour is the premise for its emancipation” (International Review n°70)

Having made this fundamental shift to the point of view of the proletariat, Marx began to elaborate a vision of the gigantic project of human emancipation which the existence of  revolutionary proletarian movement was now transforming from a beautiful but unattainable dream to a realisable social goal. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (EPM) of 1844 contain some of Marx’s most daring insights into the nature of human activity in a really free society. It has been argued that these notebooks are “premarxist” because they are still axed around essentially philosophical concepts like alienation, which had been a key term in Hegel’s philosophical system. And it is true that the concept of alienation, of man being estranged from his real powers, exists to a greater or lesser extent not only in Hegel, but throughout history, even in the earliest forms of myth. Also it is also obviously true that there were yet to be many key developments in Marx’s thinking in the ensuing decades. Yet there remains a fundamental continuity between the writings of the early Marx and those of the later Marx who produced great “scientific” works like Capital. When Marx analyses alienation in the EPM, he has already taken it down from the clouds of mythology and philosophy to the concrete level of man’s real social life and productive activity; by the same token, the inspirational picture he paints of communist humanity is grounded in real human capacities. Later works, like Grundrisse, were to take off from the same starting point.

In the EPM, Marx sets the scene for describing this liberated mankind by analysing in depth the nature of the problem facing the species: his alienation in capitalist society.

Marx identifies four facets of alienation, rooted in the fundamental processes of labour:

• the alienation of man from his own product, so that the creations of man’s hands become powers that dominate him: the machine built and set in motion by the worker ties the worker to its infernal rhythm; the social wealth created by the worker, as capital, becomes an impersonal power that tyrannises the whole of social life;
• the alienation from productive activity, so that work loses all semblance of creative pleasure and becomes a torment for the worker;
• alienation from other men:   alienated labour is founded on the exploitation of one class by another, and this fundamental division engenders many others, especially under the reign of universal commodity production, where society tends to become a war of each against all;
• the alienation of man from his own species nature, which is to be a social and creative being, and which has been emptied out on an unprecedented scale by bourgeois relations of production.   

But the marxist analysis of alienation is not a lament for prior, less explicit forms of alienation, nor a pretext for despair: for whereas the exploiting class is also alienated, with the proletariat, alienation becomes the subjective basis of a revolutionary attack on capitalist society. 

4. “Communism, the real beginnings of human society” (International Review n°71)

The writings of the early Marx, having analysed the disease, also show what the health of the species would be like. Against any notion of “equalising” in a downward direction, Marx shows that communism represents a huge step forwards for the human species, the resolution of conflicts that have plagued it not only in bourgeois society but throughout history – it is the “riddle of history solved”. Man in communism will not be reduced but elevated; but he will be elevated within the possibilities of his own nature. Marx outlines the various dimensions of man’s social activity once the shackles of capital have been removed:

-         if the division of labour, and above all production under the reign of money and capital, divides mankind into an infinity of competing atoms, communism restores man’s social nature, so that part of the very satisfaction of labour is the understanding that it is undertaken for the needs of others;

-         by the same token, the division of labour is to be overcome in each individual, so that producers are no longer tied cripplingly to a single form of activity, whether mental or manual: the producer becomes an all-round individual whose work combines mental, physical, artistic and intellectual activity;

-         freed from want and the whip of forced labour, the way is opened for a new and luminous experience of the world, an “emancipation of all the senses”; by the same token, man no longer experiences himself as an atomised ego “opposed” to nature, but experiences a new consciousness of his unity with nature.

5. “1848: communism as a political programme” (International Review n°72)

These early writings already contain an understanding of the centrality of relations of production in determining human activity, but this was not yet elaborated into a coherent and dynamic presentation of historical evolution. This was to develop very soon afterwards, in works such as The German Ideology where Marx first outlines the method later known as historical materialism. At the same time, a commitment to communism and the proletarian revolution was not “merely” a theoretical one; it necessarily involved a militant political commitment. This reflects the very nature of the proletariat as a propertyless class which could not build up a position of economic strength inside the old society, but could only affirm itself in opposition to it. Thus a communist transformation could only be preceded by a political revolution, by the seizure of power by the working class. And to prepare for this, the proletariat had to create its own political party.

There are many today who claim adherence to Marx’s ideas but who, traumatised by the experience of Stalinism, see no need to act in a collective, organised manner. This is foreign both to marxism and to the being of the proletariat, which as a collective class has no other means of advancing its cause except through the formation of collective associations; and it is inconceivable that the most advanced layers of the class, the communists, should somehow stand outside this profound necessity.

From the beginning, Marx was a militant of the working class. His aim was to participate in the formation of a communist organisation. Hence the intervention of Marx and Engels in the group that was to become the Communist League and publish the Communist Manifesto in 1847, on the very eve of a wave of revolutionary upheavals that would see the proletariat appear as a distinct political force for the first time.

The Manifesto opens by outlining the new theory of history, rapidly chronicling the rise and fall of different forms of class exploitation which have preceded the emergence of modern capitalism. The text makes no bones about recognising the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie in serving the global extension of the capitalist mode of production; at the same time, by identifying the contradictions of the system, in particular its inherent tendency towards the crisis of overproduction, it points out that capitalism too, like Rome or feudalism before it, will not last forever, but will be replaced by a higher form of social life.

The Manifesto affirms this possibility by pointing to a second fundamental contradiction in the system – the class contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the working class. Historical development is dividing capitalist society into two great warring camps whose struggle will lead either to the foundation of society on a higher level or the “mutual ruin of the contending classes”.  

These are, in reality, indications of capitalism’s future: of an epoch when capitalism will no longer serve human progress but will have become a fetter on the productive forces. The Manifesto is not consistent on this point: it still recognises the possibility of progress under the bourgeoisie, particularly in the overthrow of the remnants of feudalism; and yet it also suggests in places that the system is already tipping over into decline and that the proletarian revolution is imminent. And yet the Manifesto remains a work of genuine social “prophesy”: only months after its publication the proletariat proved in practice that it was the new revolutionary force in bourgeois society. This was testimony to the solidity of the historical method that the Manifesto embodies.

The Manifesto is the first explicit expression of a new political programme, indicating the steps the proletariat would have to take to inaugurate the new society:

• the conquest of political power. The class struggle is described as a more or less veiled civil war and envisages the revolution as the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie. At this stage, the idea is that the class violence of the proletariat will be aimed at the conquest of the existing state apparatus; and there is even room for the notion of a peaceful conquest of power through “winning the battle for democracy”. This approach to the bourgeois state would be fundamentally revised in the light of subsequent experience;
• the conquest of power by the proletariat must take place on an international scale. This is the text where Marx and Engels raise the immortal cry “the workers have no country” and insist that “united action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat”;
• the long-term goal is the replacement of a class-divided system by an “association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. This society will have no further need for a state, and will have overcome the crippling division of labour and the separation between town and country.

The Manifesto does not imagine that such a society can be inaugurated overnight, but will require a more or less long period of transition. Many of the immediate measures put forward in the Manifesto as representing “despotic inroads on capitalism” – such as the nationalisation of the banks and the imposition of a heavy progressive income tax – can now be seen as perfectly compatible with capitalism, especially with capitalism in its period of decline, which is characterised by the totalitarian domination of the state. Again, the revolutionary experience of the working class has brought a much greater level of clarity about the economic content of the proletarian revolution. But the Manifesto is perfectly correct to affirm the general principle that the proletariat can only advance towards communism by centralising the productive forces under its control

6. “The revolutions of 1848: the communist perspective becomes clearer” (International Review n°73)

The real experience of revolution in 1848 already made many things clearer. Recognising that a vast social upheaval was imminent, the Manifesto had already anticipated its hybrid character, which stood half way between the great bourgeois revolution of 1789 and the future communist revolution, by putting forward a series of tactical measures designed to assist the bourgeoisie and the radical petty bourgeoisie in their struggles against feudalism, while at the same time preparing the ground for a proletarian revolution, which it saw as following rapidly in the wake of the victory of the bourgeoisie.

In fact, this perspective was not borne out by events. The political appearance of the proletariat in the streets of Paris – paralleled, in England, by the rise of the first real workers’ party, the Chartists – struck terror into the hearts of the bourgeoisie. The latter realised that such a rising force could not easily be controlled once they unleashed it against the feudal powers. Thus the bourgeoisie was pushed towards compromise with the old regime, especially in Germany. The proletariat, meanwhile, was not yet politically mature enough to assume the direction of society: the communist aspirations of the Paris proletarians were implicit rather than explicit. And in many other countries the proletariat was still only in the process of formation out of the dissolution of previous forms of exploitation.

The movements of 1848 were a baptism of fire for the newly formed Communist League. Attempting to carry out the tactics advocated in the Manifesto, the League opposed the facile revolutionism of those who considered that the proletarian dictatorship was an immediate possibility, or who lost themselves in military dreams of freeing Germany at the point of a French bayonet. Against this, the League tried to put into practice the tactical alliance with the radical democrats in Germany. In fact, it went too far in this direction, dissolving the League into the Democratic Unions set up by the radical bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties.

In the light of these errors, and through reflection upon the savage repression of the Parisian workers and the German bourgeoisie’s betrayal of its own revolution, the Communist League drew some vital lessons, especially in Marx’s text for the League, “The class struggles in France”:

-         the necessity for proletarian autonomy. The bourgeoisie’s treachery was to be expected and planned for. It would inevitably either compromise with the reaction or, once victorious, would turn on the workers. Thus it was vital for the workers to maintain their own organisations throughout the process of the bourgeois revolution. This meant both the communist political vanguard and the more general organisations of the class (“clubs, committees, etc”);

-         these organs should be armed and even be ready to form a new workers’ government. Furthermore, Marx began to recognise that such a new power would only come into existence by “smashing” the already existing state apparatus, a lesson that would be fully confirmed by the experience of the Paris Commune in 1871. 

The perspective remained that of a “permanent revolution”: an immediate transition from bourgeois to proletarian revolution. In fact these lessons have more relevance to the epoch of proletarian revolution, as the events in Russia in 1917 were to show. And within the Communist League itself, there were in fact sharp debates about the prospects facing the working class in the wake of the defeats of 1848. An immediatist tendency led by Willich and Schapper thought that the defeat was of little consequence and that the League should be preparing for new revolutionary adventures. But the tendency around Marx thought deeply about the events; not only did they understand that the revolution could not arise straight away out of the ashes of defeat, but also that capitalism itself was not ripe for the proletarian revolution, which could only come out of new capitalist crisis. Hence the task facing revolutionaries was to preserve the lessons of the past and to conduct a serious study of the capitalist system in order to understand its real historic destiny. These differences were to result in the dissolution of the League and, for Marx, a period of profound theoretical work which was to give rise to his masterpiece, Capital. 

7. “The Study of Capital and the Foundations of Communism”

a. “The backdrop of history” (International Review n°75 [3])

The key to unlocking the future of capitalism lay in the sphere of political economy. In its most revolutionary period, the bourgeoisie’s political economists, in particular Adam Smith, had made an important contribution to understanding the nature of capitalist society, in particular by developing the labour theory of value, which today, in capitalism’s epoch of decline, has been almost completely abandoned by the bourgeois “experts” in economics. But even the best bourgeois economists were unable to take these first insights to their ultimate conclusion because their class prejudices stood in the way. The real inner workings of capital could only be grasped from the standpoint of the proletariat, which could lucidly draw conclusions that were completely unpalatable to the bourgeoisie and its apologists: not only that capitalism is a society founded upon class exploitation, but also that it is the last form of class exploitation in human history, and has created both the possibility and the necessity for its supersession by a classless communist society.

 But in examining the nature and destiny of capital, Marx did not stop at the boundaries of the capitalist epoch. On the contrary, capitalism could only be properly understood against the backdrop of human history as a whole. Thus Capital and its “draft”, the Grundrisse, return, with the benefit of a more advanced historical method, to the anthropological and philosophical concerns that had animated the EPM:

• the affirmation of the existence of a human nature: man is not a blank slate born anew in each economic formation; rather, man develops his nature through his own activity in history;
• the affirmation of the concept of alienation, which is also seen in its historical development: capitalist wage labour incarnates the most advanced form of the alienation of labour, and at the same time is the premise for its emancipation. Hence, the rejection of a purely linear view of history as unmitigated progress in favour of the dialectical method, which sees historical advance moving through a contradictory process which includes phases of regression and decline.

Within this framework, the dynamic of history reveals an increasing dissolution of man’s original social bonds through the generalisation of commodity relations: primitive communism and capitalism stand at antithetical ends of the historical process, paving the way for the communist synthesis. Within this broad framework, the movement of history is synonymous with the rise and fall of different antagonistic social formations. The concept of the ascendancy and decadence of the successive modes of production is inseparable from historical materialism; and, contrary to some crude misconceptions, the decadence of a social system does not at all imply a complete cessation of growth.

 
b. “The overthrow of commodity fetishism” (International Review n°76)

For all its depth and complexity, Capital is essentially a work of polemic. It is a tirade against the “scientific” apologists of capitalism and thus “a missile hurled against the heads of the bourgeoisie”, to use Marx’s phrase.

The starting point of Capital is the unravelling of the mystification of the commodity. Capitalism is a system of universal commodity production: everything is for sale.  The reign of the commodity draws a veil over the system’s real mode of operation. It was thus necessary to reveal the true secret of surplus value in order to demonstrate that all capitalist production is without exception based on the exploitation of human labour power, and is thus the real source of all the injustice and barbarity of life under capitalism. 

At the same time, to grasp the secret of surplus value is to demonstrate that capitalism is saddled with profound contradictions which will inevitably lead to its decline and eventual demise. These contradictions are built into the very nature of wage labour:

-         the crisis of overproduction, since the majority of the population under capitalism are, by the very nature of surplus value, overproducers and underconsumers. Capitalism is unable to realise all the value it produces within the closed circuit of its relations of production;

-         the tendency towards the fall in the rate of profit, because only human labour power can create new value, and yet unrelenting competition constantly forces capitalism to reduce the amount of living labour in relation to the dead labour of machines.

In the ascendant period in which Marx was living, capitalism could offset its inner contradictions by constantly expanding into the vast pre-capitalist areas which surrounded it. Capital already grasped the reality of this process, and its limitations, but it had to remain an unfinished work, not just because of the personal limitations facing Marx, but because only the real evolution of capitalism could clarify the actual process through which the capitalist system would enter into its epoch of decline. The understanding of the phase of imperialism, of capitalist decadence, had to be taken up by Marx’s successors, and by Rosa Luxemburg in particular.

The contradictions of capitalism also point to their real solution: communism. A society driven towards chaos by the rule of market relations can only be superseded by a society which has abolished wage labour and production for exchange, a society of the “freely associated producers” in which relations between human beings are no longer obscure but simple and clear. Hence Capital is also a description of communism; largely in the negative sense, but also in the more direct and positive sense of outlining how a society of freely associated producers would operate. And beyond this, Capital and the Grundrisse return to the inspired vision of the EPM by attempting to describe the realm of freedom – to provide us with an insight into the free, creative activity which is the essence of communist production.       

8. “1871: the first proletarian revolution” (International Review n°77)

By 1864, the period of retreat in the working class struggle had come to an end. The workers of Europe and America were organising themselves into trade unions to defend their economic interests; there was a growing use of the strike weapon; and workers were also mobilising themselves on the political terrain to support progressive causes such as the war against slavery in the USA. This ferment in the class gave birth to the International Workingmen’s Association, and the fraction around Marx played an active part in its formation. Marx and Engels recognised the International as a genuine expression of the working class, even though it was made up of many diverse and often confused currents.  The marxist fraction in the International thus found itself engaged in many critical debates with these currents, in particular around:

• the principle of the self-emancipation of the working class, against well-meaning bourgeois reformers who would liberate the class from on high, and the principle of class autonomy against bourgeois nationalists like Mazzini;
• the defence of proletarian politics and centralised organisation against the anti-political stance and the federalist prejudices of the anarchists.

The debate about the need for the proletariat to recognise the political dimension of its struggle was to an extent a debate about whether or not to campaign within the sphere of bourgeois politics, of parliament and elections, and thus about the historic perspective of the revolution: for the marxists the struggle for reforms was still on the agenda because the capitalist system had not yet entered into its “epoch of social revolution”. But in 1871 the real movement of the class took a historic step forward: the first seizure of political power by the working class, the Paris Commune. Even though Marx understood the “premature” nature of this insurrection, it was a crucial harbinger of the future, bringing new clarity to the problem of the relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeois state. Whereas in the Communist Manifesto the perspective had been the taking over of the existing state, the Paris Commune proved that this part of the programme was now obsolete and that the proletariat could only come to power through the violent destruction of the capitalist state. Far from invalidating the marxist method, this was a striking confirmation of it. 

This clarification did not come from nowhere: the marxist critique of the state goes back to Marx’s writings of 1843; the Manifesto looks forward to communism as a stateless society; and in the lessons the Communist League drew from the experience of 1848, there is already an emphasis on the necessity for autonomous proletarian organisation and even the notion of smashing the bureaucratic apparatus. But after the Commune, all this could be incorporated into a higher synthesis.

The heroic combat of the Communards made it clear that the workers’ revolution meant:

• the dissolution of the standing army and its replacement by the arming of the proletariat;
• the replacement of a privileged bureaucracy by public officials paid an average workers’ wage; the replacement of parliamentary-type bodies by working class bodies which fused the legislative and executive functions; and most important of all, the principle of the election and revocability of all positions of responsibility in the new power. 

This new power provided the organised framework:

• for drawing the other non-exploiting classes behind the proletariat;
• for beginning the economic and social transformation which indicated the road towards communism, even though this could not be realised in this epoch and in such a limited geographical context.

The Commune was thus already a “semi-state” which was historically destined to give way to a stateless society. But even at this point Marx and Engels were able to glimpse the “negative” side of the Commune-state: Marx stressed that the Commune could only provide an organised framework for, but was not itself, the movement for the social emancipation of the proletariat; Engels insisted that this state remained a “necessary evil”. Later experience – the Russian revolution of 1917-27 – would demonstrate the profundity of this insight, and would reveal how vital it was for the proletariat to forge its own autonomous class organs to control the state – organs like the workers’ councils, which were not conceivable among the semi-artisanal Paris proletarians of 1871.  

Finally, the Commune indicated that the period of national wars in Europe was over: faced with the spectre of proletarian revolution, the bourgeoisies of France and Prussia united their forces to crush their principal enemy. For the proletariat of Europe, national defence had become a mask for class interests entirely hostile to their own. 

9. “Communism against ‘state socialism’” (International Review n°78)

With the brutal crushing of the Commune, the workers’ movement faced a new period of retreat, and the International would not long survive it. For the Marxist current, this would again be a period of intense political combat against forces which, while acting within the movement, more or less expressed the influence and outlook of other classes. It was a combat, on the one hand, against the more explicitly bourgeois influences of reformism and “state socialism”, and on the other hand, against the petty bourgeois and déclassé ideologies of anarchism.

The identification between state capitalism and socialism has been at the root of the great lie of the 20th century: that Stalinism equals communism, as well as of the milder “social democratic” versions of the same fraud. One of the reasons that the lie has so much weight is that it stems from what were once genuine confusions within the workers’ movement. In the ascendant period, when capitalism largely manifested itself in the shape of private capitalists, it was not difficult to assume that the centralisation of capital by the state represented a blow against capital (as we saw in the Communist Manifesto, for example). Nevertheless, marxist theory already supplied the basis for criticising this assumption, by demonstrating that capital is not a legal relationship but a social one, so that it makes little difference whether surplus value is extracted by an individual or a collective capitalist. Moreover, towards the end of the 19th century, as the state began to intervene more and more vigorously in the economy, Engels had already made this implicit critique explicit.

In the period that followed the dissolution of the International, the focus for the development of the workers’ movement passed to Germany. The backward political conditions that still reigned there were also reflected in the backwardness of the current around Lassalle, which was characterised by a superstitious worship of the state, and of the semi-feudal Bismarkian state at that. And even the marxist fraction led by Bebel and Liebknecht was not entirely free of such prejudices. The compromise between these two groups gave birth to the German Social Democratic Workers Party. The new party’s 1875 programme was subjected to a withering critique by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, which summarises the marxist approach to the problem of revolution and communism as it existed at that point. Thus:

• against the Gotha programme’s tendency to mix up immediate reforms with the long term goal of communism, Marx warned against the German party’s reliance on the exploiter’s state, not only to protect the exploited but even to take society towards socialism;
• against the tendency to make social democracy an all-class party of democratic reform, the marxists – for whom “social democracy” was a totally inadequate term – insisted on the class character of the party as an element irreducibly hostile to bourgeois society;
• against substitutionist ideas of the party as an educated bourgeois elite which brought salvation to the benighted workers, the marxists insisted that elements from other classes could only join the proletarian movement by casting away their bourgeois prejudices;
• against illusions in the notion of a “People’s State” that could bring in piecemeal reforms eventually leading to socialism, the marxists insisted that communism meant a radical social transformation, and that it could only be inaugurated after a period of proletarian dictatorship that aimed at the ultimate disappearance of any state form. The principle of proletarian dictatorship had been totally confirmed in practice by the Paris Commune;
• against the Gotha programme’s call for “fair distribution” of the social product, Marx insisted that the key to any movement towards communism was the abolition of exchange and of the law of value;
• while the Gotha programme confuses socialism with state ownership, Marx talks about a movement from the lower to the higher stages of communism. In the first stage, society is still marked by scarcity and by the imprint of the old society. Capitalist social relations must be attacked through measures which prevent the return of the drive to accumulate value. Such an interim measure was the system of labour-time vouchers which Marx saw as a first step towards the abolition of the wages system, though still constrained by “bourgeois right”.             

10. “Anarchism or communism” (International Review n°79 [4])

The struggle against the overtly bourgeois influences of “state socialism” went hand in hand with the fight to overcome the vestiges of petty bourgeois ideology embodied in anarchism. This was not a new combat: in works such as The Poverty of Philosophy, marxism had already defined itself against the Proudhonist nostalgia for a society of independent producers mediated by “fair exchange”. By the 1860s, anarchism appeared to have moved on, since Bakunin’s current at least described itself as collectivist and even communist. But in reality, the essence of Bakuninism was no less alien to the proletariat than the Proudhonist ideology, with the added disadvantage that it could no longer be seen as an expression of immaturity in the workers’ movement, but was from the start ranged directly against the fundamental advance represented by the marxist outlook.

The conflict between marxism and Bakuninism, between the proletarian and petty bourgeois standpoint, was fought out on several levels:

• the question of organisation: Bakunin’s contribution to the life of the International was to pose as a defender of freedom and local autonomy against the excessively centralist tendencies expressed in the International’s General Council. But centralisation is an organic expression of the proletariat’s need for unity, whereas the Bakuninists wanted to reduce the General Council to a mere letterbox, to liquidate the capacity of the International to speak with one voice against the enemy class, and this project could only bring disorganisation to the ranks of the proletarian movement. At the same time, the Bakuninists’ speeches about freedom and autonomy were pure hypocrisy, since their whole aim was to infiltrate the International via an extremely “authoritarian” secret order based on the Masonic model, with “Citizen B” – Bakunin – at its head. The struggle for proletarian organisational principles, based on transparency and clear lines of responsibility, against the petty bourgeois intrigues of the Bakunin clan, was the key issue of the 1872 Congress of the International;
• historical method:  whereas the marxist current stood for the method of historical materialism, the understanding that the activity of the workers’ movement had to be defined in relation to the objective historical conditions confronting it, Bakunin rejected this approach in favour of proclaiming the eternal ideas of justice and freedom, and argued that the revolution was possible at any time;
• the subject of revolution: whereas marxism recognised that the class uniquely destined to lead the communist revolution, the modern proletariat, was still in the process of formation, this was a matter of indifference for the Bakunists, for whom the revolution was seen as a grand conflagration that could equally be led by peasants, semi-proletarians and bandit-rebels as by the working class;
• the political nature of the class struggle: since, for the marxists, the communist revolution was not yet on the agenda of history, it was necessary for the working class to consolidate itself as a political force within the confines of bourgeois society, which meant organising itself through trade unions and similar organs of economic defence, and intervening in the bourgeois political arena of parliament to enforce its interests at the legal level. The Bakunists, however, rejected all parliamentary activity in principle and – on the face of it at least – rejected any struggle that was not for the abolition of capitalism; moreover, the overthrow of capitalism did not require the conquest of political power by the working class, but the immediate “dissolution” of any form of state. Against this, the marxists drew the real lessons of the Commune: that the working class revolution indeed meant the seizure of political power, but that this new power was of a new type, in which the proletariat as a whole, rather than a privileged elite, could take direct charge of the management of political and economic life. And in practice the ultra-revolutionary phrases of the anarchists were a thin veneer over an opportunist practice of tail-ending the bourgeoisie, as they did in Spain through participation in local authorities which were by no means separate from the capitalist state;
• the question of the future society: the true nature of anarchism as a reflection of the conservative outlook of petty bourgeois strata ruined by the concentration of capital was nowhere more evident than in their view of the future society. This was no less true of the “collectivist” Bakuninsts than it had been of Proudhon: in particular, Guillaume’s text “On building the new social order” emphasises that the various producers’ associations and communes that will come into being after the revolution are to be connected through the good offices of a “Bank of Exchange” which will organise the business of buying and selling on society’s behalf. The marxists, by contrast, insisted that in a truly “collectivist” society the producers do not exchange their products, because they are already the product and “property” of the whole of society. The perpetuation of commodity relations can only be the reflection of the existence of private property, and will serve as the soil from which a new form of capitalism will grow.      

11. “The mature Marx: past and future communism” (International Review n°81)

During the last years of his life, Marx devoted a good deal of his intellectual energy to the study of archaic societies. The publication of Morgan’s Ancient Society, and questions posed to him by the Russian workers’ movement about the perspectives for revolution in Russia, drew him into an intensive study that has left us with the very incomplete, but still extremely important, Ethnographic Notebooks. These studies also fuelled Engels’ great anthropological work Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State.

Morgan’s work on the American Indians was, for Marx and Engels, a striking confirmation of their thesis of primitive communism: against the conventional bourgeois notion that private property, social hierarchy and sexual inequality are inherent in human nature, Morgan’s study revealed that the earlier the social formation, the more property was communal; the more collective was the decision-making process; the more relations between men and women were based on relations of mutual respect. This provided a tremendous support to the communist argument against the mythologies of the bourgeoisie. At the same time, the main subject of Morgan’s investigations – the Iroquois – were already a society in transition between the earlier form of “savagery” and the stage of civilisation or class society; and the forms of inheritance structured in the clan or gens system revealed the germs of private property which provides the soil for the emergence of classes, the state, and the “historic defeat of the female sex”.

Marx’s approach to primitive society was based on his materialist method, which saw the historical evolution of societies as being determined in the last instance by changes in their economic infrastructure. These changes brought about the demise of the primitive community and paved the way for the appearance of more developed social formations. But his view of historical advance was radically opposed to the crude bourgeois evolutionism which saw a purely linear ascent from darkness to light, culminating in the dazzling splendour of bourgeois civilisation. His view was profoundly dialectical: far from dismissing primitive communist society as semi-human, the Notebooks express a profound respect for the human qualities of the tribal commune: its capacity for self-government, the imaginative power of its artistic creations, its sexual egalitarianism. The concomitant limitations of primitive society – in particular, the restrictions on the individual and the separation of mankind into separate tribal units – were necessarily overcome by historical advance. But the positive side of these societies was lost in the process and will have to be restored at a higher level in the communist future.

This dialectical view of history – contrary to those who try to drive a wedge between Marx and Engels by accusing the latter of being a vulgar “evolutionist”– was shared by Engels and is clearly demonstrated in Origins of the Family.

The problem of primitive and pre-capitalist societies was not simply a question about the past. The 1870s and 80s was the period in which, having completed the tasks of the bourgeois revolution in old Europe, capitalism passed over to the imperialist phase of dividing up the remaining non-capitalist areas of the globe. The proletarian movement thus had to adopt a clear position on the colonial question, not least because there were within its ranks currents which defended a notion of “socialist colonialism”, an early form of chauvinism whose full danger was to be exposed in 1914.

There was no question of revolutionaries supporting the progressive mission of imperialism. But since large parts of the planet were still dominated by pre-capitalist forms of production, it was necessary to elaborate a communist perspective for these regions. This was concretised in the Russian question: the founders of the communist movement in Russia wrote to Marx asking him for his attitude towards the archaic community, the agrarian Mir, which still survived in Tsarist Russia. Could this formation serve as the basis for a communist development in Russia? And – contrary to the expectations of some of his “marxist” followers in Russia, who kept rather quiet about the contents of Marx’s response – Marx concluded that there was no inevitable stage of “bourgeois revolution” in Russia  and that the agrarian commune could serve as the basis for a communist transformation. But there was a major proviso: this would only happen if the Russian revolution against Tsarism served as the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West.

This whole episode shows that Marx’s method was by no means closed or dogmatic; on the contrary, he rejected the crude schemas of historical development that some marxists derived from his premises, and was always revising and reviewing his conclusions. But it also shows its prophetic power: even if capitalist development in Russia did essentially undermine the Mir, Marx’s rejection of a stageist theory of revolution in Russia was to have its continuity in Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and Lenin’s April Theses, which followed Marx in their recognition that the only hope for any revolutionary upheaval in Russia was to link itself immediately to the proletarian revolution in western Europe.  

12. “1883-1895: social democracy advances the cause of communism” (International Review n°84)

The appearance of the “social democratic” parties in Europe was an important expression of the revival of the proletariat after the crushing defeat of the Commune. Despite their irritation with the term “social democracy”, Marx and Engels enthusiastically supported the formation of these parties, which marked an advance on the International on two counts: first, they embodied a clearer distinction between the general, unitary organs of the class (in that period, the trade unions in particular), and the political organisation, regrouping the most advanced elements of the class. And second, they were constituted on the basis of marxism.

There is no doubt that there were, from the beginning, significant weaknesses in the programmatic bases of these parties. Even the marxist leaderships within them were often weighed down with all kinds of ideological baggage; and as they grew in influence, they began to become a pole of attraction for all kinds of bourgeois reformists who were positively hostile to marxism. The period of capitalist expansion at the end of the 19th century created the conditions for the growth of an increasingly open opportunism within theses parties, a process of inner degeneration culminating in the great treason of 1914.

This has led many would-be radical political currents, usually claiming to be communist but deeply influenced by anarchism, to reject the whole experience of social democracy en bloc, to dismiss it as reflecting nothing more than an adaptation to bourgeois society. But this ignores completely the real continuity of the proletarian movement and the manner in which it develops an understanding of its historic goals. All the best elements of the communist movement in the 20th century – from Lenin to Luxemburg and from Bordiga to Pannekoek – came through the school of social democracy and would not have existed without it. It is not accidental that the ahistorical method that leads to a blanket condemnation of social democracy frequently ends up throwing Engels, and even marxism itself, into the trash-can of history, thus revealing the anarchist roots of its thinking.

Against the attempt to separate Engels from Marx and present him as a vulgar reformist, it is evident that Engels’ polemic against the real bourgeois influences acting upon social democracy – in particular his Anti-Dühring – is a fundamental defence of communist principles:

• the affirmation of the insoluble contradictions of capitalism, which lie in the very nature of the production and realisation of surplus value;
• the critique of state intervention and ownership, which was not a solution to these contradictions, but capitalism’s last line of defence against them;
• the consequent rejection of “state socialism” and the insistence that socialism/communism demands the withering away of any form of state;
• the definition of communism as an association of the producers which has done away with  wage labour and commodity production;
• the re-assertion of the highest goals of communism as being the overcoming of alienation and the real beginning of human history.

Neither was Engels a lone figure in the social democratic parties. A brief study of the work of August Bebel and William Morris confirms this: the defence of the idea that capitalism would have to be overthrown because its contradictions would result in growing catastrophes for humanity; the rejection of the identification between state ownership and socialism; the necessity for the revolutionary working class to set up a new form of power modelled on the Paris Commune; the recognition that socialism involves the abolition of trade and money; the understanding that socialism cannot be built in one country but requires the unified action of the world proletariat; the internationalist critique of capitalist colonialism and the rejection of national chauvinism, above all in the context of mounting rivalries between the great imperialist powers – these positions were not extraneous to the social democratic parties, but expressed their fundamentally proletarian core.  

13. “The transformation of social relations: how revolutionaries saw the question at the end of the 19th century” (International Review n°85)

Only by disposing of the mystification of the capitalist nature of social democracy before 1914 can a serious study be made of the strengths and limitations of the way in which the revolutionaries of the late 19th century envisaged the transformation of social life and the elimination of some of mankind’s most pressing problems.

A major issue posed to communist thought in the 19th century was the “woman question”. As early as the 1844 Manuscripts Marx had argued that the relation of man to woman in any given society was a key to understanding how close to, or how distant from, that society was to realising humanity’s real nature. The work of Engels in Origins of the Family and of Bebel in Woman and Socialism chronicle the historical development of the oppression of woman, which took a fundamental step with the abolition of the primitive community and the emergence of private property, and which has remained unsolved under the most advanced forms of capitalist civilisation. This historical approach is by definition a critique of the feminist ideology which tends to turn the oppression of women into an innate, biological element of the human male, and thus an eternal attribute of the human condition. Even when feminism hides behind a supposedly radical critique of socialism as a “purely economic” transformation, it reveals its fundamentally conservative approach. Communism is by no means a “purely economic” transformation. But just as it begins with the political overthrow of the bourgeois state, so its ultimate goal of a profound transformation of social relations requires the elimination of the economic forces which lie behind the conflict between men and women and the transformation of sexuality into a commodity.

Just as feminism falsely accuses marxism of “not going far enough”, so the ecologists, by repeating the lie that marxism is Stalinism, claim that marxism is just another “productivist” ideology which bears responsibility for the ravaging of the natural environment in the 20th century. This charge is also made at the more philosophical level, particularly against 19th century social democracy, whose methodology is often identified with a purely mechanical kind of materialism, with an uncritical “scientism” which tends to abstract mankind from nature and treat the natural world as capital itself treats it: as a dead thing to be bought, sold, and exploited. Again, even Engels is often among the accused. But while it is true that these mechanistic tendencies did exist within the social democratic parties, and even became predominant as the process of degeneration accelerated, their best elements always defended a very different approach. And once again there is complete continuity between Marx and Engels in recognising that mankind is a part of nature and that communism will bring about a genuine reconciliation between man and nature after millennia of estrangement.

This vision was not restricted to the inconceivably distant future; in the work of Marx, Engels, Bebel, Morris and others it was founded on a concrete programme which the proletariat would have to put into effect when it came to power. This programme was summarised in the phrase “abolition of the separation between town and country”. Stalinism in power interpreted this phrase in its own way – by justifying the poisoning of the countryside and the construction of vast barracks for the workers to inhabit. But for the real marxists of the 19th century, this phrase meant not the frenzied urbanisation of the globe but the elimination of the swollen cities and the harmonious distribution of mankind across the whole planet. This project is more than ever relevant in today’s world of vast mega-cities and the rampant poisoning of the environment.           

14 “The transformation of work according to the revolutionaries of the late 19th century” (International Review n°86)

As an artist who wholeheartedly joined the socialist movement, William Morris was well placed to write about the transformation of work in a communist society, since he understood very well both the soul-destroying nature of work under capitalism, and the radical possibilities of replacing alienated labour with truly creative activity. In his visionary novel, News from Nowhere, it is stated plainly that “happiness without happy daily work is impossible”. This accords perfectly with the marxist conception of the centrality of labour in human life: man has made himself through labour, but he has made himself in conditions which generate his self-alienation. By the same token, the overcoming of alienation cannot be achieved without a fundamental transformation of labour.

Communism, contrary to some who speak in its name, is not “anti-work”. Even under capitalism the ideology of “refusal of work” expresses the purely individual revolt of marginal classes or strata. And one of the first measures of the proletarian power will be to install the universal obligation to work. In the early phases of the revolutionary process, this inevitably contains an element of restraint, since it is impossible to abolish scarcity without a more or less long transition period which will certainly involve considerable material sacrifices, especially in the initial phase of civil war against the old ruling class. But progress towards communism will be measured by the degree to which work has ceased to be a form of sacrifice and has become a positive pleasure. In his essay on “Useful work versus useless toil” Morris identifies the three principal aspects of the former:

• that work is informed by “hope of rest”: the reduction of the working day will have to be an immediate measure of the victorious revolution, otherwise it will be impossible for the majority of the working class to play an active part in the revolutionary process. Capitalism has already created the conditions for this measure by developing the technology which could – once freed from the drive for profit – be used to greatly reduce the quantity of repetitive and unpleasant tasks involved in the labour process. At the same time, the vast amounts of human labour power that go to waste under capitalist production – in the form of massive unemployment or work that serves no useful purpose (bureaucracy, military production, etc) – could be re-directed towards useful production and services, and this would also help to reduce the working day for all. These observations were already made by the likes of Engels, Bebel and Morris, and they are even more applicable in the decadent period of capitalism;
• that there should be “hope of product”: in other words, the worker should have an interest in what is being produced, either because it is essential for the satisfaction of human needs, or because it is intrinsically beautiful. Even in Morris’s day capitalism had an enormous capacity to turn out shabby and useless products, but the mass production of junk and ugliness in decadent capitalism would probably have exceeded his worst nightmares;
• that there is “hope of pleasure in the work itself”. Morris and Bebel insist that work should be carried out in agreeable surroundings. Under capitalism the factory is a model for hell on earth; communist production will retain the associated character of factory work but in a very different physical environment. At the same time the capitalist division of labour – which condemns so many proletarians to carry out mind-numbingly repetitive chores day after day – must be overcome so that every producer enjoys a balance between intellectual and physical labour, is able to devote himself to a variety of tasks, and develops a variety of skills in carrying them out. Moreover, the work of the future will be freed from the frenzied pace demanded by the hunt for profit, and will be adapted to human need and human desire;
• Fourier, with his characteristic imaginative power, had talked about work in his “Phalansteries” being based on “passionate attraction” and looked forward to daily work becoming more like play. Marx, who greatly admired Fourier, argued that really creative work was also a “damned serious affair”, or as he puts it in The Grundrisse, “A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish”. However, he continues: “But does he not find joy in the child’s naivete, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage?”. Communist activity will have overcome the old antimony between work and play.

These sketches of the communist future were not utopian, since marxism had already demonstrated that capitalism had created the material conditions for daily work to be utterly transformed in this way, and had identified the social force which would be compelled to undertake the transformation precisely because it was the last victim of the alienation of labour.    

15. 1895-1905: parliamentary illusions hide the perspective of revolution (International Review n°88)

The dictatorship of the proletariat has been a fundamental concept of marxism since its inception. Previous articles showed that this was never a static idea, but evolved and became more concrete in the light of the proletarian struggle. Similarly, the defence of the proletarian dictatorship against various forms of opportunism has also been a constant element in the development of Marxism. Thus, in 1875, Marx, basing his arguments on the experience of the Paris Commune, was able to make a withering critique of the Lassallean notion of the “People’s State” put forward in the Gotha Programme of the new Social Democratic Workers Party in Germany.

At the same time, since the perspective of proletarian power is born out of relentless struggle against the prevailing ideology, this also implies a struggle against the impact that this ideology can have even in the most lucid fractions of the workers’ movement. Even after the experience of the Paris Commune, for example, Marx himself made a speech to the 1872 Hague Congress of the International where he suggested that in some countries at least the proletariat could come to power peacefully, through the democratic apparatus of the existing state.

In the 1880s, the German party – now the leading party in the international movement – had been outlawed by the Bismarck regime and this helped it to preserve its revolutionary integrity. Even where concessions to bourgeois democracy persisted, the prevailing view was that the proletarian revolution necessarily required the forceful overthrow of the bourgeoisie, and the fundamental lesson of the Commune – that the existing state could not be conquered but must be destroyed from top to bottom – had by no means been forgotten.

In the ensuing decade, however, the legalisation of the party, an influx of petty bourgeois intellectuals, and above all the spectacular expansion of capitalism and the consequent winning of real reforms by the working class, provided the soil for the growth of a more clear-cut expression of reformism within the party. The rise of a “state socialist” tendency around Vollmar, and in particular the revisionist theories of Eduard Bernstein, sought to persuade the socialist movement to give up its claims to be in favour of violent revolution and to declare itself openly as a party of democratic reform.

In a proletarian party, the overt penetration of bourgeois influences such as these is inevitably met with fierce resistance from those who represent the proletarian heart of the organisation. In the German party, the opportunist tendencies were most famously opposed by Rosa Luxemburg in her pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution, but the rise of left fractions was an international phenomenon.

Furthermore, the battles led by Luxemburg, Lenin, and others appeared to be successful. The revisionists were condemned not only by Red Rosa, but also by the “Pope” of Marxism, Karl Kautsky.

Nevertheless, the victories of the left proved to be more fragile than they may have appeared. The ideology of democratism had seeped into the whole movement and even Engels was not spared. In his 1895 introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, Engels rightly pointed out that a simple resort to barricades and street fighting was no longer enough to topple the old regime, and that the proletariat had to build a massive balance of forces in its favour before launching the struggle for power. This text was distorted by the leadership of the German party to make it appear that Engels was opposed to all proletarian violence. But the opportunists, as Luxemburg later pointed out, had only been able to do this because there were indeed weaknesses in Engels’ argument: building up the proletariat’s political strength was more or less identified with the gradual growth of the social democratic parties and their influence within the parliamentary arena.

This focus on parliamentary gradualism was theorised in particular by Kautsky, who had certainly opposed the open revisionists but increasingly came to stand for a conservative “centre” which valued a semblance of party unity more than programmatic clarity. In seminal works like The Social Revolution, Kautsky identified the proletarian seizure of power with the winning of a parliamentary majority, even though he also made it clear that in such a situation the working class would have to be prepared to repress the resistance of the counter-revolution. This political strategy also went had in hand with an economic “realism” which lost sight of the real content of the socialist programme – the abolition of wage labour and commodity production – in favour of seeing socialism as the state regulation of economic life.

The article in the next issue of the International Review will summarise the second series, which covers the period from 1905 till the end of the first great international revolutionary wave. It will begin by showing how this issue of the form and content of the revolution was clarified through a sharp debate on the new forms of class struggle that began to emerge as capitalism approached the tipping point between its ascendant and its decadent epochs.  

CDW

In n°122 of our Review we published an article on the cycle of conferences of the groups of the Communist Left, held between 1977 and 1980. We stressed the fact that these conferences marked a real step forward and deplored the fact that they were deliberately undermined by two of the main participating groups, the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (PCInt – Battaglia Comunista) and the Communist Workers’ Organisation, today the main sections of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. The initiative for these conferences lay with the PCInt which had launched an appeal to hold them in 1976 and had hosted the first of these in Milan in 1977. The fact that this conference was not a complete flop was down to the fact that, unlike other groups who announced that they would take part but failed to turn up, the ICC sent a sizeable delegation. The convocation of the two ensuing conferences was not simply down to the PCInt but was the work of a “Technical Committee” where the ICC worked with the utmost seriousness, particularly by organising them in Paris where the largest section of our organisation is situated. And it was in large part thanks to the seriousness of this work that many more groups took part in these conferences and that they had been prepared in advance through preparatory bulletins. By introducing, at the last minute, an extra criterion for “selection” for future conferences, an initiative explicitly aimed at excluding our organisation from them, the PCInt, with the complicity of the CWO (which it had brought round after long discussions behind the scenes) took the responsibility for demolishing all the work that had been done, even though it had itself begun this work. And the 4th Conference, which was finally held in September 1982, only confirmed the catastrophic attitude adopted by the PCInt and the CWO at the end of the 3rd.

This is what we intend to demonstrate in the present article, which is based essentially on the English-language proceedings of this conference, published as a pamphlet by the IBRP (which had been formed in 1983)[1] [21] in 1984 (in other words two years after the conference itself) .

In the opening address to the conference, the CWO, which had organised it in London, referred to the three previous conferences and notably the 3rd:

“Six groups attended the 3rd Conference whose agenda included the economic crisis and perspectives for class struggle as well as the role and tasks of the party. The debates of the 3rd Conference confirmed the areas of agreement already established but a stalemate was reached as far as the discussion on the role and tasks of the party were concerned. In order that future conferences could go beyond merely reiterating the need for the party and repeating the same arguments about its role and tasks, the PCInt proposed an additional criterion for attendance at the conferences to the effect that the revolutionary organisations must recognise that the revolutionary organisation has a leading role to play in the class struggle. This opened up a clear division between those groups who realise there are tasks for the party today and that the party must take a leading role in the class struggle, and those who reject the idea that the party should be organised inside the class today so as to be able to be in a position to take a leading role in the revolution of tomorrow. Only the CWO supported the PCInt’s resolution and the 3rd Conference broke up in disarray.

“Today, therefore, fewer groups are present than at the last conference but the basis now exists for beginning the clarification process about the real tasks of the party. In this sense the break-up of the last conference was not a totally negative split. As the CWO wrote in Revolutionary Perspectives n°18 when reporting on the 3rd Conference:

“‘Whatever is decided in future, the outcome of the 3rd Conference means that the international work amongst communists will proceed on a different basis from that of its predecessors’ (…)

“Although today we have a smaller number of participants than at the 2nd and 3rd Conferences we are starting from a clearer and more serious basis. We hope this conference will demonstrate this seriousness by a willingness to debate and discuss in order to influence each other’s positions rather than merely mounting sterile polemics and trying to use the conferences as a publicity arena for one’s own group”.

The proceedings of this conference give us a very clear idea of the “greater seriousness” that distinguished it from the previous ones.

The organisation of the conference

In the first place, it’s worth looking at the “technical” aspects (which obviously have a political significance) of the preparation and holding of the conference.

In contrast to the two previous conferences, there were no preparatory bulletins. The documents which had been submitted in advance were essentially texts which had already been published in the press of the participating groups. Here we should make special mention of the documents submitted by the PCInt: this was an impressive list of texts (including one book) published by the PCInt on the questions on the agenda and which amounted to several hundred pages (see this list in the PCInt’s circular letter of 25th August 1982, p39). All of it in Italian! Now Italian is certainly a very beautiful language, and it’s also a language in which a number of very important documents in the history of the workers’ movement (beginning with Labriola’s studies on marxism and above all many of the fundamental texts of the Italian Communist Left between 1920 and the Second World War) have been written. Unfortunately, Italian is not an international language and we can imagine the perplexity of the other participating groups faced with this mountain of documents whose content was closed to them.

We should recognise that, in the same circular, the PCInt showed that it was concerned with this problem of language: “We are translating into English a further document relating to the points on the agenda, which will be sent as soon as possible”. Unfortunately in a letter dated 15th September to one of the invited groups we read: “The promised text will, for technical reasons, only be ready at the conference itself” (ibid, p 40).

We are well aware of the difficulties, in the sphere of translations as in many others, facing the groups of the Communist Left, given their limited forces. We do not criticise this weakness of the PCInt in itself. But in this case its inability to produce in advance a document comprehensible to the other participants at the conference “for technical reasons” simply shows the lack of importance it attached to this question. If it had really given it the same degree of “seriousness” which the ICC had given it previously, it would have mobilised much more energetically to overcome this “technical problem”, if only by calling on a professional translator.

The conference itself also came up against this problem of translation, as we learn from the proceedings: “The relatively brief nature of the PCInt’s interventions is due in large part to the limitations of the host group’s translations from Italian to English”.

Thus, many of the explanations and arguments put forward by the PCInt were lost, which is obviously a pity. The CWO seems to put this down to its poor knowledge of Italian. But it seems to us that it was up to the PCInt, if it really did take the conference seriously, to send comrades who could express themselves in English. For an organisation that wants to be a “Party”, it should be possible to find at least one such comrade in your ranks. The comrades of the CWO may think that when the ICC was present at the conferences, we did nothing but “repeat the same arguments about the party over and over again”. They may even claim that we simply wanted to use the conferences for our own sectarian policies. But all the same, they would have to admit that the organisational capacities of the tandem they formed with the PCInt were well below those of the ICC. Nor is it just a question of numbers of militants. It’s fundamentally a question of understanding the tasks confronting revolutionaries today and the seriousness with which you carry them out. The CWO and the PCInt consider that the Party (and the groups which are presently preparing the way for it, i.e. themselves) have the task of “organising” the class struggle. This is not the position of the ICC.[2] [22] However, despite our weaknesses, we try to organise as effectively as possible those activities that are down to us. And this doesn’t really seem to be the case with the CWO and the PCInt: perhaps they think that if they devote too much energy and attention to the tasks of organisation today, they will be too tired tomorrow when it comes to “organising” the class for the revolution.

The groups taking part

In the pamphlet containing the proceedings of the conference we learn that the groups initially invited were the following:

• Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista, Italy)
• Communist Workers Organisation (UK, France)
• L’Eveil Internationaliste (France)
• Unity of Communist Militants (Iran)
• Wildcat (USA)
• Kompol (Austria)
• Marxist Worker (USA)

The last three groups had the status of “observers”.

At the conference itself, there were only three groups. Let’s see what happened to the others:

“By the time the conference took place Marxist Worker and Wildcat had apparently ceased to exist” (p38). We can judge from this the perspicacity of the CWO and the PCInt who made up the Technical Committee charged with preparing the conference: in their great concern to “select” organisations “really capable of concretely posing the question of the party and attributing it with a leading role in the revolution of tomorrow”, they turned towards groups who judged it preferable to go on holiday while waiting for the future party (again, probably to have more strength for playing a “leading role” when the time comes). On the other hand, we can say that the conference had a narrow escape: if Wildcat had survived and had come along, it would surely have polluted it with its “councilism”, which far outdoes anything that the PCInt accuses the ICC of. Its councilism was well known, and yet still somehow enabled it to fulfil the criteria which excluded the ICC.

As for the other groups who didn’t come, we will once again leave the explanation to the CWO:

“In the light of subsequent events it seems appropriate now to draw out the significance of the last conference. The non-attendance of two groups who initially agreed to participate has been shown to be part of their political distancing from the framework of the conference. Kompol have not communicated with us further while L’Eveil Communiste has embarked on a modernist trajectory which is leading them outside of the framework of Marxism altogether” (“Preamble”, p 1).

Once again, we can only admire the political flair involved in inviting such groups.

We now come to the SUCM (Student Supporters of the UCM), the only other group present at the conference apart from the two who called it.

This is what the pamphlet has to say about it:

“The SUCM has ceased to exist. Its members have become part of a wider organisation (The Organisation of the Supporters of the Communist Party of Iran Abroad – OSCPIA) which includes the previous members of the SUCM as well as sympathisers of the Kurdish Komala. Despite their initial adherence to the criteria for attending the conferences; despite their willingness to discuss and relate to organisations of the European Left Communist tradition, the SUCM found itself hamstrung by its position as a support of a larger organisation in Iran, a group which became the Communist Party of Iran in September 1983. Laying aside polemics, it appears that this date has an objective significance, confirmed, for example, by the trajectory of the comrades of the SUCM on the question of the Revolutionary Democratic Republic and its implications. At the time of the 4th conference, the SUCM clearly accepted that real wars of national liberation are impossible in the era of imperialism, in the sense that there can be no genuine war of national liberation outside of the workers’ revolution for the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship. From then on, however, the SUCM insisted more and more on the thesis that communist struggles emerge from national struggles. That is, the theoretical position is diluted in line with the positions of the CP of Iran, positions which are very dangerous – as articles in the press of the CWO and the PCInt have demonstrated. Thus, instead of deepening the clarification process and pushing the Iranian organisations towards positions more clearly and firmly rooted in revolutionary soil, the OSPCIA tries to reconcile the distortion of the communist programme evinced by the SUCM and the CP of Iran with left communism. It is inevitable that there will be distortions in one form or another in an area which has no contact with the Left Communist tradition or with its heritage of theoretical elaboration and political struggle. However, it is the task of communists neither to hide these distortions nor to accept them and adapt themselves to them but to contribute towards overcoming them. In this respect the OSPCIA has missed an important opportunity. Given the present state of the differences it is not possible to define the CP of Iran as a force which can claim the right to re-enter the political camp delineated by the Conferences of the Communist Left”.     

If we are to believe the explanations given in this passage, the SUCM, after the conference, and following in the wake of the CP of Iran, had evolved towards positions which no longer allowed it to “claim the right to re-enter the political camp delineated by the Conferences of the Communist Left”. In sum, these two organisations were now given the same label as the ICC since our organisation could also not claim such a “right”.[3] [23]

In fact, the CP of Iran was not just “outside the political camp defined by the conference” but also outside the camp of the working class. It was a bourgeois organisation in the current of Stalino-Maoism. We can only be fascinated by the subtle diplomacy (in order to avoid “polemic”!) with which the IBRP talks about this organisation. The IBRP doesn’t like calling a spade a spade. It prefers the tool in question to be neither a fork nor a hoe… but an agricultural implement nonetheless. This way of proceeding has a name in the workers’ movement: it is called opportunism, or else the word has no meaning. True, it is disagreeable to think that people with whom you’ve spent several months before a conference working for the perspective of the future world party of the revolution have become out and out defenders of the capitalist system. It’s even more difficult to admit it publicly. So it’s better to say that these elements, whom you continue to call “comrades”, have “missed an important opportunity”, that they have found themselves “hamstrung”, that their “theoretical position is diluted in line with the positions of the CP of Iran”, positions which you call “very dangerous” in order to avoid calling them bourgeois.

What the IBRP doesn’t see, or doesn’t want to see, or simply refuses to recognise publicly, is that the evolution of the SUCM towards the defence of the capitalist order (re-baptised as making it no longer “a force which can claim the right to re-enter the political camp delineated by the Conferences of the Communist Left”) wasn’t really an evolution at all. At the very time of the conference, the SUCM was already a bourgeois, Maoist organisation. This can be seen, by anyone with their eyes open, by its interventions at the conference.

The interventions of the SUCM

We reproduce below some of these interventions:

“...if capital in the domestic market of the metropolitan country tolerates the impositions of the trade union movement during its normal and non-crisis conditions of operation, and it is only during the deepening of the crisis that it resorts to decisive suppression of the trade union movement”(p 6)

This assertion is to say the least surprising on the part of a group which is supposed to belong to the Communist Left. In reality, in the advanced countries, it’s not the trade union movement which is crushed when the crisis deepens, but workers’ struggles, with the complicity of the trade unions. Even the Trotskyists are capable of seeing this. But not the SUCM, which has no problem identifying the trade union movement with the class struggle. Thus, on the question of the role of the trade unions (which is not secondary one but among the most fundamental for the working class), the SUCM is situated to the right of Trotskyism and ends up with the same position as the Stalinists or the social democrats. And it’s with such a group that the CWO and the PCInt proposed to cooperate with a view to forming the world party.

But this was just a taster. 

“Today the proletariat in Iran is on the eve of forming its communist party and, with the massive force that is behind the programme of this party, it is to become an independent and determining factor in the present upheavals in Iran. The indisputable leadership of Komala over the struggle of vast sections of the workers and toilers in Kurdistan, the influence that revolutionary Marxism has acquired among advanced workers in Iran, the existence of vast networks of workers’ nuclei which distribute the theoretical and workers’ publications of revolutionary Marxism and localities, despite the conditions of terror and suppression and the ever-increasing turning of currents: disillusionment with populism and moves towards revolutionary Marxism are all indicative of the important role that the socialist proletariat of Iran will play in the forthcoming events. From the standpoint of the world proletariat the significance of the question lies in the fact that now, after more than 50 years, the red banner of communism is about to become the banner of the struggle of the workers of one dominated country. The hoisting of this flag in one part of the world is a call upon the world proletariat to end the dispersion of its ranks and to unite as a class against the world bourgeoisie and settle matters with it” (p 10-11).

Faced with such a declaration, you have a choice of three hypotheses:

• either we are dealing with elements who are sincere but who are totally out of touch with reality;
• or we are dealing with a huge bluff aimed at impressing the public but not based on any reality;
• or, in effect, the CP of Iran and Komala had the influence described, but in the historic conditions of 1982 a political current with such an influence could only be bourgeois.

If the first hypothesis was true, the first suggestion to make to such elements, before any discussion, would be to go and seek psychiatric help.

If we are dealing with a bluff, discussion with elements who are lying like that would have no interest, even if they thought they were defending communist positions in this manner. As Marx said, “the truth is revolutionary”, and while lying is an essential weapon of bourgeois propaganda, it can in no way be part of the arsenal of the proletariat and its communist vanguard.

We come to the last hypothesis: the SUCM was a group that was not proletarian but leftist, i.e. bourgeois. This is what we said at the time, following discussions we had with the elements from this group, discussions that enabled us to understand its real nature regardless of its declarations in favour of the Communist Left. The CWO and the PCInt did not want to take heed of our warnings.

The bourgeois nature of this organisation appeared quite clearly in the discussions on the question of the “democratic revolution” and the programme of the party. In the midst of interventions that appear to have a theoretical foundation, with the support of marxist writers, from Marx and above all Lenin, we can find the following:

“The world crisis of imperialism foments the embryo of revolutionary conditions, but this embryo, precisely because of the different conditions in the dominated and metropolitan countries, is more developed in the dominated country. The first sparks of the socialist revolution of the world proletariat against capital and capitalism at its highest stage set the flames to the democratic revolution in the dominated country. A revolution, which from this standpoint is an inseparable part of the world socialist revolution, whilst because of its isolation, because of the limitations of its ability on the strength of workers and toilers of the dominated country, because of the lack of the necessary objective conditions within the proletariat of these countries on the one hand, and the presence of vast masses of a toiling and revolutionary non-proletariat on the other, inevitably takes the form and develops in the first instance within a democratic revolution. The present revolution of Iran is such a revolution” (p 7).

“The present revolution is a democratic revolution whose task is to remove the obstacles to the free development of the class struggle of the proletariat for socialism.

“The content of the victory of this revolution is the establishment of a democratic political system under the leadership of the proletariat which, from the economic point of view, is equivalent to the practical negation of the domination of imperialism, and the requirements of the accumulation of capital in the dominated country, over the material existence and living conditions of workers and toilers” (p 8)

Furthermore, the SUCM makes the following denunciation of the policies of the Khomeini government at the time of the war between Iraq and Iran which broke out in September 1980, a year and a half after the installation of the “Islamic Republic”:

“The wresting of democratic gains of the Uprising [the uprising at the beginning of 1979 which got rid of the Shah and enabled Khomeini to take control] and the prevention of the direct exercise of the democratic authority of the people in determining and running their own affairs ” (p 10).

Finally, the SUCM establishes a distinction between the minimum programme (the “democratic republic”) and the maximum programme, socialism (p 8). This distinction was used by social democracy when capitalism was still an ascendant system and the proletarian revolution was not yet on the agenda, but it was rejected by revolutionaries in the period opened up by the First World War, including by Trotsky and his epigones.

The interventions of the CWO and the PCInt

Obviously, faced with the bourgeois conceptions of the SUCM, the CWO and the PCInt defended the positions of the Communist Left.

On the union question, the PCInt’s intervention was very clear:

“No union can do anything other than stay on bourgeois ground (…) In the imperialist epoch communists can never think of the possibility of restoring the unions or building new unions (…) Unions bring the class to defeat since they deceive it with the idea of achieving its interests through trade unionism. It is necessary to smash the unions” (p 12).

These are formulations to which the ICC would be happy to put its name. The only thing we regret is that the PCInt, which put forward these positions in a presentation on the struggles in Poland in 1980, didn’t say explicitly that they were in total opposition to the positions put forward by the SUCM shortly before on the same question. Is this because it was lacking vigilance towards the declarations of the SUCM? Is it because of a language problem? But the CWO understands English. Or was it a question of “tactics”, of not immediately brushing the SUCM up the wrong way?

In any case, on the question of the “democratic revolution”, the “democratic republic” and the “minimum programme”, the PCInt and the CWO could not fail to reject such notions, which have nothing to do with the programmatic patrimony of the Communist Left:

“The oppression and misery of the masses cannot in itself lead to revolution. This can only happen when they are led by the proletariat of those areas linked to the world proletariat…To say that Marx supported these in the past and therefore we must support them today, in a different epoch, is, as Lenin said on another subject, to quote the word of Marx against the spirit of Marx. Today we live in the epoch of the decay of capitalism and that means the proletariat has NOTHING TO GAIN from supporting this or that national capital or this or that reformist demand…It is nonsense to suggest that we can write a programme which provides the objective basis for the struggle for socialism. Either the objective basis exists or it does not. As the Italian CP says in its Rome Theses of 1922, ‘we cannot by expedients create the subjective basis’. …Only the struggle for socialism itself can destroy imperialism, not structural expedients about democracy or minimum demands” (p16).

“We believe the role of the communist party in the dominating and dominated countries is the same. We do not include in the communist programme minimum demands from the nineteenth century…We want to make a communist revolution and can only do that by putting forward the communist programme and never including in our programme demands which can be recuperated by the bourgeoisie” (p18).

We could add many more quotes from the CWO and the PCInt defending the positions of the Communist Left, as well as others by the SUCM making it clear that they have nothing to do with this current, but this would end up with us reproducing a good third of the pamphlet.[4] [24] For anyone familiar with the positions of Maoism in the 1970s and 80s, it is clear that the SUCM (which takes great care in several of its interventions to criticise official Maoist conceptions) is a “left” and “critical” variant of this current. What’s more, on two occasions, the CWO notes similarities between the positions of the SUCM and those of Maoism.

“Our real objection is however the theory of the aristocracy of labour. We think this is the last germ of populism in the UCM and its origin is in Maoism” (p 18).

“The section on the peasantry is the last vestiges of populism in the SUCM (…) The theory of the revolutionary peasantry is reminiscent of Maoism, something we totally reject” (p 22).

However, these remarks remain timid and “diplomatic”. There is, though, a question which the CWO and the PCInt could have put to the SUCM: the significance of the following passage from one of the texts presented by the SUCM to the conference, the “Programme of the Communist Party” adopted by the UCM and Komala (a guerrilla organisation with links to the Kurdish Democratic Party), and published in May 1982, i.e. 5 months before the conference:

“The domination of revisionism over the Communist Party of Russia led to the defeat and retreat of the world working class in one of its main strongholds”. By “revisionism” this programme meant the “Kruschevite” revision of “Marxism-Leninism”. This is exactly the vision defended by Maoism and it would have been interesting if the SUCM had made it clear whether it considered that before Kruschev the Russian Communist Party under Stalin was still a party of the working class. Unfortunately this fundamental question was not posed, either by the PCInt or the CWO. Are we to believe that these two organisations had not read this document, which was essential as it represented the programme of the SUCM? We can only reject such an interpretation because it would be inconsistent with the “seriousness” so strongly proclaimed by the CWO in its opening speech. Furthermore, several interventions by the PCInt and the CWO made precise quotes from passages from this document. There is another interpretation: these two organisations didn’t pose the question because they were afraid of what the answer would be. After all how could they have carried on a conference with an organisation which may have considered Stalin as being “revolutionary” and “communist” – Stalin, the leading figure of the counter-revolution which was unleashed against the proletariat in the 1930s, the assassin of the best fighters of the October revolution, the butcher of tens of millions of Russian workers and peasants?     

Obviously, raising this question would not have been very “diplomatic” and would have risked turning the conference into an immediate fiasco, leaving only a tête-à-tête between the CWO and the PCInt – i.e. the only two organisations who at the 3rd conference had adopted the new criterion aimed at eliminating the ICC and giving new life to the conferences.

These two organisations preferred to emphasize the total agreement that existed between their view of the role of the party and that defended by the SUCM in its presentation on this question, where it affirms that the party “organises all aspects of the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and leads the working class in accomplishing the social revolution” (p25). The fact that the PCInt and the CWO have a programme which is totally opposed to that of the SUCM (communist revolution against democratic revolution), the fact that both want to “organise” and “lead” struggles in opposite directions, this is apparently of secondary importance for the CWO and the PCInt. The main thing is that the SUCM does not have any “councilist” leanings, unlike the ICC.

Epilogue

The conference concluded with a summary of the points of agreement and disagreement by the presidium.[5] [25] The list of agreements is much the longest. Concerning the “areas of disagreement” it cited only the question of the “democratic revolution”, of which it says:

“There is a need for further discussion with and clarification with the SUCM

a) The democratic revolution must be defined by the time of the next conference.

b) We propose the best way is to criticise via text the SUCM’s view of the democratic revolution and have a more developed discussion on the economic basis of imperialism”.

Concerning the totally opposing view of the role of the trade unions expressed at the conference, there is no mention, probably because the SUCM had entirely approved the presentation on the struggles in Poland in which the PCInt had raised the union question in the terms we saw above (even though the SUCM could only be in disagreement with the PCInt on this point).

At the end, the SUCM and the PCInt expressed themselves:

SUCM: “It’s a year since we contacted the PCInt and the CWO. We thank them for their help and we value the contact with the two groups. We have tried to transmit criticisms back to the UCM in Iran. We agree with the summing up”

PCInt: “We agree with the summing up. We are also pleased to find comrades coming from Iran. The discussion with them must certainly be developed in order to find a political solution to the differences which this conference has focussed on”.

Thus, contrary to the 3rd Conference, which “broke up in disarray” as the CWO reminded us in the opening speech, the “4th Conference” ended with all the participants expressing the desire to continue the discussion. We know what happened afterwards.

In fact, it took quite a while before the CWO and the PCInt would open their eyes (a bit!) to the nature of the people they had been discussing with, and it was only when the latter threw off their masks. Thus, several months after the “4th Conference”, the CWO, at its territorial conference, reacted violently against the ICC which had, as is its wont, called a spade a spade and a bourgeois group a bourgeois group:

“The SUCM's interventions consisted mostly of flattery towards the CWO: their only concrete point was a subtly worded suggestion that the CWO should 'critically' and 'conditionally' support the national movements. This went completely unanswered by the CWO, whose ire was instead reserved for the ICC when we attempted to raise the whole issue of the SUCM's presence; then the CWO was moved to shout down the ICC comrade before he had said more than ten words!" (World Revolution n° 60, May 83, “When will you draw the line, CWO?”)

We encountered the same attitude at an ICC public meeting in Leeds:

"The CWO's most telling interventions were firstly to support the SUCM against the ICC's ‘unfounded allegations’ about the class nature of the UCM and Komala; and then to praise the SUCM's demagogy as the clearest contribution to the meeting. Shouting down communists for warning the revolutionary movement against the invasion of bourgeois ideology was only the logical next step in the CWO's sectarian attitude towards the ICC" (ibid.). 

 This attitude of reserving your sharpest barbs against the tendencies who warn against the danger represented by bourgeois organisations and thus of defending the latter, is not new in the workers’ movement. It was the attitude of the centrist leadership of the Communist International when it advocated the “United Front” with the socialist parties, an attitude which the Communist Left rightly denounced at the time.

This is why the conference held in September 1982 in London in no way deserves to be called the “4th Conference of the Communist Left”. On the one hand because it was held with the presence of a group which didn’t belong to the proletariat, and still less to the Communist Left, the SUCM. And also because at this conference there was a total absence of the spirit and approach of the Communist Left, which is founded on a scrupulous search for clarity, on an intransigent struggle against all manifestations of the penetration of bourgeois views into the proletariat, a struggle against opportunism.

This is not the opinion of the IBRP, which, at the end of the presentation to the pamphlet tells us:

“…the validity or otherwise of the 4th International Conference does not revolve around the participation of the SUCM (whose attendance, like any other group was dependent on their acceptance of the criteria developed from the 1st to the 3rd). The 4th Conference confirmed the development of a clear political tendency in the international proletarian milieu, a tendency which recognises that it is the task of revolutionaries today to develop an organised presence inside the class struggle and to work concretely for the formation of the international party. Unless the future party is more than a propagandist organisation, i.e. unless it is a party organised within the working class as a whole, it will be in no position to lead the class struggle of tomorrow to its victorious conclusion.

“The formation of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) in December 1983 is the concrete manifestation of this tendency and is in itself proof of the validity of the 4th Conference. The political homogenisation reached by the PCInt and the CWO (and confirmed, incidentally, during the debates with the SUCM) has enabled the two groups to initiate practical steps towards the formation of the future international party. International correspondence for both groups (and other Bureau members) is now the responsibility of the Bureau. But the Bureau is much more than a PCInt-CWO affair, it is a means for emerging organisations and militants worldwide to clarify their positions by taking part in international debate ad the revolutionary work of the Bureau itself. In fact it is the international reference point which the PCInt aimed should develop out of the Conferences back in 1977. By expanding and developing its work within its clearly defined political framework the Bureau will eventually be in a position to call a 5th International Conference which will mark a further step towards the formation of the international party”.

There was no 5th Conference: after the ridiculous fiasco of the 4th (which the members of the IBRP could not hide from themselves, even if they tried to hide it from the outside) it was preferable to cut their losses. And then, having adopted the same position as the Bordigists, the IBRP henceforth considered itself the only organisation in the world capable of making a valid contribution to the formation of the future party of the world revolution. We can leave them to their megalomaniac dreams… and their sad inability to maintain a continuity with the best of what the Communist Left has brought to the historic movement of the working class.

Fabienne 

A century ago on June 27, 1905, in a crowded hall in Chicago, Illinois, Big Bill Haywood, leader of the militant Western Federation of Miners, called to order “the Continental Congress of the Working Class,” a gathering convened to create a new working class revolutionary organization in the United States: the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), often referred to as the Wobblies.[1] Haywood solemnly declared to the 203 delegates in attendance, “We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism (…) The aims and objects of this organization should be to put the working class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters (…) this organization will be formed, based and founded on the class struggle, having in view no compromise and no surrender, and but one object and one purpose and that is to bring the workers of this country into the possession of the full value of the product of their toil.” (Proceedings of the First IWW Convention, p.1-2.)

This marked the beginning of the great revolutionary syndicalist experiment in the US, which will be the focus of this third installment in our series on anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism in the history of the workers’ movement.[2] In the course of its 16 years of existence as a serious organization, from 1905 to 1921, the IWW became a force to be reckoned with by the bourgeoisie and the workers’ organization most feared and vilified by its class enemy. The IWW evolved rapidly during this period in terms of its theoretical tenets, political clarity, and its contributions to the proletarian struggle.

But before we examine the lessons to be drawn from this experience, it is worth emphasizing that the mere fact of returning to it has a particular importance in the present historical context. Today, a kind of “Holy Alliance” that runs from Al Qaeda to the far left of capital, by way of the anti-globalization movement and the governments of America’s imperialist rivals, has every interest in presenting – more or less subtly – “Yankee imperialism” (or the “Great Satan”) as the Enemy Number One of the world’s peoples and workers. According to the propaganda of this “Holy Alliance”, the American “people” are born-again Christian crusaders who profit unthinkingly from the fruits of American imperialist policy. In the United States itself, the workers are presented as being part of the “middle classes”. The experience of the IWW, the exemplary courage of its militants in the face of a ruling class for whom no violence or hypocrisy was too vile, is thus a reminder that the workers of America are indeed the class brothers of workers the world over, that their interests and struggles are the same, and that internationalism is not a vain word for the working class, but the touchstone of its very existence.

Historical context of the IWW’s foundation

The rise of the IWW in the US was in part a response to the same general tendencies that triggered the rise of revolutionary syndicalism in western Europe: “opportunism, reformism, and parliamentary cretinism.”[3] The crystallization of this general international tendency in the US was conditioned by certain American specifics, including the existence of the Frontier; the accompanying large scale immigration of workers from Europe to the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s; the arrival on the labor market of large numbers of ex-slaves liberated after the Civil War (1861-65); and the vitriolic clash between craft unionism and industrial unionism and the debate over “boring from within” versus dual unionism.                                                          

The Frontier and immigration

The existence of the Frontier and the tremendous influx of immigrant workers were strongly intertwined and had significant consequences for the development of the workers’ movement in the US. The frontier acted as a safety valve for burgeoning discontent in the populous industrial states of the northeast and Midwest.

Significant numbers of workers, both native-born and immigrant, ferociously exploited in the factories and industrial trades, exercised the option of fleeing the industrial centers and migrating westward to the frontier in search of self sufficiency and a “better life”, as a homesteader operating a subsistence farm or in quixotic get-rich-quick schemes in mining. This safety valve disrupted the evolution of an experienced proletarian movement.  And although the frontier in effect no longer existed by the early 1890s, this escapist phenomenon continued well into the early 20th century.[4]

The divisions between native-born, English-speaking workers (even if the latter were only second generation immigrants themselves) and newly arrived immigrant workers who spoke and read little or no English had long been a cause for concern in the workers movement in the US. In a letter to Sorge in 1893, Engels warned against the bourgeoisie’s cynical use of divisions within the proletariat, which retarded the development of the workers’ movement in the US.[5] The bourgeoisie skillfully used race, ethnic, nationality and linguistic prejudices to divide workers amongst themselves, and to disrupt the development of a working class that saw itself as a united class. These divisions were a serious handicap for the working class in the US because it cut off the native Americans from the vast experience gained by workers in Europe and made it difficult for class conscious American workers to keep up to date with the international theoretical developments within the workers’ movement, leaving them dependent on poor quality translations of Marx and Engels’ writings, which sometimes reflected the theoretical weaknesses of the translators. 

This retarded the theoretical development of the workers’ movement in America, which was hampered in its ability to mount an effective resistance against opportunist and reformist currents.

The theoretical deficiencies of Daniel DeLeon, leader of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), who subscribed to a variant of the Lasallean “iron law of wages”[6] – and as a result completely underestimated the importance of the proletariat’s immediate struggle – who naively believed in revolution at the ballot box, rejected the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and ruled the SLP in an authoritarian and sectarian manner, have been addressed in previous articles in the ICC press in the US.[7]  Eugene Debs, the perennial candidate of the Socialist Party of America (SPA, the SLP’s rival socialist party),[8] had great oratorical skills but limited theoretical and organizational talents. Both men participated in the founding convention of the IWW, but the fact that neither individual, nor their respective political parties, was capable of contributing political clarity to the IWW was in a large sense the consequence of the weak theoretical traditions of the American workers’ movement.

Another consequence of the Frontier tradition was the tendency towards violence in American society. Frontier settlements initially lacked any formal state apparatus, including institutions of law and order, and this contributed to the rise of a culture of guns and violence, which persists to this day, with the proliferation of guns and a level of violence in society that far exceeds that of any other major industrialized nation.[9] In this context it was doubtless inevitable that the class struggle of the late 1800s and early 1900s in the US was extremely violent. The American bourgeoisie displayed no reluctance to utilize repressive force in its confrontations with the proletariat, whether it was the army, state militias, private militias (the infamous Pinkertons), or hired thugs that were deployed to suppress numerous workers’ struggles, even to the point of massacring strikers and their families. Workers for their part were not reluctant to respond in self-defense. Such circumstances readily exposed the viciousness and hypocrisy of the class dictatorship of bourgeois democracy and the futility of trying to achieve fundamental change at the ballot box. This in turn triggered widespread skepticism among the most class conscious workers about the efficacy of political action, which was generally perceived as synonymous with participation in electoralism. This confusion was fed particularly by the SLP’s DeLeon whose bizarre fetishization of the ballot perpetuated the mistaken notion that political action was by definition identical to electoralism. The failure to understand that the revolution was a fundamentally political act, the confrontation with and destruction of the capitalist state, and the conquest of power by the working class, would have severe consequences for the Wobblies.

Craft unionism vs. industrial unionism

The Knights of Labor, which grew to one million members by 1886, was the first national labor organization of significance in the US. Although the Knights considered that workers should conceive of themselves as wage earners first, and as Irish, Italian, Jewish, Catholic or Protestant second, they remained (as was inevitable for this period in the development of the working class) a group of national trade unions which organized workers along narrow craft lines, “organizing carpenters as carpenters, bricklayers as bricklayers, and so forth, teaching them all to place their own craft interests before those of other workers.”[10] The clashes around the struggle for the 8-hour day, which led to the Haymarket massacre of 1886,[11] dealt the Knights a severe blow, and by 1888 they were clearly in decline. The craft unions then regrouped in the American Federation of Labor (founded in 1886), which accepted the inevitability of capitalism and the wage system, and sought to make the best deal possible for the skilled workers it represented. Under Samuel Gompers’ leadership the AFL presented itself as a staunch defender of the American system, and a responsible alternative to labor radicalism. In so doing, the AFL abandoned any responsibility for the well being of millions of unskilled and semi-skilled American workers who were ruthlessly exploited in the emerging mass employment manufacturing and extractive industries.

In this context, the clash between craft and industrial unionism, often seen as a clash between “business” or class collaborationist unionism and “industrial” or class struggle unionism, was a dominant controversy within the workers’ movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

While this debate reflected the historical specificities of the “Anglo-Saxon” countries (in particular the combination of a strong trades union movement and a weak socialist and marxist political tradition within the working class), it was above all the expression of far-reaching changes taking place within capitalism itself: on the one hand, the development of large-scale industry epitomized by the rise of “Taylorism”,[12] and on the other, the fact that capitalism’s ascendant period was drawing to a close, imposing new historical goals and methods on the class struggle.

The first trades unions (as the English term implies) were based on particular crafts within industry, and much of their activity was devoted to defending their members’ interests not only as workers in general, but also as craftsmen. This included the enforcement of barriers to entry into a trade that required certain craft qualifications (generally acquired after a period of apprenticeship), or the defense of “demarcation lines” reserving certain jobs for members of certain unions, for instance. As such, the trades union organization in its traditional form tended both to create divisions among the workers in different trades, and to exclude completely the vast masses of unskilled workers who poured into the new mass-production industries that developed at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The fact that such unskilled workers were often recent immigrants from the countryside or from abroad often also isolated them from craft workers in terms of language and racial prejudice (which was by no means limited to the prejudice between whites and blacks).

The other key development was the fact that, in the early years of the 20th century, the end of capitalism’s ascendant period began to impose new demands on the workers’ struggle. As we have seen in the articles on the Russian revolution of 1905 (International Review n°120, 122, 123), the class struggle was reaching the point where the fight to defend or improve wages and living conditions increasingly meant mounting a political challenge to the whole capitalist order. More and more, the question was no longer one of gaining reforms within capitalism but of deciding the key question of power: was political, state power to remain in the hands of the capitalist class, or on the contrary was the working class to destroy the capitalist state and take power into its own hands for the construction of a new, communist (or socialist, as the IWW would have said) society?

On both counts, the narrow craft unionism of the AFL was not only inadequate, but also downright reactionary.

What then could be done about it? Two solutions were hotly debated throughout the history of the syndicalist movement:[13] “dual unionism”, and “boring from within”. “Dual unionism”, which in effect meant setting up a new movement to rival the old trades unions, was a high-risk strategy: it opened the syndicalists to accusations of splitting the labor movement, and could only hope to be effective if it could attract enough adherents, as the fiasco of DeLeon’s fruitless attempt to establish an “industrial union” in the late 1890’s showed all too clearly. The strategy of “boring from within”, on the other hand, could only hope for success if the syndicalists were able to take control of the existing unions, and in the meantime left them at the mercy of the unprincipled methods of their “traditionalist” opponents like Gompers in the AFL.

In the final analysis, the Russian revolutions of 1905 and still more of 1917 rendered the whole debate moot by creating a new form of organization, the soviet (workers’ council), which was fitted to the new conditions of proletarian struggle in a way that neither craft unions nor the IWW’s “industrial unions” could ever be.

There were a number of notable strands present in the evolution of the industrial unionist camp. One example was that of Eugene Debs, who in 1893, disenchanted by the mutual scabbing and strikebreaking activity of craft unions in the railroad industry during his 17 year career in the rail workers’ craft unions, founded the American Railway Union (ARU) as an industrial organization open to all rail workers, regardless of skill or craft. The union grew quickly, attracting not only unskilled workers but also skilled workers who understood the need for broad solidarity in their struggle against the employers. In 1894, the ARU found itself locked prematurely in struggle in the Pullman strike, a strike which led to the union’s destruction and to a six-month prison term for Debs. The experience would be an important moment in the political evolution of Debs, who became converted to socialism in prison, and emerged as a leading critic of Gompers’ brand of unionism.

In the late 1890s, the Socialist Labor Party, under the leadership of Daniel DeLeon, abandoned its policy of competing for leadership of the AFL unions, “boring from within,” and opted for a policy of “dual unionism,” creating the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance, as a rival socialist labor organization, in which enrollment in the party was a prerequisite for union membership. This organizational attempt met with limited success.

The founding of the IWW reignited the charge of “dual unionism” as a central element in Samuel Gompers’ propaganda attack against the IWW and led to considerable controversy. French anarcho-syndicalists who had triumphed in winning control of the CGT by successfully “boring from within”, and by winning control of essentially craft unions, were critical of the IWW’s abandonment of the AFL unions. William Z. Foster, an IWWer who fell under the influence of the French anarcho-syndicalists during a visit to France, argued vehemently for disbandment of the IWW and re-entry into the AFL before he eventually left the Wobblies.[14]  

IWW leaders denied the accusations of dual unionism, as seen in Haywood’s insistence that the IWW’s mission was to organize the unorganized, the unskilled industrial workers who were ignored by the craft unions of the AFL. The IWW did not seek to raid the memberships of AFL unions or even to compete with the AFL in winning the support of particular labor forces.  However, it was undeniable that the IWW was in effect a rival to Gompers and the AFL.

Perhaps the most important current in the evolution of the industrial unionist perspective, particularly in terms of its direct impact on the founding of the IWW, was to be found in the attempts by workers in the mining camps of the Colorado, Montana, and Idaho to organize on an industrial basis in the 1880s and 1890s which gave rise to the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Embittered by their experiences in what literally amounted to open class warfare with the mining companies and the state authorities (both sides were often armed), the WFM became increasingly radicalized. In 1898, the WFM sponsored the formation of the Western Labor Union (WLU), as a “dual union.”  A regional alternative to the AFL, it never really had any independent existence beyond the influence of its sponsor. While their immediate demands often echoed the same “pork chop unionism” wage demands of the AFL, by 1902 the long range goal of the WFM was socialism. 

For example, in his 1902 farewell address to the WFM convention, outgoing president Ed Boyce warned that pure and simple unionism was not enough to defend the interests of workers. In the final analysis, the answer, he argued was “to abolish the wage system which is more destructive of human rights and liberty than any other slave system devised.”[15]

In 1902, the AFL urged the WFM to disband the WLU and to rejoin the AFL, but the WFM responded by transforming the regional organization into the American Labor Union, to compete with the AFL on a national level, and by embracing socialism even more openly. The ALU began to openly advocate positions that would subsequently serve as the guiding principles for the IWW: the primacy of economic action (what the IWW would later call “direct action”) over political action and the syndicalist model for the organization of the revolutionary society. The ALU Journal stated:

“The economic organization of the proletariat is the heart and soul of the Socialist movement (…) The purpose of industrial unionism is to organize the working class in approximately the same departments of production and distribution as those which will obtain in the co-operative commonwealth, so that if the workers should lose their franchise, they would still retain an economic organization intelligently trained to take over and collectively administer the tools of industry and the sources of wealth for themselves.”[16]

 The 1904 WFM convention directed its executive board to seek the creation of a new organization to unite the entire working class. After two secret meetings during the summer and fall, each attended by a slightly differing array of representatives of various organizations, a letter was sent to thirty individuals, including industrial unionists, Socialist Party members, Socialist Labor Party members, and even members of AFL unions, inviting them “to meet with us in Chicago, Monday, January 2, 1905, in secret conference to discuss ways and means of uniting the working people of America on correct revolutionary principles (…) as will insure its [labor’s] integrity as a real protector of the interests of the workers.”[17] Twenty-two people attended the January meeting. Several, including Debs, were unable to attend but sent their strong support. Only two of the invitees, both influential Socialist Party members, refused to attend because of their preference for working within the AFL. The January meeting issued a call for the founding convention of the IWW.

Revolutionary syndicalism or anarcho-syndicalism?

As a revolutionary syndicalist organization, the IWW embraced an orientation that placed it in sharp contrast to the anarcho-syndicalism of the French CGT, discussed previously in “Anarcho-syndicalism faces a change in epoch: the CGT up to 1914,” International Review n°120. Despite the syndicalist vision that permeated the views of the IWW’s founders, particularly the idea that the socialist society would be organized along the lines of industrial unions, there were sharp differences between the IWW and anarcho-syndicalism as it existed in Europe. These differences can be seen clearly in three vital questions: internationalism, political action and centralization.

Internationalism

In the period leading up to the outbreak of the first world imperialist war, the anarcho-syndicalists of the French CGT, expressed their opposition to war in a manner more akin to pacifism than proletarian internationalism. At the onset of war in 1914 the CGT completely abandoned any anti-war perspective and rallied to the support of the French capitalist state, participated in the mobilization of the proletariat for imperialist war and thereby crossed the class line to the side of the bourgeoisie. Contrary to this betrayal of class principles, the revolutionary syndicalists of the Industrial Workers of the World defended an opposition to imperialist war prior to US entry into the conflict that mirrored that of Social-Democracy before the outbreak of war between the major European powers. For example, the 1916 IWW convention adopted a resolution that declared:

“We condemn all wars, and for the prevention of such, we proclaim the anti-militaristic propaganda in time of peace, thus promoting class solidarity among the workers of the entire world, and, in time of war, the general strike, in all industries.

“We extend assurances of both moral and material support to all workers who suffer at the hands of the capitalist class for their adherence to these principles, and call on all workers to unite themselves with us, that the reign of the exploiters may cease, and this earth be made fair through the establishment of Industrial democracy.” (Official Proceedings of the 1916 Convention, p.138)

Whatever the ambiguities that characterized the IWW’s actions when the US eventually entered the global imperialist slaughter in April 1917 – which we shall discuss in more detail in our next article – unlike the French anarcho-syndicalists they never endorsed the war and for this refusal they faced violent state suppression.

The class difference between the IWW and the CGT in their reaction to war was not merely the result of different historical circumstances: the fact that the United States only entered the war in 1917, and did not face foreign invasion of American territory. The difference between the CGT’s capitulation and the IWW’s internationalism in the face of war was prepared by a profound difference in their practice. As we have shown in the previous article in this series, the CGT remained tied to a “national” vision of revolution which owed much to the experience of the French bourgeois revolution of 1789. The IWW, by contrast, never lost sight of the international nature of the class struggle and took seriously the words “of the World” in its organizational title. From the outset, the IWW’s ambition was to unite the entire world proletariat into a single, class-struggle organization: affiliated sections of the “One Big Union” were created as far afield as Mexico, Peru, Australia and Great Britain. Within the United States, the IWW pioneered in bridging the gap between immigrant and native-born, English speaking workers in the US, and welcomed blacks into the organization on an equal basis with white workers, at a time when racial segregation and discrimination was rampant in society at large and when most American Federation of Labor unions denied admission to blacks. 

Political action

While anarcho-syndicalism rejected political action, revolutionary syndicalism, as personified by the IWW, embraced the activity and participation of political organizations at its founding convention, including the Socialist Party of America and the Socialist Labor Party. In fact those who participated in the 1905 convention considered themselves socialists, adherents of a Marxist perspective, not anarchists. With the exception of Lucy Parsons, widow of the Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons,[18] who attended as an honored guest, no anarchists or syndicalists played any significant role in the founding congress. At the end of the founding convention, “every IWW official was a Socialist Party member.”[19]  

One of the most dramatic moments at the IWW’s founding convention was the public handshake between Daniel DeLeon, leader of the SLP, and Eugene Debs of the SPA. Despite years of bitter political and personal feuding, it was in the revolutionary syndicalist setting of the IWW convention that these two political giants of the socialist movement publicly buried the hatchet in the interests of proletarian unity.  While the IWW would come to distance itself from the socialist parties, culminating in the departure of both Debs and DeLeon by 1908, the organization remained open to socialist and later to communist party militants. In fact, in 1911, Big Bill Haywood was an elected executive board member of the SPA at the same time as he held a leadership post in the IWW. Moreover, it was the Socialist Party’s right wing faction, not the IWW’s General Executive Board, that regarded Haywood’s simultaneous leadership role in both organizations as unacceptable. Even well after the IWW had formally removed political action from its revolutionary preamble, most members voted for socialist candidates, and socialist electoral victories in such places as Butte, Montana were generally attributed to large Wobbly voter turn out.

 IWW leaders vehemently denied any adherence to the theories of syndicalism, which they regarded as an alien, European doctrine. “In January, 1913, for instance, a Wobbly partisan called syndicalism ‘the name that is most widely used by [the IWW’s] enemies.’ The Wobblies themselves had few kind words for the European syndicalist leaders. To them, Ferdinand Pelloutier was ‘the anarchist’, Georges Sorel, ‘the monarchist apologist for violence’, Herbet Lagardelle was an ‘anti-democrat’, and the Italian Arturo Labriola, ‘the conservative in politics and revolutionist in labor unions’.”[20]

However, despite the IWWers insistence that they were “industrial unionists” or “industrialists,” not syndicalists, it is in fact accurate to characterize the organization as revolutionary syndicalist, since, for the IWW, the “One Big Union” would be the proletariat’s organizing force within capitalism, the agent of the proletarian revolution, and the organizational form for the socialist society that the revolution was to create.

In fact, the IWW’s attitude to political action was ambivalent. Although many Wobblies were militants in the SPA or the SLP, as we have seen, the IWW had a well-founded distrust for the factional disputes between the political organizations: the IWW’s general organizer from 1908-1915, Vincent St. John, made it clear that he opposed tying the IWW to a political party, and “struggled to save the IWW from Daniel DeLeon on the one hand and from the ‘anarchist freaks’ on the other.”[21]

On the other hand, the IWW’s own activity was in many cases more akin to that of a political organization than a union. In particular, the IWW’s commitment to “direct action” reflected a conception that far exceeded traditional trade unionist boundaries that limited organizational activities to the workplace for the unions, or the ballot box for the political parties. It implied that the struggle could be taken to the streets and that the state as well as the employer was an enemy to be confronted. The clearest examples of this were the free speech fights waged by the IWW from 1909 to 1913, mostly in western cities that had passed local laws prohibiting soap-box speakers from addressing workers in the streets as part of IWW organizing drives. The IWW responded by mobilizing all available militants to rush to these locations, to break the law by making speeches, and literally flooding the jails. This civil disobedience mobilized support from many workers, socialists, and even AFL unions and liberal elements within the bourgeoisie. While the conception of “direct action” would eventually be linked to the advocacy of “sabotage” as a union tactic, which we will discuss later, on balance direct action was clearly rooted in a commitment to political action outside the traditional parameters of syndicalism.

Centralization

In contrast to the decentralized vision of anarcho-syndicalism whose federationist principles favored a confederation of independent and autonomous unions, the IWW operated in accordance with a centralist orientation. While the IWW’s 1905 constitution conferred “industrial autonomy” on its industrial unions, it clearly established the principle that these industrial unions were under the control of the General Executive Board (GEB), the central organ of the IWW: “The subdivision International and National Industrial Unions shall have complete industrial autonomy in their respective internal affairs, provided the General Executive Board shall have power to control these Industrial Unions in matters concerning the interest of the general welfare.” (Constitution and By-Laws of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1905 – Article 1).[22]  This position was accepted without controversy in 1905. The GEB alone could authorize an IWW strike. This emphasis on centralization was based on “recognition of the centralization of American capital and industry.”[23] In contrast to the decentralized, federationist perspective of the anarcho-syndicalists which encouraged frequent strikes by autonomous unions, the IWW favored fewer strikes that were more coolly planned and based on a more dispassionate analysis of the balance of forces and the strength of the workers, a decision that was better taken by an Executive Board that had a more global vision of the struggle, than by isolated workers reacting rashly to local grievances.

Even later, after the organization had come to reject political action and adopted a more openly revolutionary syndicalist perspective, centralizers continued to prevail over proponents of a decentralized organizational orientation. This debate pitted a “Western faction” against an “Eastern faction” in the GEB. Decentralizers were strongest in the west, with a base among migratory industrial workers – lumberjacks, miners, and agricultural workers, who were most often single, native-born Americans, who roamed from place to place in search of work. In the East, on the other hand, the IWW’s strength was centered in manufacturing industries and among longshoremen, who were often married men with families, with more stable living conditions, and after the Lawrence strike in 1912 were often immigrant workers. The Easterners favored centralization in order to keep tighter control of what was done in the name of the union and to permit the IWW to build a more stable membership by providing ongoing support to the membership even outside times of open struggles – essentially to provide the same kinds of services that the AFL unions provided. The Westerners favored greater autonomy for local groups of workers and individuals to take actions that they saw fit as a means to build morale and enthusiasm within the membership. Though he had his origins among the miners of the West, Haywood belonged to the Eastern faction and consistently favored centralization in order to build a stable, permanent union organization.

Having asserted the strengths of revolutionary syndicalism as compared to anarcho-syndicalism, it is clear that  “revolutionary syndicalism represented a real effort within the proletariat to find an answer to the opportunism of the socialist parties and unions, while anarcho-syndicalism represented the influence of anarchism within this movement.” (International Review n°120). However, this is not to say that revolutionary syndicalism and the IWW did not suffer from great weaknesses.  Our intention in the next article will be to examine whether the principles of revolutionary syndicalism, as they were expressed in the IWW in the period 1905-1921, proved adequate for the class struggle as it confronted the question of war or revolution on a concrete level at a crucial moment in the international confrontation between the working class and its exploiters. This critique of the IWW’s positions in no way denies or denigrates the bravery, heroism, combativeness, and dedication of IWW militants, many of whom paid for their dedication with prison terms, or even their lives, nor does it minimize the important strikes that the IWW organized, uniting immigrant and native born, black and white workers in the class struggle. We will rather seek to look beyond the false consciousness of romanticized Wobbly mythology that still blinds well-meaning militants to the shortcomings of the organization and its heritage.

J. Grevin

Since 1989 the international proletariat has undergone a long period of reflux in its class consciousness and its combativity. Its capacity to conceive itself as a class able to play the historic role of overthrowing capitalism and building a new society, has been profoundly affected by the fall of the regimes falsely called "communist" and the bourgeois campaign on the "impossibility" of an alternative to capitalist society. As a result the old refrains of Marcuse, the Frankfurt School, etc, who announced the disappearance of the proletariat and its replacement by new "revolutionary subjects" has experienced a comeback among comrades who are wondering "how to struggle" against this world full of barbarism and misery. However this situation is beginning to change under the effects of the rapid aggravation of capitalism’s contradictions, of its economic crisis in particular. The international proletariat is rediscovering its combativeness[1] [41] and developing its consciousness; this is indicated by the emergence of minorities who are not only asking, "who is the revolutionary subject?" but also ask "what aims and means must the proletariat employ if it is to realise its revolutionary nature?".[2] [42]

In the face of such questions, the intervention of the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste (GCI, or in English, the Internationalist Communist Group, ICG) sows enormous confusion. On the one hand they present themselves as "revolutionaries of the far left" (they condemn parliamentarism and nationalism, they denounce the left and extreme left of capital and attack private property, etc). On the other hand they give "critical" support, just as the extreme left of capital does, to some of the most reactionary positions of the bourgeoisie and viciously attack the class positions of the proletariat and its genuine communist organisations. So the trajectory of the GCI over the last twenty-five years boils down to a barely dissimulated support for openly bourgeois causes under the pretext that "proletarian mass movements" lurk behind them. The aim of this article is to denounce this pretence.

The GCI’s trajectory

The GCI was born from a split from the ICC in 1979, and since then has lost no opportunity to support every bourgeois cause:

 

• at the beginning of the 1980s it indirectly took the side of the Popular Revolutionary Bloc in the war in El Salvador (and which was a confrontation between American and Russian imperialist powers by means of local pawns). The GCI denounced the leadership of the PRB as bourgeois but held that "a movement of the revolutionary masses" lay hidden behind it and that this should be supported;[3] [43]
• from the middle of the 1980s, in the war between bourgeois factions that opposed the Shining Path[4] [44] and the dominant factions of the Peruvian bourgeoisie, the GCI also took the side of the Shining Path indirectly. The excuse was "support for the proletarian prisoners, the victims of the terrorism of the bourgeois state";[5] [45]
• at the end of the 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s, confronted with the nationalist movement of Algerian Kabilia (1988) or the one that developed in Iraqi Kurdistan (1991), the GCI used the most sophisticated excuses to support these movements. They talked of the creation of "workers' councils" "by the masses". But, as they were themselves forced to admit, in Kabilia these "workers’ councils" were really inter-classist organisms in hamlets or districts set up by tribal chiefs or leaders of nationalist or oppositional parties, often called into existence by "Tribal Committees"![6] [46]

 

Confronted with recent imperialist conflicts, the GCI has maintained the same direction. They have adopted a position decidedly in favour of the Iraqi insurrection (which we will come back to at the end of this article). We should also stress that in the conflict between Israel and Palestine the GCI pounced on expressions of pacifist ideology within left wing sectors of the Israeli bourgeoisie in order to present them, albeit critically, as a "first step" towards "revolutionary defeatism", no less. So they quote the following passage of a letter from an objector, who certainly took a risk in expressing his opposition to the war but who does not go beyond the nationalist terrain: "Your army which is called the 'Israeli Defence Force' is nothing other than the armed instrument of the settlers' movement. This army does not exist to bring security to Israeli citizens, it only exists to guarantee the continued theft of Palestinian land. As a Jew, the crimes committed by this force against the Palestinian people disgust me. It is my duty as a Jew and as a human being to categorically refuse to play any kind of role in this army. As the son of a people who have been the victim of pogroms and destruction, I refuse to play a role in your senseless policies. As a human being, it is my duty to refuse participation in any institution that commits crimes against humanity." (Letter quoted in the article "Nous ne sommes ni israéliens, ni palestiniens, ni juifs, ni musulmans, … nous sommes le prolétariat!" in Communisme n° 54, April 2003). In fact, whatever the author’s intentions, this letter could have been signed by the factions of Israeli capital who publicly criticise the way the war is conducted because they are aware of the growing discontent among the workers and the population against the situation of endless war. The letter calls for "the defence of the safety of Israeli citizens", which is no more than a sophisticated way of referring to the security of Israeli capital. It does not address the problem of the interests of the workers and the exploited masses but rather that of the Israeli nation. In other words it contains all the ingredients - defence of the nation and the national capital - that are the basis of imperialist war.

Worshipping anything that moves in opposition to revolutionary principles

The "contributions" of the GCI can be summed up as a cocktail of "radical" positions and those typical of third worldism and bourgeois leftism. How does the GCI manage to reconcile water and fire? Its blackmailing method goes like this: why scorn a proletarian movement just because the bourgeoisie leads it? Did not the Russian revolution of 1905 start with a demonstration led by Father Gapon?

This "argument" is based on a sophism that, as we will see, is the quicksand on which the whole "theoretical" edifice of the GCI is built. A sophism is a false affirmation that is deduced from correct premises. This is illustrated in the famous example: "Socrates is mortal, all men are mortal, all men are Socrates". It is a matter of a ridiculous assertion, just an intellectual game consisting of a chain of syllogisms.

"1905" was a real proletarian movement that set in motion huge masses. They won the street where at the beginning they were subjected to the attempts of the tsarist police to manipulate them. But this does not mean that every movement which reveals "great weaknesses" and is "led by the bourgeoisie" is proletarian. This is where the huge sophism of the gentlemen of the GCI resides! There are numerous "mass movements" that have been organised by factions of the bourgeoisie for its own benefit. These movements have led to violent confrontations, they have led to spectacular changes of government that are frequently called "revolutions". But none of this makes them proletarian movements comparable to the 1905 revolution.[7] [47] An example of the amalgamation method of the GCI is to be seen in its analysis of the events in Bolivia in 2003. The masses were on the streets, there were attacks on banks and bourgeois institutions, blocked streets, looted supermarkets, lynchings, presidents overthrown… Here we have all the ingredients that lead the GCI to talk of "the affirmation of the proletariat" and declare that: "It has been a long time since we have heard it said openly that it is necessary to destroy bourgeois power and bourgeois parliament with all its representative democracy (including the famous Constituent Assembly) and build proletarian power to make the social revolution!" ("Quelques lignes de force dans la lutte du prolétariat en Bolivie" in Communisme n°56, October 2004).

Anyone who seriously analyses the events in Bolivia can see nothing that resembles the "destruction" of bourgeois power or the "construction of the power of the proletariat". From beginning to end the movement was dominated by bourgeois demands (nationalisation of the oil and gas industry, constituent assembly, recognition of Aymara nationality, etc) and its general aims gravitated around such "revolutionary" themes as "putting an end to the neo-liberal model", "establishing another form of government", "struggling against Yankee imperialism".[8] [48]

The GCI is obliged to recognise this but all at once they pull out of their hat the "undeniable" argument: that this is part of the weaknesses of the movement! Following this irrefutable logic, a struggle for bourgeois demands from beginning to end, can undergo a miraculous transformation that can carry the proletariat to power in order to realise the social revolution. This "ultra-radical" version of old fairy tales enables the GCI to horribly disfigure the proletarian struggle.

Any society in crisis and decomposition, as is the situation of capitalism today, suffers increasingly strong convulsions that lead to rebellion, riots, assaults, disturbances, and repeated violations of the most basic rules of social life. But all this chaos has nothing to do with a social revolution. This is all the more so when we are talking of the proletarian revolution, that of a class that is both exploited and revolutionary, that effectively dismantles the established order, turns everything upside down but does it in a conscious and organised way with the perspective of social transformation. "When, to be sure, the representatives of our German opportunism hear of ‘revolution,’ they immediately think of bloodshed, street fighting or powder and shot, and the logical conclusion thereof is: the mass strike leads inevitably to the revolution, therefore we dare not have it. In actual fact we see in Russia that almost every mass strike in the long run leads to an encounter with the armed guardians of tsarist order, and therein the so-called political strikes exactly resemble the larger economic struggle. The revolution, however, is something other and something more than bloodshed. In contradiction to the police interpretation, which views the revolution exclusively from the standpoint of street disturbances and rioting, that is, from the standpoint of ‘disorder’ the interpretation of scientific socialism sees in the revolution above all a thorough-going internal reversal of social class relations." (Rosa Luxemburg: Mass strike, party and unions). Certainly the proletarian revolution is based on violent confrontations, bloody battles but these are means that are consciously controlled by the proletarian masses and consistent with the revolutionary goal to which it aspires. In one of its habitual exercises in sophistry, the GCI isolates and abstracts elements such as "disturbance", "disruption of public order" from the living phenomenon that is a revolution and, with impeccable logic, they deduce that any convulsion that changes bourgeois society is "revolutionary".

The blind activism of "the masses in revolt" is used by the GCI to smuggle through the idea that the latter would reject electoralism and go beyond democratic illusions. They tell us that the slogan "Kick them all out!" that was so popular with the petty bourgeoisie during the convulsions of 2001 in Argentina goes further than Russia 1917. "The slogan 'Kick them all out! Get rid of the lot of them!' is a slogan that goes way beyond the political, particularly as a critique of democracy. It makes it quite clear that the slogans raised in insurrectionary movements that were much stronger, including that of 'Bread and Peace' in Russia, October 1917, were centrist slogans"  ("A propos des luttes ouvrières en Argentine", Communisme n° 56, October 2004).

These gentlemen of the GCI falsify historic facts scandalously. In fact, the slogan of October was "All power to the soviets", that is it posed the only question that could criticise democracy in acts, by overthrowing the bourgeois state and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat on its ruins. On the other hand, "Kick them all out!" contains the utopian dream of "democratic regeneration" through "direct popular participation" without "professional politicians". No break with democracy whatsoever took place in Argentina. On the contrary its chains were tightened, as is shown by a report made by the GCI itself: "At the elections, the majority vote was the so-called 'vote of anger' or 'vote of rage', a vote that is invalid, annulled. Groups of proletarians printed electoral leaflets in the form of a pamphlet with the heading 'No party. I will vote for no one. Vote of rage'" ("A propos des luttes ouvrières en Argentine", Communisme n°54, April 2003). This is supposed to constitute a break with electoralism! On the contrary, this affirms it because it acts to reinforce participation in the electoral circus by inciting people to vote even if they do not have confidence in the "current politicians". It calls on them to express their distrust of the latter but their confidence in electoral participation!

The GCI bring in through the back door, wrapping it in an activist mist, the defence of democracy that they solemnly threw out of the front door. In Argentina they also support the escraches, protest movements in front of the homes of military personnel involved in the barbaric crimes of the dirty war (1976-83). These actions, inspired by the "ultra-democrat" Kirschner, are a current manoeuvre of the Argentine state to divert attention from the increasingly cruel attacks against the living conditions of the proletariat and most of the rest of the population. A few Argentine officers are used as scapegoats to divert the anger of the discontented masses. For the GCI, far from weakening the consciousness of the proletariat, "By means of this social condemnation, the proletariat develops its strength by mobilising a large number of people (from the locality, neighbours, friends…)" (Ibid). Behind these pompous words, the reality is that these are mobilisations against repression that are typical of citizens' collectives (neighbours, friends, people from the locality) that are fated to refurbish the democratic facade of the state.[9] [49]

Methods of "proletarian struggle" according to the GCI

The method that the GCI extols for the proletarian struggle is no more than a trade unionist and even decidedly social democratic approach. It is no different from classical leftism except for its verbal radicalism, its exaltation of violence and its tendency to label everything as "proletarian".

In a thesis on proletarian autonomy and its limits, referring to the events in Argentina in 2001, the GCI outlines what could be the quintessence of the organisation for workers' struggle and its methods of struggle. "In the process of affirming itself as a class, the proletariat endowed itself with massive structures of association such as assemblies in the locality. These were in turn preceded, made possible and created by structures that were more permanent and organised; the piqueteros that have been described above and other structures that over the years have fought against the impunity of the torturers and the assassins of the Argentinean state (Mothers of May Square, Hijos…). These include the associations of workers in struggle (occupied factories) or those of the pensioners' movement. The correlation between the different kinds of structures, the continuity between some of them and the forms of direct action employed by them, made possible this affirmation of proletarian autonomy in Argentina. It is an example that tends to spread to America and the rest of the world: pickets, escraches, organised pillaging and the organisation of the locality around an enormous cooking pot so that everyone can eat every day…" ("A propos des luttes ouvrières en Argentine", Communisme °54, April 2003).

Come off it! The local assemblies that in the 2001 revolts were generally the expression of the desperate petty bourgeoisie are turned into "massive structures for the association of workers".[10] [50]

The best expression of the GCI's vision of "workers' associations" is its idea that the "self-organisation of the proletariat" was "preceded, made possible and created" by "permanent structures" such as the piqueteros, the associations of the occupied factories and even the Mothers of May Square!

Here too, this kind of position is in line with those of the left and the extreme left of capital. That is, if you want to struggle you have to have a prior mass organisation that divides you into sectors (union organisations, co-operatives, organisations against repression, of pensioners, of youth, of the unemployed, in localities, etc). What are the lessons that the proletarian elements should learn from passing through these structures? Quite simply that they do not in any way serve as an impetus for organisation, consciousness and the strength of the working class. On the contrary, they are instruments of the bourgeois state to disorganise, atomise, demobilise and lock workers who fall into their net, onto the terrain of the bourgeoisie. These are not the methods by which the proletariat opposes the bourgeois state but the latter's weapons against the proletariat.

This is because in decadent capitalism there can be no permanent mass organisations that simply restrict this or that aspect of capitalist exploitation and oppression. As this kind of organisation is unable to undermine the bourgeois state, it is inevitably absorbed by it. It is perforce integrated into its democratic mechanisms for totalitarian control over society and over the working class in particular. In decadent capitalism unitary organisations for the economic and political defence of the working class can only exist if there is a massive mobilisation of the workers.

In Argentina, we have seen a proliferation of "base" organisations: the piqueteros movement, self-managed enterprises, a network under the name of "economic solidarity", independent unions, people's canteens… Such organisations are usually created out of the response of the workers or the population to increasingly hopeless exploitation and misery. These responses are made outside of, and sometimes against, the unions and the official institutions. However the attempt to make them permanent, leads inevitably to their absorption by the bourgeois state, thanks in particular to the rapid intervention of aid organisations (like the NGOs of the Catholic church or off-shoots of  Peronism) and in particular to a swarm of leftist organisations (mainly Trotskyist).

The clearest case of the anti-working class function of these permanent organisations is the piqueteros movement. In 1996-97 there were roadblocks in various regions mounted by the unemployed who were fighting to obtain the means of subsistence. These early movements were a genuine proletarian struggle. However they could not extend because of the international reflux in the struggle both at the level of consciousness and of combativity. Although they proved to be unable to establish a balance of forces in their favour against the bourgeois state, they were gradually conceived as a means of putting pressure on it. The unemployed were progressively "organised" by the radical unionists, by extreme left groups (the Trotskyists in particular). This gave rise to the piqueteros movement, which degenerated into a real assistance movement (the state distributed sacks of provisions to many piqueteros organisations in return for their control over the workers).

But in spite of this conclusion that was reached by elements in Argentina itself[11] [51] and is made on the basis of the interests of the working class, the GCI does all it can to contribute to the anti-proletarian myth propagated about the piqueteros movement, presenting it - unhesitatingly - as the expression of the renaissance of the proletariat in Argentina: "The affirmation of the proletariat in Argentina would not have been possible without the development of the piqueteros movement, the spearhead of proletarian association over the last five years. The pickets in Argentina, the total block on lorries, roads, motorways and its extension to other countries has shown to the whole world that the proletariat as an historic subject is not dead and that transportation is capital's Achilles heel in the present period."[12] [52] (Communisme n° 54, April 2003)

When reality makes it difficult to go on defending its analysis, the GCI backs off once more and talks of the weaknesses of the piqueteros movement, its "institutionalisation", to avoid saying that it is integrated purely and simply into the bourgeois state. So in reference to a congress of the piqueteros associations that was held in 2000, they concede: "However a tendency that is trying to institutionalise the movement tried to take control of this congress, which was to set up a fight plan to increase the road blocks in the following months. Within this tendency there is the CTA (Argentinean workers centre); organisations that adhere to it are the important Federation for land and lodging, the CCC (Classist and Combative Current) and the Workers' Pole - Workers' Party. A medley of different political and leftist ideologies (radical populism, Trotskyism, Maoism), this tendency is trying in practice to officialise the piqueteros movement. It does so by trying to make it a valid interlocutor, with permanent representatives and clear demands to which the state can respond ("freedom for imprisoned social combatants, Planes Trabajar and an end to policies making concessions to neo-liberalism"). This leads the members of this tendency to accept a series of conditions that denature the strength of the movement and tend to liquidate it." ("A propos des luttes ouvrières en Argentine", Communisme no.54, April 2003)

But for the GCI this does not mean that the movement has lost its proletarian character. They go on to say that "the mass of piqueteros ignore these orders, break with the legality that is imposed on them and refuse to abandon their methods of struggle: the wearing of balaclavas (that the movement has held to be a basic aspect of security and defence), blocking the roads completely and even the seizure of banks and government offices continue to develop" ("A propos des luttes ouvrières en Argentine", Communisme n° 54, April 2003).

Finally, the GCI follows the same schema as does the bourgeois left: they too speak of the "institutionalisation" of mass organs and then go on to add that there is a "rank-and-file" that counter-balances the leadership and takes "initiatives" to struggle. What kind of struggle? Wearing a balaclava or the sterile radicalism that consists of "blocking the roads completely", such as the unionists advocate when they are afraid that the situation may get out of hand.

The attack on property and the "future" society according to the GCI

The proletariat’s goal is supposedly the "generalised reappropriation of the means of existence, by attacking the bourgeoisie and its state". And this goal of "generalised reappropriation" is supposed to have taken form already, once again in Argentina: "From the 18th December on, in the four corners of Argentina, the proletariat assaulted supermarkets, delivery trucks, shops, banks, factories (...) sharing out the expropriated goods among the proletarians and supplying the ‘popular’ soup-kitchens with what had been recovered" ("A propos des luttes ouvrières en Argentine", Communisme n°54, April 2003). The GCI’s "communist" programme can be summed up as follows: "the proletarians directly expropriate bourgeois property to satisfy their immediate needs".

Like the rest of the GCI’s verbal loudmouth radicalism, these words might frighten a few bourgeois half-wits. They might even impress some elements who are in revolt but are ignorant. But when we look at them more closely, they are thoroughly reactionary. The proletariat’s goal is not the "direct" distribution of existing wealth, for the simple reason that – as Marx showed against Proudhon – the roots of capitalist exploitation lie not in the way products are shared out, but in the social relationships through which production is organised.[13] [53]

To call a saqueo (expropriation of goods) a "direct expropriation of bourgeois property" is nothing but trickery clothed in "marxist" terminology. The saqueo does not attack property, it merely causes it to change hands. The GCI is in direct continuity with Bakunin, who considered bandits to be the "most thorough-going revolutionaries". When one group is expropriated by another, there is no "revolutionary" dynamic about it, on the contrary it is a logical reproduction of bourgeois society: the bourgeoisie expropriated the peasantry and the artisans to transform them into proletarians, and the bourgeoisie expropriate each other through the ferocious competition which is characteristic of their system. The theft of consumer goods in its various forms is part of the interplay of capitalist relations of production: the thief steals from someone else, shopkeepers cheat on a small or large scale, the capitalists both large and small swindle the consumers and their own competitors, etc. If you want to imagine a society whose watchword is "expropriate each other", then you need only look at capitalism: "The gradations between commercial profiteering, fictitious deals, adulteration of foodstuffs, cheating, official embezzlement, theft, burglary and robbery, flow into one another in such fashion that the boundary line between honourable citizenry and the penitentiary has disappeared. In this the same phenomenon is repeated as in the regular and rapid degeneration of bourgeois dignitaries when they are transplanted to an alien social soil in an overseas colonial setting. With the stripping off of conventional barriers and props for morality and law, bourgeois society itself falls victim to direct and limitless degeneration [Verlumpung], for its innermost law of life is the profoundest of immoralities, namely, the exploitation of man by man" (Rosa Luxemburg, "The struggle against corruption", in The Russian revolution, 1918).

"Attack property" as a slogan is mere empty showing-off. At best, it looks at the effects without so much as being aware of the causes. Marx has already refuted such pompous radicalism in his polemic with Proudhon: "In each historical epoch, property has developed differently and under a set of entirely different social relations. thus to define bourgeois property is nothing else than to give an exposition of all the social relations of bourgeois production. To try to give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a category apart, an abstract and eternal idea, can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence" (The poverty of philosophy, "Property or ground rent").

What should the society of the future be like according to the GCI? Very learnedly, they tell us that "the unvarying goal of the proletarian revolution is to work as little as possible and to live as well as possible; in the end, this is exactly the same goal as that of the slave when he struggled against slavery 500 or 3,000 years ago. The proletarian revolution is nothing but the historical generalisation of the struggle for the material interests of all the exploited classes since antiquity" ("Pouvoir et révolution", in Communisme n°56, October 2004).

The GCI’s daring tirade in favour of "working as little as possible", thoroughly typical of the ideal revolt of the student petty bourgeois, is incapable of going beyond a vision which reduces work to the alienating activity that it has been in all class societies, and is under capitalism in particular. It is a million miles from understanding that, in a society freed from exploitation, work will no longer be the stultifying activity it is today, but will be a factor in the fulfilment of human beings.

To proclaim that the "unvarying goal" (sic) of the "proletarian revolution" is to " to work as little as possible and to live as well as possible" merely reduces the programme of the proletarian revolution to a ludicrous statement of the obvious. Apart from a few workaholic managers, this is everybody’s "unvarying goal", beginning with Mr Bush who, despite being President of the United States, takes a nap every day, goes off for a break at the end of every week, and in general idles as much as he can, thus putting into rigorous practice the "revolutionary" programme of the GCI.

Indeed, this objective is so "unvarying" that it can be raised to the heights of a universal aspiration of the whole human race, past, present, and future, and with so democratic a principle we can put slaves, serfs, and workers all on the same level... and in doing so completely negate everything that is characteristic of communist society, which is the specific product of the historical being and becoming of the proletariat. The proletariat is the heir to all the exploited classes that have preceded it in history, but this does not mean that its nature is the same, or that it shares either the same goals or the same historical perspective. This elementary truth of historical materialism has been thrown in the bin by the GCI, and replaced with cut-price sophistry.

In the Principles of communism, Engels reminds us that "The working classes have always, according to the different stages of development of society, lived in different circumstances and had different relations to the owning and ruling classes". He demonstrates the difference between the slave and the modern proletarian, showing in particular that: "The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave". What is the goal of the slave? "The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general". The liberation of the slave does not consist in abolishing exploitation, but in rising to a higher form of exploitation: that of the "free worker", subject to capitalist wage labour, as happened for example in the United States after the Civil War. Engels also demonstrates the difference between the serf and the proletarian: "The serf liberates himself in one of three ways: either he runs away to the city and there becomes a handicraftsman; or, instead of products and services, he gives money to his lord and thereby becomes a free tenant; or he overthrows his feudal lord and himself becomes a property owner. In short, by one route or another, he gets into the owning class and enters into competition. The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences".

These differences make the proletariat the revolutionary class in today’s society, and constitute the material foundations of its historical struggle.

The GCI thinks it can wipe all this out at the stroke of a pen, to replace it with a sham "revolution" which is nothing other than the disorder and anarchy which are more and more the product of the evolution of capitalism.

The GCI’s lunatic demagogy in support of the imperialist gangs in Iraq

We have shown that the GCI’s entire doctrine is based on nothing but outrageous sophistry. Its shameful support for the criminal and chaotic imperialist war racking Iraq makes use of two sophisms in particular.

1. The idea that imperialist war is part of capitalism’s class struggle against the proletariat

The class struggle is the motor of history. Capitalism’s fundamental antagonism is that between bourgeoisie and proletariat. But are we therefore to conclude that every conflict is part of the confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat? The GCI is quite happy to put forward this ludicrous dogma. "The war has become a more and more openly civil war, a social war directed against the class enemy: the proletariat" ("Haïti, le prolétariat affronte la bourgeoisie mondiale", in Communisme n°56, October 2004). "This terror is concretised in the struggle against social agitation, by permanent military occupation (Iraq, Afghanistan, ex-Yugoslavia, Chechnya, most African countries...), by the war against subversion, by prisons and detention centres, torture, etc. (...) It is becoming more and more difficult to pass off these international police operations against the proletariat as wars between governments" ("Et Aguila III n’est pas passé!", in Communisme n°56).

It would be hard to be more radical than that! But where does this ultra-radicalism take us? To losing any distinction between the class struggle, imperialist war and social agitation of every kind... Concretely, this comes down to calling for support for the Islamist fighters (currently the main occupants of torture camps like Guantanamo) on the grounds that they are supposedly the visible victims of the social war "against the proletariat", but also for the more or less informal gangs operating in Iraq, on the grounds that they are opposing the "international police operations against the proletariat".

2. The idea that the bourgeoisie has created a World State for its war against the proletariat

According to the GCI, all the fractions of the world bourgeoisie have closed ranks behind the United States to conduct police operations against the proletariat in Iraq. If we are to believe the GCI, the class struggle in the Middle East is so dangerous that it has forced the world cop to intervene. And the GCI has harsh words for the poor souls so blind that they are unable to perceive this "shining reality": "but where is the proletariat in all this shambles? What is it doing? What ideologies does it confront in its efforts to gain its autonomy from all the forces of the bourgeoisie and to strike them down? This is what the discussion should be for the small groups of proletarians who try against wind and storm, and in the disgusting and suffocating atmosphere of social peace, to hold high the flag of social revolution. And instead most, if not all of them, remain stuck in arguments over whether this or that inter-bourgeois contradiction is more fundamental than the others." ("De quelques considérations sur les évènements qui secouent actuellement l’Irak", in Communisme n°55, February 2004).

The GCI also ends up with the idea that capitalism now possesses a single world government, so rejecting the idea that marxism has always defended, that capitalism is divided into competing national states fighting it out in the international arena: "across the world, a growing number of territories are directly administered by world bodies of capitalists united in the dens of thieves and brigands that are the United Nations, the IMF, and the World Bank (...) The Capitalist World State becomes more perceptible day by day as it imposes its terrorist order" ("Haïti, le prolétariat affronte la bourgeoisie mondiale", in Communisme n°56, October 2004). Here then is the ultra-radical GCI offering us Kautsky’s old theory, against which Lenin fought so hard, that capitalism is uniting in a super-imperialism. This theory is rolled out regularly by the left and the far left of capital, the better to chain the workers to "their" national state, against "worldwide capitalism" and "non-national" bodies like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, multinational corporations, etc. And the GCI follows them in "suggesting" (which is even worse than coming out and saying so openly) that the main enemy is US imperialism, the super-imperialism which has federated under its control most of world capitalism. This is perfectly consistent with its courageous stance as armchair recruiting sergeant for the imperialist war in Iraq with its support for the bourgeois Iraqi insurrection disguised, for the occasion, as a proletarian movement: "the whole apparatus of the World State, its services, its representatives on the spot, are systematically targeted. These acts of armed resistance are far from being blind, they have a logic if only we are prepared to abandon the stereotypes and the ideological brainwashing that the bourgeoisie offers us as the only explanation for what is happening in Iraq. Behind the targets, and the daily guerrilla war against the occupying forces, we can discern the contours of a proletariat which is trying to struggle, to organise itself against all the bourgeois fractions which have decided to bring capitalist order and security to the region, even if it is still extremely difficult to judge our class’ autonomy from the bourgeois forces which are trying to control our class’ rage and anger against every kind of representative of the World State. The acts of sabotage, bomb attacks, demonstrations, occupations, strikes... are not the work of islamists or pan-Arab nationalists, this would be too easy and would only be a concession to the ruling class’ view which wants to limit our understanding to a struggle between ‘good and evil’, between the ‘good guys and the bad guys’, a bit like in a Western, in order to evacuate once again capitalism’s deadly contradiction: the proletariat" ("De quelques considérations sur les évènements qui secouent actuellement l’Irak", in Communisme n°55, February 2004).

Whose side is the GCI on?

The original split from the ICC, from which the GCI emerged, was based on a whole series of disagreements that appeared in the ICC’s section in Belgium in 1978-79 on the explanation of the economic crisis, the role of the party and its relationship with the class, the nature of terrorism, the weight of the proletarian struggle in the periphery of capitalism, etc. Those who were in disagreement with the ICC, and who disagreed equally amongst themselves, regrouped in a Tendency and left our organisation to give birth to the GCI without having established clearly what were the disagreements that justified the split. The GCI was thus not formed on a clear set of alternative positions to those of the ICC, but on a mix of inadequately developed divergences, and above all on the basis of disappointed personal ambition and resentments.[14] [54] As a result, discord between the leaders of the new group quickly gave rise to two new splits,[15] [55] leaving at the head of the GCI the element with the most decided leanings towards leftism, and who since then has not stopped giving support to every kind of bourgeois cause.

A group like the GCI is not typically leftist, in the same way as the Trotskyists or the Maoists, since unlike the latter its programme does not give open support to the bourgeois state. Indeed, it denounces these currents in the most radical terms. Nonetheless, as we have shown in this article, behind the verbal radicalism of its denunciation of the political forces and institutions of the bourgeoisie, the result of all its slogans and analyses is to channel any revulsion against the present system into the dead-ends of anarchism and leftism, rather than proposing a theoretical and political armament to those who are trying to pose the question in terms of a political perspective.[16] [56] And this is especially true for all those who, as they try to find a way out of anarchism, are seduced by the GCI’s version of "marxism", and so abandon the process of clarification that they have begun.

But this is not the end of the GCI’s "contribution". Their virulent attacks do not spare real revolutionaries, and our own organisation in particular. With the same sophistry that we have already highlighted, and without a shred of serious argument, they describe us in passing as "social-democrats", "pacifists", "Kautskyists", and "police auxiliaries".[17] [57] In doing so, they make their own little contribution to the general effort of the bourgeoisie to discredit any struggle with a truly revolutionary perspective. And to conclude, we will just remind our readers that the GCI’s radicalism, in the service of a cause which is certainly not that of the proletariat, has gone so far as to call for the murder of the ICC’s militants in Mexico.[18] [58] The GCI’s call has since been relayed, this time against our militants in Spain, by a group close to the GCI, the ARDE.[19] [59]

While the GCI’s political programme is not part of the bourgeoisie’s political apparatus, this does not mean that it belongs to the proletarian camp, since its purpose in life is to attack and destroy the latter. In this sense, it is a representative of what the ICC has characterised as political parasitism. And we cannot conclude this article any better than by quoting the "Theses on parasitism" (International Review n°94), which are particularly appropriate to the situation we have just examined: "the notion of political parasitism is not at all an 'ICC invention'. It was the IWA which was the first to be confronted with this threat against the proletarian movement, which it identified and fought. It was the IWA, beginning with Marx and Engels, who already characterised the parasites as politicised elements who, while claiming to adhere to the programme and organisations of the proletariat, concentrated their efforts on the combat not against the ruling class but against the organisations of the revolutionary class. The essence of their activity was to denigrate and manoeuvre against the communist camp, even if they claimed to belong to it and to serve it" (point 9).

 C. Mir, 6th November, 2005

The mobilisation of the young generations of future proletarians in France, in the universities and high-schools, and in demonstrations, as well as the inter-generational solidarity around the struggle, confirms the opening of a new period of class confrontations. The real control of the struggle by the general assemblies (mass meetings), the latter’s combativeness but also the reflection and maturity that found expression within them – especially their ability to avoid most of the traps set for them by the ruling class – are signs that a profound development is under way in the class struggle. Its dynamic will have an impact on the workers’ struggles to come.[1] [86] But the struggle against the CPE in France is neither an isolated nor a purely “French” phenomenon: it is the expression of an international rise and maturation of the class struggle. Several new characteristics have appeared in this process which are destined to gain in strength in the future.

We are still a long way from generalised massive struggle, but we can already see the signs of a change in spirit within the working class, of a more profound reflection especially among the younger generations who have not been subjected to all the campaigns about the death of communism after the collapse of the Eastern bloc sixteen years ago. In the “Resolution on the international situation” adopted by the ICC’s 16th Congress and published in International Review n°122, we showed that since 2003 we have witnessed a “turning point” in the class struggle, one of whose main expressions is a tendency to a greater politicisation within the working class. We highlighted the following characteristics in the struggle:

• “they have involved significant sectors of the working class in countries at the heart of world capitalism (as in France 2003);
• they have been preoccupied with more explicitly political questions; in particular the question of pensions raised in the struggles in France and elsewhere poses the problem of the future that capitalist society holds in store for all of us;
• they have seen the re-emergence of Germany as a focal point for workers’ struggles, for the first time since the revolutionary wave;
• the question of class solidarity has been raised in a wider and more explicit way than at any time since the struggles of the 80s, most notably in the recent movements in Germany;
• they have been accompanied by the emergence of a new generation of elements looking for political clarity. This new generation has manifested itself both in the new influx of overtly politicised elements and in the new layers of workers entering the struggle for the first time. As evidenced in certain important demonstrations, the basis is being forged for the unity between the new generation and the ‘generation of ‘68’ – both the political minority which rebuilt the communist movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s and the wider strata of workers who have been through the rich experience of class struggles between ‘68 and ‘89.”

Every one of these points is fully confirmed today, not only by the struggle against the CPE in France but also by other examples of responses to the attacks of the bourgeoisie.

The simultaneity of the workers’ struggles

In two of France’s most important neighbours, and at the same time as the struggle against the CPE, the unions have been forced to take the initiative in the face of growing social discontent, and to organise large-scale strikes and demonstrations in some sectors.

In Britain, a strike called by the unions on 28th March was taken up by 1.5 million municipal employees to protest against a reform in their pension scheme which would oblige them to work until 65 instead of 60 before earning the right to a full pension. This was one of the most massive strikes for years. The ruling class orchestrated a major propaganda campaign presenting the workers as “privileged” relative to those in private industry. The unions also did all they could to isolate this category of workers – state employees – who have continued to “benefit” from a legal retirement age of 60 years. The anger of workers in Britain was all the greater since in recent years, 80,000 workers have lost their pensions as a result of the bankruptcy of several pension funds, while all workers have been the object of a long series of attacks by the Blair government.

In Germany, the increase in the working week from 38.5 to 40 hours without any increase in wages has followed hard on massive job losses in the state sector. This increase in the working week is only one of the attacks planned in the “Agenda 2010” initiated by the Social-Democratic chancellor Schröder with the Hartz plan, which also included a reduction of over 50% in holiday and Christmas bonuses for state employees and which led to their first strike for ten years. The strike has lasted, under union leadership, for two and a half months in Baden-Württemberg. In the country at large, the state employer has accompanied these measures with a vast media campaign against its own workers, from the garbage collectors to hospital workers (requisitions, threat to replace strikers accused of “laziness” because they refuse to work an extra 18 minutes each day). While the media campaign presents state employees as “privileged” because they enjoy job security, the DBB and Ver.di unions helped to divide the workers among themselves, presenting each attack as a specific problem and isolating their struggle from those in private industry. Under the pressure of rising social discontent, the IG Metall union called a strike on 28th March of 80,000 engineering workers in 333 companies to demand wage increases, in an industry where wages have stagnated for years and which has been hard hit by job losses and factory closures. On 28th March (the same day as one of the biggest demonstrations against the CPE), the Social-Democratic Minister of Labour within the right-left “Grand coalition” government was persuaded by the mobilisation in France that discretion was the better part of valour, and withdrew a measure similar to the CPE which had been planned to increase the new hire trial period for all jobs from six months to two years.

The social turmoil has also reached the United States. Major demonstrations have been organised in several towns to protest against the law now before the Senate, after its passage through the House of Representatives in December 2005, to make illegal immigration a criminal offence and toughening the repression not only against illegal immigrants themselves, but also against any who offer them shelter or assistance. It is also planned to increase checks on immigrants and to reduce the validity of residence permits from three to six years, renewable once only. To cap it all, there is the administration’s proposal to extend the frontier barrier that already exists in several places (notably between Tijuana and the southern suburbs of San Diego) along the whole 3200 kilometres of the border with Mexico. In Los Angeles between 500,000 and 1 million people mobilised on 27th March, following the demonstration in Chicago of more than 100,000 people; similar gatherings took place in many other towns, notably Houston, Phoenix, Denver and Philadelphia.

Though less spectacular, not a month passes without struggles taking place somewhere in the world, giving expression to the essential characteristics of the workers’ struggle internationally, and bearing with them the seeds of the future: workers’ solidarity across the barriers of corporation, generation, and nationality.

The development of workers’ solidarity

These recent expressions of solidarity have been subject to an almost complete blackout by the media.

Other important struggles have taken place in Britain. In Northern Ireland, 800 Belfast postmen walked out on wildcat strike for nearly three weeks against fines and management pressure, speed-ups and increased workloads. At first, the workers mobilised against disciplinary measures against two colleagues, one in a “Catholic” the other in a “Protestant” post-office. The Communication Workers Union showed its true colours and opposed the strike. One of its spokesmen declared in Belfast: “we repudiated the action and asked them to go back to work, pointing out that the action was illegal”. But the workers continued the struggle, legal or not, and showed that they had no need of the unions to organise.

A joint demonstration crossed the “frontier” separating the Catholic and Protestant districts, going up the main streets of the Protestant, then down the main street of the Catholic district. Other struggles of recent years, especially in the health service, have already shown a real solidarity between workers of different confessions, but this was the first time that such solidarity has appeared in the open between “Catholic” and “Protestant” workers, in a province torn for decades by bloody civil strife.

The unions, with the help of the leftists, then did an about-turn and pretended to declare their “solidarity”, notably by organising strike pickets at each post-office, thus effectively isolating the workers from each other and so sabotaging the struggle. Despite this sabotage, the open unity of Protestant and Catholic workers on the Belfast streets in this strike revived memories of the great unemployed demonstrations of 1932, when proletarians from both sides of the divide came together to fight cuts in the dole. But that was in a period of working class defeat, which made it impossible for these exemplary actions to strengthen the development of the class struggle. Today, there is a greater potential for the class struggles to come to defeat the divide-and-rule policies that the ruling class uses to preserve the capitalist order. This struggle’s importance lies in the experience of class unity put into practice outside the control of the unions. Its implications go far beyond the local situation of the postmen who were its protagonists; it offers an example to be followed as widely as possible.

Nor is this an isolated event. In February, at Cottam, near Lincoln in central England, fifty power workers went on strike in support of Hungarian immigrant workers whose pay was only half that of their English comrades. These immigrant workers’ contracts left them at the mercy of immediate redundancy, or of transfer with no prior notice to sites elsewhere in Europe. Here too, the unions opposed the strike because of its illegality, since neither Hungarian nor English workers had taken a “democratic vote”. The media also denigrated the strike, a local rag even dug up an academic to say that the UK workers had a “certain amount of honour” in striking in solidarity with their fellow workers. In contrast, however, “the foreigners themselves have stayed at their posts throughout” (a scholarly claim somewhat undermined by pictures of Hungarian and British workers standing together on the picket lines). For the working class, however, the recognition that all workers defend the same interests no matter what their nationality or their different rates of pay or work, is an important step forward in their ability to enter the struggle as a united class.

At Reconvilier in the Swiss Jura, after a first strike in November 2004, 300 engineering workers at Swissmetal walked out for a month at the end of January, in solidarity with 27 laid off comrades. The struggle began without the unions, but the latter finally organised negotiations with the bosses and confronted the workers with the alternative of either accepting the loss of pay for their strike days, or of accepting the lay-offs: they were in effect blackmailed into accepting either wage cuts or lay-offs. As one Reconvilier worker said, following the logic of the capitalist system means “choosing between cholera and the plague”. And another wave of 120 redundancies is already planned. But the strike has at least posed clearly the question of the workers’ ability to oppose this blackmail and the logic of capital. Another worker drew this lesson from the strike’s defeat: “We are to blame for having left the control of the negotiations in hands other than our own”.

In India, during July 2005 the workers of the Honda factory in Gurgaon, in the suburbs of Delhi went on strike. Joined by a mass of workers from neighbouring factories in this industrial city, and supported by the local population, the workers were confronted with brutal police repression and a wave of arrests. On 1st February, 23,000 airport workers went on strike in 123 Indian airports. This strike was a direct response to a management plan to reduce the number of airport employees by 40%, lay-offs aimed mostly at older workers who are likely never to find work again. Air traffic in Delhi and Mumbai was paralysed for four days, and was also brought to a halt in Calcutta. Using a law against “illegal acts endangering civil aviation” as an excuse, the authorities declared the strike was illegal and in several towns, notably Mumbai, sent in police and paramilitaries to bludgeon the strikers back to work. As loyal partners of the government coalition led by Congress, the unions and the leftists were already negotiating with the government as early as 3rd February. They then called the strikers to meet with the Prime Minister, pushing them back to work in exchange for an empty promise to re-examine the planned redundancies in the airports. They thus helped to sow division among the workers, between those who wanted to continue the struggle and those who thought they could bring it to an end.

Workers’ combativeness was also in evidence at the Toyota factory near Bangalore, where workers struck for fifteen days from 4th January against line speed-ups which had been the cause of an increase in both accidents and management-imposed fines. These penalties for “inadequate productivity” were being systematically docked from wages. Here too, the workers immediately came up against the opposition of the unions, who declared the strike illegal. The repression has been fierce: 1500 out of 2300 strikers have been arrested for “disturbing the social peace”. The strike received the support of other workers in Bangalore, and this forced the unions and leftist organisations to set up a “coordination committee” in other workplaces in the city that supported the strike, and against the repression of the Toyota workers – in order to keep this example of spontaneous workers’ solidarity under control and sabotage it. During February also, other workers in Bangalore came out to demonstrate their support for 910 workers of Hindustan Lever in a struggle against lay-offs.

An international development of the struggle offers hope for the future

These struggles wholly confirm a maturation, a politicisation of the struggle that began with the “turning point” of 2003 against the “reform” of pensions, especially in France and Austria. Since then, there have been a number of clear expressions of workers’ solidarity, which we have reported in our press in opposition to the blackout organised by the media. Such reactions found expression in particular in the strike at Mercedes-Daimler-Chrysler in July 2004, when the workers in Bremen struck and demonstrated alongside their comrades of Sindelfingen-Stuttgart who were being blackmailed into accepting lay-offs in exchange for keeping their “benefits”, while at the same time management was proposing to transfer 6,000 jobs from Stuttgart to Bremen itself.

The same was true of the baggage handlers at Heathrow in August 2005, who in the midst of an anti-terrorist campaign in the wake of the London bombings walked out spontaneously in support of 670 workers of mostly Pakistani origin laid off by the Gate Gourmet airline food company.

There are other examples. In September 2005, 18,000 Boeing mechanics struck for three weeks against the new contract proposed by management which aimed at reducing both pensions and health benefits. In this conflict, the workers were fighting against differentials between younger and older workers, and between workers in different factories. Even more explicitly, the strike in the New York metro on the eve of Christmas 2005, against an attack on the pensions for future recruits demonstrated the workers' ability to refuse such attempts at division. Despite massive pressure, the strike was largely solid since the workers were well aware that they were fighting for their children’s future and for the generations to come (which is a slap in the face for all the bourgeois propaganda about the integration or non-existence of the American proletariat).

Last December, the workers of the SEAT factory in Barcelona walked out against the unions who had signed a “shameful agreement” accepting the lay-off of 600 workers.

The summer of 2005 saw Argentina’s biggest strike wave for fifteen years, hitting the health service, food processing companies, and the Buenos Aires metro, and also involving municipal workers in several provinces, and school teachers. In several places, workers from other companies joined the strikers’ demonstrations. This occurred particularly in the case of the oil industry, of office workers in the legal system, of the teachers, and of the municipal workers who were joined by the unemployed at Caleta Olivia. At Neuquen, health service workers joined a demonstration of striking teachers. At one children’s hospital, the strikers demanded the same wage increase for all professional categories. The workers have come up against both fierce repression and slanderous campaigns in the media.

The development of a feeling of solidarity in the face of massive frontal attacks, which are the consequence of capitalism’s economic crisis, is tending to break through the barriers that each national bourgeoisie tries to impose: the trade, the factory or workplace, the company, the branch of industry, nationality. At the same time, the working class is being pushed to take charge of its struggles itself, to assert itself, and little by little to gain confidence in its own strength. In doing so, it comes up against the manoeuvres of the ruling class and the sabotage of the unions as they try to keep the workers isolated. In this long and difficult process of maturation, the presence of the young generations of workers who have not suffered the impact of the ideological retreat after 1989 is an important element in the dynamic. This is why, whatever their limits and weaknesses, today’s struggles are laying the groundwork for those to come, and bear within them the seeds of the development of the class struggle.

The bankruptcy of capitalism and the deepening crisis are the proletariat’s allies

Officially, the world economy is in good health. Unemployment is at its lowest for ten years in the USA, and has been falling for the last year in Europe: Spain’s economy is more dynamic than it has ever been. And yet, there is no respite in the attacks on the working class. On the contrary. In the Detroit region, Ford and General Motors (threatened with bankruptcy) have laid off 60,000 engineering workers. Redundancy plans follow one after another at SEAT in the Barcelona region, and at Fiat in Italy.

Everywhere, the boss state, the supreme representative of the interests of the national capital, is to the fore in attacking the workers: increasing precarious working (the CNE and CPE in France) and labour flexibility, attacking pensions and health benefits (Britain, Germany). Almost everywhere, health and education systems are in crisis. The US bourgeoisie declares that it is not competitive enough because of the weight of pensions on companies’ balance sheets – pensions that are at the mercy of bankruptcies and stock exchange collapse.

This systematic dismantling of the Welfare State (attacks on pensions, on Social Security, on the unemployed through reductions in the dole, waves of redundancies in every country and every branch of industry, the generalisation of precarious working and job flexibility) not only plunges today’s proletarians into poverty, it also means that the system is less and less able to integrate new generations of workers into the productive process.

Everywhere, these attacks are presented as “reforms”, a structural adaptation to the globalisation of the world economy. One of their main characteristics is that they hit both young and old almost simultaneously. The bourgeoisie is not in a state of obvious crisis everywhere, but all these attacks on the working class are demonstrations of capitalism’s historical dead-end, of its utter lack of perspective for the new generations. Those countries which, in Europe, are offered as economic models (Spain, Denmark, Britain) are often those which hide, behind the façade of a “healthy” economy, large-scale attacks on the workers and a serious increase in poverty. The ideological façade does not stand up to reality, as we can see from the example of Britain described in the 1st April issue of Marianne: “The Blair miracle is also one child in three living below the poverty line. One child in five who doesn’t get three meals a day (Tony Blair, in a speech at Toynbee Hall in 1999, promised to ‘eradicate child poverty within a generation’. How many years does the Prime Minister think there are in a generation?). Of these children, almost 100,000 sleep in the bathroom or the kitchen for lack of space: not surprisingly, since you have to go back to 1925 to find a Labour government that has built less council housing than New Labour! Ten million adults are able neither to save, nor to insure the little they have. Six million are unable to clothe themselves properly in winter. Two million households – mostly pensioners – are inadequately heated. It is estimated that 25,000 of the latter died as a result of the cold in 2004”. What better demonstration of the bankruptcy of the capitalist system could there be than its inability not only to provide work for the young, but to protect them from cold, hunger, and poverty!

The riots in the French suburbs are a clear expression of this dead-end. If we look at the world as a “snapshot”, the situation looks desperate. The world is full of unemployment, poverty, war, barbarity, chaos, terrorism, pollution, and insecurity, careless incompetence in the face of natural disasters. After the hammer blow against the older workers and future pensioners, the blows are now falling on the younger workers and future unemployed! Capitalism is openly showing its real face: that of a decadent system with nothing to offer the new generations; a system gangrened by an insoluble economic crisis; a system which since World War II has spent fantastic sums on the production of ever more deadly and sophisticated weapons; a system which, ever since the 1991 Gulf War, has covered the planet in blood notwithstanding the promises of an “era of peace and prosperity” that was supposed to follow the collapse of the Eastern bloc. It is the same bankrupt capitalist system, the same capitalist class at bay, that is dumping millions in poverty and unemployment, and spreading death and destruction in Iraq, the Middle East, and Africa!

But there is hope, as the young generations in France have just shown. By rejecting the CPE, and calling for the support of wage workers and their parents’ generation, they have shown a clear awareness that all generations are affected, that their struggle against the CPE is only a step, and that the attack that the CPE represented is directed against the whole working class.

The bourgeoisie’s hired media not only maintained a blackout lasting several weeks on what was happening in France, around the world, they also systematically distorted events to present the movement against the CPE as a mere repeat of the riots of October-November 2005, endlessly turning the spotlight on the sideshow of confrontations with the police, or of the exploits of the “wreckers” in the demonstrations. Behind the deliberate confusion between the blind and desperate violence of the suburbs last autumn, and the diametrically opposed methods used in the struggle of the student youth and the workers who joined them, lies the deliberate intention of the ruling class to prevent the working class of other countries from developing an awareness that it is both necessary and possible to fight for another future.

This intention on the part of the ruling class is perfectly understandable. Given its class prejudices, it has no clear awareness of the proletarian movement’s perspective, but it nonetheless understands confusedly the importance and the depth of the struggle that has just taken place in France. It is not limited to the working class in France itself. Fundamentally, this is just a moment in an international renewal of the class struggle whose depth expresses, over and above the particular demands around which the student youth mobilised, an increasing rejection by the young generations of the future offered them by the capitalist system, whose increasing attacks on the exploited can only provoke increasingly massive, and above all increasingly conscious, class confrontations, increasingly aware of the solidarity of all workers in struggle.

WIM, 15th April, 2006

In the last issue of the International Review we published a summary of the first volume of our series on communism, which looks at the development of the communist programme during the ascendant period of capitalism, and at the work of Marx and Engels in particular.

The second volume of the series focuses on the further precisions to this programme derived from the practical experiences and theoretical reflections of the proletarian movement during the revolutionary wave which swept the capitalist world in the years after 1917. We are dividing the summary of this volume into two parts: the first, in this issue, examines the heroic phase of the revolutionary wave, when the prospect of world revolution was very real and the communist programme seemed very concrete; the second will be centred on the descending phase of the revolutionary wave, and on the efforts of the revolutionary minorities to understand the remorseless advance of the counter-revolution.

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1. 1905: the mass strike opens the door to the proletarian revolution (International Review 90)

The aim of the second volume of the communism series is to show how the communist programme was developed through the direct experience of the proletarian revolution. Its background is the new epoch of wars and revolutions definitively inaugurated by the first imperialist world war, and more specifically, the rise and demise of the first great revolutionary wave of the international working class between 1917 and the end of the 1920s. We thus modified the overall title of this volume: communism was no longer a prediction of what would become necessary once capitalism had exhausted its progressive mission. It had been placed on the agenda of history by the new conditions of capitalist decadence, an epoch in which capitalism would become not only an obstacle to further progress, but a threat to the very survival of humanity.

However, the volume begins in 1905, a transitional moment when the new conditions could be seen in outline without yet becoming definitive - a period of ambiguity which was reflected in the often ambiguous perspectives drawn up by the revolutionaries themselves. Nevertheless, the sudden explosion of the mass strike and uprising in Russia in 1905 illuminated a discussion that had already begun in the ranks of the marxist movement, and which was axed around an issue that is profoundly relevant to the concerns of this series: how, when the hour of revolution has struck, will the working class actually come to power. This was the real content of the debate on the mass strike, which animated the German Social Democratic Party in particular.

This was in essence a three-way combat: on the one hand, the revolutionary left around figures such as Luxemburg and Pannekoek was leading the fight, first against the openly revisionist theses of Bernstein and others who wanted to explicitly drop all references to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, and against the trade union bureaucracy who could not envisage any workers’ struggle that was not rigidly controlled by themselves, and wanted any general strike movement to be narrowly limited in its demands and its duration. But once again the “orthodox” centre of the party, while nominally supporting the idea of the mass strike, also saw it as a limited tactic to be subordinated to a fundamentally parliamentary strategy. The left, by contrast, saw the mass strike as the indication that capitalism was nearing the end-point of its ascendant course, and thus as the precursor to the revolution. Although widely rejected as “anarchist” by all the forces of conservatism in the party, the analysis developed by Luxemburg and Pannekoek was not a repackaging the old anarchist abstraction of the general strike, but sought to draw out the real characteristics of the mass movement in the new period:

• its tendency to emerge spontaneously, to erupt “from below”, often around partial and transient issues. But this spontaneity was not in opposition to organisation; on the contrary, in the new period, the organisation of the struggle was generated by the struggle itself and as a result was raised to a higher level;
• the tendency towards a rapid extension to wider and wider layers of the class, essentially on a geographical basis, and founded on the search for class solidarity;
• the inter-action of the economic and political dimension of the struggle, up to and including the stage of armed insurrection;
• the importance of the party in this process was not diminished but accentuated. Its task was no longer the technical organisation of the struggle, but precisely because of this its essential role of political leadership now came to the foreground.

While Luxemburg drew out these general features of the mass strike, the understanding of the new organisations of the struggle – the soviets – was elaborated largely by the revolutionaries in Russia. Trotsky and Lenin were able to grasp very quickly the significance of the soviet as the organising instrument of the mass strike, as the flexible form that permitted the masses to debate, decide and develop their class consciousness, and as the organ of proletarian insurrection and political power. Against those “super-Leninists” in the Bolshevik party whose first reaction to the soviets was to call on them to dissolve into the party, Lenin insisted that the party, as the organisation of the revolutionary vanguard, and the soviet, as the organisation for the unification of the class as a whole, were not rivals but complemented each other perfectly. He thus revealed that the Bolshevik conception of the party expressed a true rupture with the old social democratic notion of the mass party and was an organic product of the new epoch of revolutionary struggles.

The events of 1905 also gave rise to sharp debates about the perspectives for the revolution in Russia. This too was a three-way debate:

the Mensheviks argued that Russia was fated to pass through the phase of bourgeois revolution, and therefore the principal task of the workers’ movement was to support the liberal bourgeoisie in its struggle against the Tsarist autocracy. The anti-revolutionary content of this theory was to be fully exposed in 1917;

Lenin and the Bolsheviks understood that the liberal bourgeoisie in Russia was too weak to lead the fight against Tsarism. The tasks of the bourgeois revolution would have to be carried out by a “democratic dictatorship” installed by a popular uprising in which the working class would play the leading role;

Trotsky, basing himself on the notion that Marx had developed in 1848, “the revolution in permanence”, reasoned first and foremost from the international angle: he argued that revolution in Russia would necessarily propel the working class to take power, and that the movement could move rapidly into a socialist phase by linking up with the revolution in western Europe. This approach was a link between the writings of the mature Marx about Russia, and the concrete experience of the revolution of 1917; and to a large extent it was taken on board by Lenin in 1917 when he ditched the notion of the “democratic dictatorship”, again in opposition to the “orthodox” Bolsheviks.

Meanwhile in the German party, the defeat of the 1905 uprising strengthened the arguments of Kautsky and others who argued that the mass strike should only be seen as a defensive tactic, and that the best strategy for the working class was that of the gradual, essentially legalistic “war of attrition”, with parliament and elections as the key instruments for the transfer of power to the proletariat. The response of the left was encapsulated in the work of Pannekoek, who argued that the proletariat was developing new organs of struggle that corresponded to the new epoch in the life of capital; and against the notion of the “war of attrition” he reaffirmed the marxist notion that the revolution aims not at the conquest of the state but at its destruction, and its replacement by new organs of political power.

2. Lenin’s State and Revolution: a striking validation of marxism (International Review n°91)

According to the philosophers of bourgeois empiricism, marxism is no more than a pseudo-science, since it offers no possibility for the falsification of its hypotheses. In fact, marxism’s claims to use the scientific method cannot be tested in the closed walls of the laboratory, but only in the wider laboratory of social history. And the cataclysmic events of 1914 proved to be a striking confirmation of the basic perspective outlined both in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 – which outlines the general perspective of socialism or barbarism – and by Engels’ uncannily accurate prediction of a devastating European war, published in 1887. And in the same way, the revolutionary storms of 1917-19 confirmed the other side of the prognosis: the capacity of the working class to offer an alternative to the barbarism of capitalism in decline.

These movements posed the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat in an eminently practical manner. But for the workers’ movement there can be no rigid separation between theory and practise. Lenin’s State and Revolution, written during the crucial period between February and October 1917 in Russia, obeyed the need for the proletariat to elaborate a clear theoretical understanding of its practical movement. This was especially necessary because the predominance of opportunism in the parties of the Second International had befogged the concept of the proletarian dictatorship, replacing it more and more with a theorisation of a gradual, parliamentary road to workers’ power. Against these reformist distortions – and also against the false answers to the problem offered by anarchism – Lenin set about restoring the fundamental teachings of marxism on the problem of the state and the transition period towards communism.

Lenin’s first task, therefore, was to demolish the notion of the state as a neutral instrument which could be used for good or ill depending on the will of those who managed it. It was an elementary necessity to reaffirm the marxist view that the state can only be an instrument for the oppression of one class by another - a reality hidden not only by the more established arguments of Kautsky and other apologists, but more concretely, in Russia itself, by the Mensheviks and their allies who used grand phrases about “revolutionary democracy” as a fig leaf over the capitalist Provisional Government that came to power after the February uprising.

Because it is an organ adapted to the class rule of the bourgeoisie, the existing bourgeois state could not be “transformed” in the interest of the proletariat. Lenin thus re-traced the development of the marxist view from the Communist Manifesto to the present day, showing how successive experience of the proletarian struggle - the revolutions of 1848, and above all the Paris Commune of 1871 - had clarified the necessity for the working class to destroy the existing state and replace it with a new kind of political power. This new power would be based on a series of essential measures which would allow the working class to maintain its political authority over all the institutions of the transition period: dissolution of the standing army and the general arming of the workers; election and revocability of all public officials, who should receive the same remuneration as the average worker; fusion of executive and legislative functions in a single body.

These were to be the principle of the new soviet power which Lenin was advocating in opposition to the bourgeois regime of the Provisional Government. The necessity to pass from theory to action in September/ October 1917 prevented Lenin from elaborating further on how the soviets constituted a higher form of the proletarian dictatorship than the Paris Commune. But State and Revolution did have the considerable merit of laying to rest certain ambiguities contained in the writings of Marx and Engels, who had speculated that the working class might come to power peacefully in some of the more democratic countries, such as Britain, Holland or the USA. Lenin made it clear that in the conditions of the new epoch of imperialism, where a militarist state everywhere assumed the mantle of arbitrary power, there could be no further exceptions. In the “democratic” countries as much as the more authoritarian regimes, the proletarian programme was the same: destruction of the existing state apparatus and the formation of a “Commune state”.

Against anarchism, State and Revolution also recognises that the state as such cannot be abolished overnight. After the overthrow of the bourgeois state, classes will still exist, and underneath them, the reality of material scarcity. These objective conditions necessitate the semi-state of the transition period. But Lenin makes it clear that the goal of the proletariat is not to continually strengthen this state, but to ensure the gradual diminution of its role in social life, eventually dispensing with it altogether. This required the constant participation of the working masses in political life and their vigilant control over all state functions. At the same time, it necessitated an economic transformation tending in a communist direction: here Lenin takes up the indications contained in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, which advocated a system of labour-time vouchers as a temporary alternative to the wage form.

Lenin was writing this work on the very eve of a gigantic revolutionary experience. It was impossible for him to do more than pose the general parameters of the problems of the transition period. State and Revolution thus inevitably contains gaps and insufficiencies which would be considerably clarified through the next few years of victories and defeats:

• in his depiction of the economic measures leading towards communism, there is a serious confusion about the possibility of the proletariat simply taking over the economic apparatus of capital once it had reached a stratified form. This lack of understanding about the dangers represented by state capitalism was magnified by the false notion of “socialism” as an intermediate mode of production between capitalism and communism. At the same time there is a lack of emphasis on the fact that the transition towards communism can really only be undertaken on an international scale;
• the book says very little about the relationship between the party and the new state machine, leaving room for parliamentary-type confusions about the party taking power and confusing itself with the state;
• there is a tendency to underestimate the scope of the state apparatus, reducing it essentially to “bodies of armed men”, rather than fully assimilating Engels’ view that the state is an emanation of class society and – while remaining an organ of repression par excellence – has the task of holding society together, a task which emphasises the conservative nature of the state, including the semi-state of the transition period. Again the Russian experience was to take Engels’ argument onto a deeper level, revealing the danger of the new state becoming a focal point for bureaucratisation and eventual bourgeois counter-revolution.

Even so, State and Revolution contains many insights into the negative side of the state. In recognising that the new state would have to manage a situation of material scarcity and thus of “bourgeois right” in the distribution of social wealth, Lenin even referred to the new state as “a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie”, a provocative phrase which, while not being entirely precise, certainly represents a glimpse of the potential dangers emanating from the transitional state.

3. 1918: the programme of the German Communist Party (International Review n°93)

The outbreak of revolution in Germany in 1918 was the conformation of the perspective that had guided the Bolsheviks towards the October insurrection: the perspective of world revolution. Given the historic traditions of the German working class and Germany’s place at the centre of world capitalism, the German revolution was the key to the entire world revolutionary process. It was instrumental in bringing the world war to an end and offered hope to the beleaguered proletarian power in Russia. By the same token, its definitive defeat in the ensuing few years sealed the fate of the revolution in Russia, which succumbed to a terrible internal counter-revolution; and while the victory of the revolution could have opened the door to a new and higher stage in human society, its downfall unleashed a century of barbarism the likes of which humanity had never previously experienced.

In December 1918 – one month after the November uprising and two weeks before the tragic defeat of the Berlin revolt in which Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht lost their lives - the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) held its founding Congress. The new party programme (also known as “What does Spartacus Want?”) was introduced by Rosa Luxemburg herself, who placed the programme in its historic context. While taking its inspiration from the Communist Manifesto of 1848, the new programme had to be set upon very different foundations; and the same was true for the Erfurt programme of German social democracy, with its separation between minimum and maximum demands, which had been suitable for a period in which the proletarian revolution was not yet on the immediate agenda. The world war had ushered in a new epoch in human history – the epoch of the decline of capitalism, the epoch of the proletarian revolution - and thus the new programme had to encapsulate the direct struggle for the proletarian dictatorship and the building of socialism. It demanded a break not only with the formal programme of social democracy, but also with the reformist illusions which had so deeply infected the party in the last part of the 19th and opening decade of the 20th centuries – illusions in a gradual, and parliamentary conquest of power which had even affected revolutionaries as lucid as Engels himself.

But to argue that the proletarian revolution was on the agenda of history did not imply that the proletariat was immediately capable of carrying it through. Indeed the event of the November revolution had shown that the German working class in particular still had a long way to go in throwing off the dead weight of the past, as evidenced by the inordinate influence of the social democratic traitors in the workers’ councils. Luxemburg insisted that the German working class needed to educate itself through a process of struggles, both economic and political, defensive and offensive, which would provide it with the confidence and awareness it needed to take complete charge of society. It was one of the great tragedies of the German revolution that the bourgeoisie succeeded in provoking the proletariat into a premature uprising which would short-circuit this whole process and deprive it of its most far-sighted political leaders.

The KPD’s document begins by asserting its general aims and principles. It makes no bones about recognising the necessity for the violent suppression of bourgeois power, while rejecting the idea that proletarian violence is a new form of terror. Socialism, it points out, represents a qualitative leap in the evolution of human society and it is impossible to introduce it by a series of decrees issued from on high; it could only be the fruit of the creative and collective labour of untold millions of proletarians.

At the same time this document is a real programme in the sense that it puts forward a series of practical measures aimed at establishing the rule of the working class and taking the first steps towards the socialisation of production, for example:

• the disarming of the police and army officers, the seizure of all arms and ammunition by the workers councils, and the formation of a workers’ militia;
• the dissolution of the command structure of the army and the generalisation of soldiers’ councils;
• the formation of revolutionary tribunals;
• the establishment of a central congress of workers’ and soldiers’ councils elected by workers’ and soldiers’ councils all over the country, and the simultaneous dissolution of all the old municipal and parliamentary assemblies;
• reduction of the working day to six hours;
• confiscation of all the means needed to feed, house and clothe the population;
• expropriation of landed estates, banks, mines, and the major industrial and commercial enterprises;
• establishment of enterprise councils to assume the essential tasks of administering the factories and other workplaces.

The majority of the measures announced in the KPD programme remain valid today, although by its very nature as a document produced at the beginning of an immense revolutionary experience, it could not be clear on all points. It thus talks about the nationalisation of the economy as a step towards socialism and could not know how easily this form could be co-opted by capital; while it rejects any form of putschism, it retains the notion that the party will put itself forward as a candidate for political power; it is very sketchy about the international tasks of the revolution. But these are weaknesses that could have been overcome had the German revolution not been nipped in the bud before it could really come into bloom.

4. The Platform of the Communist International (International Review n°94)

The platform of the Communist International was drawn up at the CI’s first Congress in 1919, only a few months after the tragic outcome of the Berlin uprising. But the international revolutionary wave was still at its high point: at the very moment the CI held its Congress, news came through of the proclamation of a soviet republic in Hungary. The clarity of the political positions adopted at the First Congress reflected this ascendant movement of the class, just as the CI’s subsequent slide into opportunism was linked to the movement’s descending phase.

Bukharin introduced the Congress discussion on the draft platform, and his remarks were themselves fortified by the considerable theoretical advances that revolutionaries were making in that period. Bukharin insisted that the starting point for the platform was the recognition of the bankruptcy of the capitalist system on a global scale. From the beginning, the CI understood that the “globalisation” of capital was already an accomplished reality, and was indeed a fundamental factor in the decline and collapse of the system.

Bukharin’s speech also highlights a feature of the first Congress – its openness to new developments brought about by the onset of the epoch inaugurated by the war. He thus recognises that, in Germany at least, the existing trade unions have ceased to play any kind of positive role and are being replaced by new class organs thrown up by the mass movement, in particular the factory committees. This contrasts with later congresses when participation in the official unions became mandatory for all parties of the International. But it is in line with the insights into the question of state capitalism contained in the platform, since as Bukharin was to argue elsewhere, the integration of the unions into the capitalist system was precisely a function of state capitalism .

The platform itself is a brief overview of the new period and the tasks of the proletariat. It does not seek to provide a detailed programme of measures for the proletarian revolution. Once again, it affirms very clearly that with the world war, “a new epoch is born. The epoch of capitalism’s decay, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the proletarian communist revolution”. Insisting that the seizure of power by the proletariat is the only alternative to capitalist barbarism, it calls for the revolutionary destruction of all the institutions of the bourgeois state (parliaments, police, courts, etc) and their replacement with organs of proletarian power, founded on the armed workers’ councils; it exposes the hollowness of bourgeois democracy and proclaims that the council system alone enables the masses to exercise real authority; and it provides broad guidelines for the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the socialisation of production. These include the immediate socialisation of the main centres of capitalist industry and agriculture, the gradual integration of small independent producers into the socialised sector, and radical measures aimed at the replacement of the market by the equitable distribution of products.

In the struggle for victory, the platform insists on the need for a complete political break both with the right wing Social Democrats, “outright lackeys of capital and hangmen of the communist revolution” but also the Kautskyite centre. This position – diametrically opposed to the policy of the United Front adopted only two years later – had nothing to do with sectarianism, since it was combined with a call for unity with genuine proletarian forces, such as elements in the anarcho-syndicalist movement. Faced with the united front of the capitalist counter-revolution, which had already claimed the lives of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the platform calls for the development of mass struggles in all countries, leading towards a direct confrontation with the bourgeois state.

5. 1919: The programme of the dictatorship of the proletariat (International Review n°95)

The existence of a number of different national party programmes, as well as the platform of the Communist International, testifies to the persistence of a certain federalism even in the new International which strove to overcome the national autonomy that had contributed to the demise of the old. But the programme of the Russian party, drawn up at its 9th Congress in 1919, has a particular interest: whereas the programme of the KPD was the product of a party faced with the task of leading the working class in an impending revolution, the new programme of the Bolshevik party was a statement of the aims and methods of the first soviet power, of a real proletarian dictatorship. It was thus accompanied on the more concrete level by a series of decrees which expressed the policies of the soviet republic on various particular issues, even though, as Trotsky admitted, many of these decrees were more in the nature of propaganda statements than immediately realisable policies.

Like the platform of the CI, the programme begins by affirming the onset of the new period of capitalist decline and the necessity for the world proletarian revolution. It also restates the necessity for a complete break with the official social democratic parties.

The programme is then divided into the following sections:

General politics. The superiority of the soviet system over bourgeois democracy is demonstrated by its capacity to draw the immense majority of the exploited and oppressed into the running of the state. The programme points out that the workers’ soviets, by organising on the basis of workplace rather than residence, are a direct expression of the proletariat as a class; while the necessity for the proletariat to direct the revolutionary process is reflected in the disproportionate weight given to urban soviets over rural soviets. There is no theorisation of the idea of the party wielding power through the soviets. In fact the overriding concern of the programme, written during the rigours of the civil war, is to find means to counter-act the growing pressures of bureaucracy within the new state apparatus, by drawing a growing number of workers into the tasks of state management. In the terrible conditions facing the Russian proletariat, these measures proved inadequate, tending to turn militant workers into state bureaucrats rather than impose the will of the militant working class over the bureaucracy. Nevertheless this section reveals an early awareness of the dangers emanating from the state machinery.

The problem of nationality: beginning from a correct starting point – the need to overcome national divisions within the proletariat and the oppressed masses and to develop a common struggle against capital - the programme here displays one of its weaker sides by adopting the notion of national self-determination. At best this slogan can only mean self-determination for the bourgeoisie, and in the epoch of unbridled imperialism it can only involve transferring domination over national units from one imperialist master to the other. Rosa Luxemburg and others would point to the disastrous effects of this policy, by showing how all the nations granted “independence” by the Bolsheviks became bridgeheads of imperialist intervention against the soviet power.

Military affairs. The programme, having recognised the necessity for a Red Army to defend the new soviet regime in a situation of civil war, puts forward a number of measures aimed at ensuring that the new army really does remain an instrument of the proletariat: its ranks should be made up of the proletariat and semi-proletariat; its training methods should be informed by socialist principles; political commissars appointed from among the best communists should work alongside military staff and ensure that former Tsarist military experts worked entirely for the interests of the soviet power; at the same time, more and more officers should be drawn from the ranks of the class conscious workers. But the practise of the election of officers, which had been a demand of the original soldiers’ soviets, was not regarded as a principle and there was a debate at the 9th Congress, animated by the Democratic Centralism group, on the need to maintain the principles of the Commune even in the army, and to oppose the tendency for the army to return to the old hierarchical methods or organisation. A further weakness, and perhaps the most important one, was that the formation of the Red Army had been accompanied by the dissolution of the Red Guards, thus depriving the workers councils’ of their specific armed force in favour of an organ of a statist kind and thus far less responsive to the needs of the class struggle.

Proletarian Justice: the bourgeois courts were replaced by popular courts where the judges were elected from among the working class; the death penalty was to be abolished and the penal system was to be freed of any attitude of revenge. In the brutalising conditions of civil war, however, the death penalty was soon restored and the revolutionary tribunals set up to deal with the emergency situation often committed abuses, to say nothing of the activities of the Special Commissions against Counter Revolution, the Cheka, which more and more escaped the control of the soviets.

Education: given the terrible weight of Russian backwardness, many of the education reforms envisaged by the soviet state simply involved bringing Russia into line with the more enlightened educational practises already current in the bourgeois democracies (such as free and co-educational education for all children up to the age of 17). At the same time, however, the longer-term aim was to transform the school from an organ of bourgeois indoctrination into an instrument for the communist transformation of society. This would necessitate the overcoming of coercive and hierarchical methods, the elimination of the rigid separation between manual and mental labour, and in general the education of new generations into a world where learning and labour had become a pleasure rather than a curse.

Religion: while maintaining the need for the soviet power to conduct intelligent and sensitive propaganda aimed at combating the archaic religious prejudices of the masses, there was a complete rejection of any attempt to forcibly suppress religion, which, as the experience of Stalinism was to prove, only has the affect of strengthening religion’s grip.

Economic Affairs: while recognising that communism could only be established on a global scale, the programme contains general outlines of a proletarian economic policy in the area under its control: expropriation of the old ruling class, centralisation of the productive forces under the control of the soviets; mobilisation of all available labour power, using a new labour discipline founded on the principles of class solidarity; the gradual integration of independent producers into collective production. The programme also recognises the need for the working class to exert its collective management over the productive process; but it sees the instrument for achieving this not as the workers’ councils and the factory committees (which are not even mentioned in the programme), but the trade unions, which by their very nature tended to take collective control of production away from the working class and put in the hands of the state. Most crucially of all, the terrible conditions imposed by the civil war, which tended to disperse and even de-class the proletarian masses of the towns, made it increasingly difficult for the working class to control not only the factories but the state itself.

In the sphere of agriculture, there was a recognition that peasant-based production could not be collectivised overnight but would require a more or less long period of integration into the socialised sector; in the meantime the soviet power would encourage the class struggle in the countryside by giving its principal support to the poor peasants and rural semi-proletarians.

Distribution: the soviet power set itself the grandiose task of replacing trade with the purposive distribution of goods on the basis of need, to be coordinated through a network of consumer communes. And indeed, during the civil war period, the old monetary system more or less collapsed and was replaced by a system of requisitioning and rationing. But this was a product of the direst scarcity and necessity and did not really represent the advent of new communist social relations, even though it was often theorised as such. Real communisation can only be based on an ability to produce abundantly, and this can never be achieved by an isolated proletarian power.

Finance: this overoptimistic evaluation of War Communism was reflected in other areas, particularly the idea that simply combining all existing banks into a single state bank is a step towards the disappearance of banks as such. But the money system soon reappeared in Russia, having merely gone underground during the War Communism period; and so forms of money and means of storing money will persist as long as exchange relations have not been overcome by the creation of a unified human community.

Housing and public health: the proletarian power acted with considerable initiative to relieve homelessness and overcrowding, particularly through the expropriation of bourgeois, but its more far-sighted schemes to build a new urban environment were blocked by the harsh conditions of the post-insurrection period. The same applies to many of the other measures decreed by the soviet power: reduction in the working day, disability and unemployment benefit, drastic improvements in public sanitation. Here again the immediate aim was to bring Russia in line with standards already achieved by the more developed bourgeois countries; here again the new power was often prevented from bringing in real improvements because of the huge draining of resources towards the war effort.

6. 1920: Bukharin and the period of transition (International Review n°96)

As well as writing the programme of the Russian party, Bukharin wrote a theoretical study of the problems of the period of transition. Although in many respects a flawed work, certain elements of it represent a serious contribution to marxist theory, while an examination of its weaknesses also sheds light on the problems he was trying to pose.

Bukharin had been in the theoretical vanguard of the Bolshevik party during the imperialist war. His book Imperialism and World Economy paralleled Rosa Luxemburg’s investigation into the economic conditions of the new epoch of capitalist decline - The Accumulation of Capital. And Bukharin’s book was one of the first to show that the onset of this period had inaugurated a new stage in the organisation of capital – the stage of state capitalism, which he linked first and foremost to the global military struggle between imperialist nation states. In his article “Towards a theory of the imperialist state” Bukharin also adopted a very advanced position on the national question (again taking a view similar to Luxemburg’s on the impossibility of national liberation in the imperialist epoch) and on the question of the state, coming more rapidly than Lenin himself to the position defended in State and Revolution: the necessity for the destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus.

These conceptions are further developed in his Economics of the Transition Period, written in 1920. Here Bukharin reiterates the marxist view of the inevitably catastrophic and violent end of capitalist class rule, and thus of the necessity for proletarian revolution as the only basis for the construction of a new and higher mode of production. At the same time he goes more deeply into the characteristics of this new phase of capitalist decadence. He anticipates the growing tendency of senile capitalism towards the squandering and destruction of the accumulated productive forces, exemplified above all in war production, irrespective of the quantitative “growth” it may involve. He also shows how, in the conditions of state capitalism, the old workers’ parties and unions are “nationalised”, integrated into the monstrously hypertrophied machinery of the capitalist state.

In its broad lines, Bukharin’s articulation of the communist alternative to this decaying world system is perfectly clear: a world wide revolution founded on the self-activity of the working class in its new organs of combat, the soviets, a revolution aimed at welding the whole of humanity into a united world community which has replaced the blind laws of commodity production with the conscious regulation of social life.

But the means and goals of the proletarian revolution must be made concrete, and this can only be the result of living experience and reflection upon that experience. And it is here we come to the weak side of the book. Although in 1918 Bukharin was part of the Left Communist tendency in the Bolshevik party, for him this was first and foremost around the question of the Brest-Litovsk peace. Unlike other Left Communists, such as Ossinski, he was far less capable of developing a critical view of some of the early signs of the bureaucratisation of the soviet state. On the contrary, if anything, his book tended to serve as an apology for the status quo during the period of the civil war, since it was above all a theoretical justification for the measures of “War Communism” as the expression of an authentic process of communist transformation.

Thus, for Bukharin, the virtual disappearance of money and wages during the civil war – a direct result of the collapse of the capitalist economy – already signifies the overcoming of exploitation and the advent of a form of communism. In a similar way, a dire necessity imposed on the proletarian bastion in Russia - a war of fronts conducted by a Red Army – became not only a “norm” of the period of revolutionary struggles but also the model for the extension of the revolution, which has now been transformed into an epic battle between capitalist and proletarian states. On this point, the “left” Bukharin was far to the right of Lenin, who never forgot that the extension of the revolution was above all a political task and not primarily a military one.

One of the ironies of Bukharin’s book is that, having clearly identified state capitalism as the universal form of capitalist organisation in the epoch of capitalist decline, it becomes wilfully blind to the danger of state capitalism after the proletarian revolution. Under the “proletarian state”, under the system of “proletarian nationalisations”, exploitation became impossible. And by the same token, since the new state is the organic expression of the proletariat’s historic interests, there is everything to be gained by fusing all of the class organs of the workers into the state apparatus, and even by restoring the most hierarchical practices in the management of social and economic life. There is no awareness at all that the transitional state, as the expression of the need to hold together a disparate and transitory social formation, might play a conservative role and even come to detach itself from the interests of the working class.

In the period after 1921, Bukharin underwent a rapid trajectory from the left to the right of the party. But in fact there was a continuity in this evolution: a tendency to accommodate with the status quo. If ETP is an attempt to declare that the harsh regime of War Communism is already the goal of the proletariat’s strivings, it was not a huge leap a few years later to proclaim that the New Economic Policy, which gave free rein to the market forces that had merely been “displaced” in the previous phase, was already the antechamber of socialism. Bukharin even more than Stalin was the theoretician of “socialism in one country” and the precedent is already there in the absurd claims that the isolated Russian bastion of 1918-20, in which the proletariat was being decimated by civil war and increasingly subject to the growth of a new bureaucratic leviathan, was already a communist society.

7. 1920: the KAPD programme (International Review n°97)

The isolation of the revolution in Russia was to have a negative impact on the political positions of the new Communist International, which began to retreat on the clarity it had exhibited at its first Congress, not least towards the social democratic parties. Previously denounced as parties of the bourgeoisie, the CI began to formulate the tactic of the “United Front” with these same parties, partly in an attempt to widen support for the stricken Russian bastion. The rise of opportunism in the CI was vigorously opposed by the left communist currents in a number of countries, but in particular Italy and Germany.

One of the early manifestations of the rise of opportunism in the CI was Lenin’s pamphlet Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, and this text has since served as the basis for numerous distortions about the communist left, and especially about the German left in the shape of the KAPD, which was excluded from the KPD in 1920. The KAPD is accused of indulging in the “sectarian” policy trying to replace real workers’ trade unions with artificial “revolutionary unions”; it is accused above all of lapsing into anarchism in its approach to vital questions such as parliament and the role of the party.

It is true that the KAPD, which was the product of a tragic and premature rupture in the German party, was never a homogeneous organisation. It contained a number of elements who were indeed influenced by anarchism; and, in the reflux of the revolution, this influence was to give birth to the councilist ideas which largely took hold of the German communist movement. But a brief examination of the KAPD programme shows that, at its best, the KAPD represented a high point of marxist clarity:

• as opposed to anarchism, the programme is situated in the objective historical circumstances of world capitalism: the new period of capitalist decadence opened up by the world war, and posing the alternative between socialism and barbarism;
• as opposed to anarchism, the programme expresses without reserve its solidarity with the Russian revolution and affirms the necessity for its world-wide extension, with Germany being specifically identified as the key to this whole perspective;
• the KAPD’s opposition to parliamentarism and the trade unions is likewise based not on any kind of timeless moralism or obsession with forms, but on an understanding of the new conditions imposed by the advent of the epoch of proletarian revolution, where parliament and the unions could henceforward only serve the class enemy;
• the same applies to the KAPD’s advocacy of the factory organisations and the workers’ councils. These were not artificial forms dreamed up by a handful of revolutionaries, but concrete organisational expressions of the real movement of the class in the new period. Even if there could not be complete clarity about the nature of the factory organisations (which the KAPD still saw as a kind of permanent precursor of the councils, based on a minimal political programme), they were anything but an artificial product at the time, regrouping some of the most militant workers in Germany;
• far from being anti-party, the programme (which was accompanied by theses on the role of the party in the revolution) clearly affirms the indispensable role of the party as a nucleus of communist intransigence and clarity within the general movement of the class;

In the same way, the programme defends without hesitation the marxist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In the practical measures it puts forward, the KAPD programme is in direct continuity with the programme of the KPD, in particular in its call for the dissolution of all parliamentary and municipal bodies and their replacement by a centralised system of workers’ councils. The 1920 programme, however, is clearer on the international tasks of the revolution, calling for example for immediate fusion with other soviet republics. It also goes further into the problem of the economic content of the revolution, emphasising the necessity to take immediate steps towards gearing production towards need (even if we can take issue with the programme’s contention that the formation of a “socialist economic bloc” with Russia alone could make significant steps towards communism). Finally, the programme raises some “new” issues not dealt with by the 1918 programme, such as the proletarian approach to art, science, education and youth, which shows that the KAPD was far from being a purely “workerist” current and was interested in all the issues posed by the communist transformation of social life.

CDW

In the first part of this article (published in International Review n°124), we examined the historical context within which the IWW was founded, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, in the watershed between capitalism’s ascendancy and decadence. Based on its theory of “industrial unionism”, the Industrial Workers of the World tried to find an answer to the problems posed by the increasing inability of “parliamentary cretinism” and the reformist union of Samuel Gompers’ American Federation of Labor (AFL) to confront the evolution of both capitalism and the class struggle. Contrary to the federalist vision of the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, the IWW’s founders set out to build a centralised, unified class-struggle organization which would be able to bring together the whole proletariat for the seizure of power, and to offer a framework for the exercise of proletarian power after the revolution.

In this article, we will see how far the IWW’s theory and practice allowed it to live up to its own goals, and to the greatest challenge yet faced by the workers’ movement world wide: the outbreak of history’s first great inter-imperialist conflict in 1914.

For or against “politics”?

The IWW preamble adopted at the founding convention was clear in its commitment to the revolutionary destruction of capitalism. “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life (…) Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system (…) It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.” The organization was not clear, however, on the nature of this revolution or how it would made. It was not even clear whether the revolution would be a political or an economic act. So while the IWW permitted and even welcomed the participation of political organizations and activists within its ranks and its members supported socialist candidates at the poll, even from the outset it harbored considerable confusions on the nature of political action for the proletariat.

In 1905, Socialist Party members present at the founding convention assumed that the IWW would endorse the Socialist Party.[1] [89] Their DeLeonist rivals hoped that the IWW’s allegiance could be won by the Socialist Labor Party. Such naive expectations seriously underestimated the political skepticism that would prevail at the founding convention. Despite their Marxist sympathies, the dominant view amongst the IWW’s founders held that for the workers the political struggle was subordinate to the economic. For example, prior to the convention the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) had written, “Experience has taught us that the economic organization and the political organization must be distinct and apart from each other (…) To our mind it becomes necessary to unite the workers upon the industrial domain, before it is possible to unite them in the political arena.”[2] [90]

Despite the sharply divergent views on politics, in the interests of unity, the convention formulated a convolutedly worded concession to socialists from both parties, by agreeing to the insertion of a political paragraph in the preamble to the IWW constitution, which read as follows: “Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as the industrial field, and take hold of that which they produce by their labor, through an economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party.” For most delegates this concessionary reference to politics was incomprehensible. One delegate complained, “I cannot afford to have brother DeLeon along with me every time I meet a man to explain what this paragraph means.” [3] [91]

The opposition to politics derived from a theoretical misunderstanding of the nature of the class struggle and the proletarian revolution and of the proletariat’s political tasks. For the IWW,  “political” had a very narrow meaning: it meant parliamentarism, the participation in bourgeois elections. According to this perspective political action, i.e., participation in elections, offered only propagandistic value in demonstrating the futility of electoralism, as exemplified in this statement: “The only value that political activity has to the working class is from the standpoint of agitation and education. Its educational merit consists solely in proving to the workers its utter inefficacy to curb the power of the ruling class and therefore forcing the workers to rely on the organization of their class in the industries of the world.

 “It is impossible for any one to be a part of the capitalist state and to use the machinery of the state in the interest of the workers. All they can do is to make the attempt, and be impeached – as they will be—and furnish object lessons to the workers, of the class character of the state.” [4] [92]

These statements are rife with confusion. It is ironic that although the anti-politicals detested DeLeon they shared many of his theoretical conceptions, such as:

• the primacy of the economic over the political struggle;
• the equation of politics with the ballot box;
• the rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat;
• the failure to understand that under the conditions of an historically progressive capitalism, it was indeed possible to participate in parliament to wrest reforms from the bourgeoisie;
• the failure to differentiate between reforms (like the 8-hour day, restrictions on child labor, etc) won in the course of class struggle from the counter revolutionary doctrine of reformism that held that socialism could be achieved peaceably through the ballot box.

When Wobblies railed against politics because it was impossible to use the capitalist state for working class revolutionary purposes they revealed an ignorance of one fundamental lesson that Marx drew from the experience of the Paris Commune: the recognition that the proletariat must destroy the capitalist state. What could be more political than the destruction of the capitalist state, the seizure of the means of production, and the imposition of the proletarian revolutionary perspective over the whole of society? The proletarian revolution will be the most audacious and thoroughgoing social and political act in all of human history – a revolution in which the exploited and oppressed masses rise up, destroy the state power of the exploiting class, and impose their own revolutionary class dictatorship over society in order to achieve the transition to communism. From the correct realization that the workers could not take hold of the bourgeois state and wield it to advance their revolutionary program, the anti-politicals wrongly concluded that the proletarian revolution was an economic, not a political act. Like the anarchists, the anti-politicals in the IWW ended up by concluding that they could ignore, not just parliament but the power of the bourgeois state itself. They believed this in spite of their own experience in the free speech fights which took place not at the point of production, but in the streets as an act of political confrontation with the state.[5] [93] Nor, despite these bitter clashes in which the ruling class frequently rode roughshod over its own laws, did the IWW have any inkling that the time was fast approaching when the bourgeois parliament and law would be nothing but a mask for the most ruthless exercise of power against the proletarian threat. This was to have catastrophic consequences, as we shall see, and it is a tragedy of historical proportions that so many dedicated and courageous militants were to enter the coming struggles bereft of such fundamental aspects of the Marxist perspective.

The political compromise embodied in the arcane wording of the political paragraph in the 1905 preamble was not sufficient to maintain the unity of the organization. By the 1908 convention, the anti-political perspective triumphed. DeLeon was barred from attending the convention on a credentials technicality, and he and his followers split to form their own IWW based in Detroit that was subordinate to the SLP, and doomed to as inauspicious an existence as the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance before it. Debs, along with many other Socialist Party members, permitted their membership to lapse and withdrew from IWW activities. Even the WFM, which had played such a vital role in the founding of the IWW, withdrew from the organization. Haywood remained in the organization and in 1911 served simultaneously as a leading member of the IWW and a board member of the Socialist Party, until he was removed from the latter after membership in the IWW was deemed incompatible by the Socialists because of the IWW’s stance on sabotage and opposition to political action.

Revolutionary party or unitary organization?

For the IWW the industrial union was an all-in-one organizational form. The union would not simply be a unitary organization that would serve as a mechanism for working class self defense and the form for proletarian rule after the revolution, but would also be an organization of revolutionary militants and agitators. According to its 1908 constitution, the IWW believed that “the army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”  As we have pointed out earlier in this series, this syndicalist vision that sees the possibility to form “the structure of the new society within the shell of the old (…) springs from a profound incomprehension of the degree of antagonism between capitalism, the last exploiting society, and the classless society which must replace it. This serious error leads to underestimating the depth of social transformation necessary to carry out the transition between these two social forms, and it also underestimated the resistance of the ruling class to the seizure of power by the working-class.” [6] [94]

Moreover, the conception that the same organization could simultaneously be a revolutionary organization of class conscious workers and agitators and an organization open to all workers in the class struggle within capitalism revealed a double confusion characteristic of revolutionary syndicalism.

The first of these confusions was the failure to distinguish between the two types of organization that have historically been secreted by the working class: revolutionary organizations and unitary organizations. The IWW failed to appreciate that a revolutionary organization regrouping militants on the basis of a shared agreement on, and commitment to, revolutionary principles and a revolutionary program, is in essence a political organization, a class party in fact if not in name. Such an organization can only, by definition, regroup a minority of the working class: its most politically conscious and dedicated members who, in the words of the 1848 Communist Manifesto “are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement”. The failure to appreciate this difference condemned the IWW to an unstable existence. The open door to membership that the organization maintained was literally a revolving door, through which perhaps as many as a million workers entered and just as quickly exited between 1905 and 1917. Newly chartered local union branches were created, only to quickly disappear without a trace as soon as the struggle which had brought them into being came to an end.

The tension resulting from the contradictory conception of being a revolutionary organization and a mass membership organization open to all workers would ultimately contribute to the historic failure of the IWW during the revolutionary wave that followed World War I. The IWW’s view of itself as a mass membership union that regrouped all workers increasingly led union-building concerns to predominate over revolutionary principle.

The second confusion sprang from the IWW’s failure to understand that, as fervently as they sought to defend the interests of their class, the battle waged by the industrial unionists against craft and business unionism was increasingly anachronistic. The historic period changed in the early 20th century with the completion and saturation of the world market, which ushered in the onset of capitalist decadence and brought to an end the period when it was possible to fight for durable reforms. Under these changed conditions, the trade union form of organization itself, whether industrial or craft, became irrelevant to the class struggle and was doomed either to disappear, or to be absorbed into the capitalist state apparatus as a mechanism for controlling the working class. The experience of the mass strike in Russia in 1905 and the discovery of soviets, or workers councils, by the proletariat in that country was an historical watershed for the world proletariat. The lessons of these developments and their impact on class struggle were the focus of theoretical work by Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Anton Pannekoek, and others in the leftwing of the Second International. In the real struggle of the proletariat, as opposed to the theory of revolutionary syndicalism, workers’ councils displaced the trade unions as the unitary organization of the working class. This new type of organization united workers from all industries in a given territorial area for the revolutionary confrontation with the ruling class and constituted the “historically discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (to use Lenin’s expression).  Equally importantly, the experience of 1905 showed that the mass unitary organization of the working class in its struggle for power could not maintain itself as a permanent organization within capitalism once that struggle had been – temporarily – defeated. While the founding IWW convention expressed its solidarity with the 1905 struggle of the Russian proletariat, the theoretical work elaborating the significance of the Russian experience was completely lost on the IWW, which never recognized the significance of the changed period or of the workers councils, and continued to laud “industrial unionism [as] the road to freedom.”[7] [95] 

The failure to learn from the real, concrete experience of 1905, or even to take any notice of the theoretical developments taking place within the left wing of the Social Democracy (which would later become the backbone of the Communist International), was only a particularly damaging aspect of the fact that, in general, the theoretical work of the IWW was extremely weak. The theoretical aspects of the propaganda published by the IWW for the most part repeated basic Marxist conceptions pertaining to surplus value, the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but failed to take account of the deepening and further elaboration of Marxist theory undertaken by the leftwing of Social-Democracy. On the historic level the IWW added little or nothing to the theory of Marxism or even to the theory of syndicalism. As historian Melvyn Dubofsky has noted, the IWW “offered no genuinely original ideas, no sweeping explanations of social change, no fundamental theories of revolution.”[8] [96] Its critique of capitalism never transcended a visceral hatred of the system’s exploitation and oppression, and never attempted to examine the nuances and intricacies of capitalist development and understand the significance of the consequent changing conditions under which the working class waged its struggles.

One disastrous exception to the avoidance of theoretical elaboration was the IWW’s effort to explain more deeply its conception of “direct action”, which led to a naïve theoretical advocacy and defense of “sabotage” in the class struggle, a term which made it vulnerable to charges of terrorism. The IWW’s definition of sabotage excluded the taking of human life, but it confounded a broad range of activities that could be considered routine tactics in the daily class struggle, such as mass work-to-rule slowdowns or “open mouth sabotage” in which workers make public embarrassing company secrets, with purely individual actions that had more in common with the anarchists’ petty bourgeois notion of “propaganda by the deed” than with working class methods of mass struggle. For example, the IWW defended an incident in a Chicago theatre, in which someone “simply dropped some vile smelling chemicals upon the floor during the performance and then made a quiet and speedy exit.”[9] [97] Some IWW soap box orators demagogically advocated the use of bombs and dynamite. Finding it difficult to reconcile the glorification of sabotage by individual or small groups of workers with its commitment to mass struggle, the IWW resolved the contradiction by declaring it did not exist: “Individual acts of sabotage, performed to the end that class benefit be derived, can in no way militate against solidarity. Rather they promote unity. The saboteur involves no one but himself and is impelled to take the risk by reason of his strong class desires.” [10] [98]   

Hesitation in the face of war

Moments of war and revolution are historically determinant for organizations that claim to defend proletarian class interests, a litmus test revealing their true class nature. In this sense, the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 revealed the betrayal of the major parties of the Social Democracy in Europe who rallied to the side of their respective bourgeoisies, supported the global imperialist war, turned their backs on the principles of proletarian internationalism and opposition to imperialist war, participated in the mobilization of the proletariat for the slaughter, and in so doing crossed the class line to the camp of the bourgeoisie.

For its part, the IWW had nothing but contempt for patriotism. In their words, “of all the idiotic and perverted ideas accepted by the workers from that class who live upon their misery, patriotism is the worst.” The Wobblies adhered formally to principles of proletarian internationalism, and opposed the war. In 1914, shortly after war erupted in Europe, the IWW convention adopted a resolution that stated, “…the industrial movement will wipe out all boundaries and establish an international relationship between all races engaged in  industry…We, as members of the industrial army, will refuse to fight for any purpose except for the realization of industrial freedom.” In 1916, the 10th Annual Convention adopted a resolution that committed the organization to a program advocating “anti-militarist propaganda in time of peace, thus promoting Class Solidarity among the workers of the entire world, and, in time of war, the General Strike in all industries.”[11] [99]  

But when US imperialism entered the war on the side of the Allies in April 1917, the IWW failed miserably to put its internationalism and anti-militarism into practice. Instead the organization lapsed into a centrist hesitancy, characterized by caution and inaction. Unlike the AFL, the IWW never endorsed the war or participated in mobilizing the proletariat for the slaughter. But neither did it take up an active opposition to the war. Unlike the socialists, it never even adopted a resolution denouncing the war. Instead, antiwar pamphlets like The Deadly Parallel were withdrawn from circulation. IWW soapbox speakers stopped agitating against war. Representing the views of a majority of the General Executive Board, Haywood regarded the war as a distraction from the class struggle and the more important work of building the union and feared that active opposition to the war would open the IWW up to repression.[12] [100] Solidarity editor Ben Williams lashed out at what he termed “meaningless” anti-war gestures. “In the case of war,” wrote Williams, “we want the One Big Union (…) to come out of the conflict stronger and with more industrial control than previously. Why should we sacrifice working class interests for the sake of a few noisy and impotent parades or antiwar demonstrations? Let us rather get on with the job of organizing the working class to take over the industries, war or no war, and stop all future capitalist aggression that leads to war and other forms of barbarism.”[13] [101]  Here was the fruit of accumulated confusions: the IWW did not understand the significance of the world war, the dawn of the age of war or revolution and the changed conditions of class struggle that accompanied it; nor did the organization understand its tasks as a revolutionary organization (a party in fact) but instead focused on its outdated role as a mass membership union with the perspective of growth in a business as usual framework.

Despite the promise of their 1916 resolution to “extend assurances of both moral and material support to all workers who suffer at the hands of the capitalist class for their adherence to these [anti-war] principles”, individual militants who faced a choice of submitting to conscription into the imperialist war or resisting were told that it was an individual decision, and received no organizational support. Many IWW leaders were correctly opposed to interclassist anti-war demonstrations and organizations and accurately argued that the IWW did not have sufficient influence within the proletariat to organize a successful antiwar general strike. However, they appeared equally unwilling to seek ways in which they could find a way to oppose the imperialist war on the working class terrain. In a letter to Frank Little, a leader of the anti-war faction on the General Executive Board, Haywood counseled, “Keep a cool head; do not talk. A good many feel as you do but the world war is of small importance compared to the great class war (…) .I am at a loss as to definite steps to be taken against the war.”[14] [102] This advice (which represented the majority view in the GEB) expressed a complete underestimation of the significance of the historic period ushered in by the world war and left the IWW totally disarmed in the face of the coming state repression.

James Slovick, secretary of the IWW’s Maritime Transport Union wrote to Haywood in February 1917 before the US entered the war and recommended preparations for a general strike against the coming war, even if it meant risking the destruction of the organization. Presciently, Slovick was convinced that the bourgeoisie would use the war as a pretext for an all out attack on the IWW whether it took action against the war or not. He contended that an antiwar general strike would have historical importance and demonstrate that the IWW was the only workers’ organization in the world to fight to end the butchery, urging that an emergency IWW convention be convened to decide the matter. Haywood deflected the request: “Of course, it is impossible for this office (…) to take action on your individual initiative. However, I place your communication on the file for future reference.”  In the face of the bourgeoisie’s preparations for entry into the global imperialist slaughter, a request for an emergency convention of the Continental Congress of the working class to discuss an appropriate proletarian response was filed for future reference! By none other than the firebrand Big Bill Haywood!  All because opposing the imperialist butchery would might disrupt the work of building the union!

 For his part, Frank Little regarded the imperialist war as capitalism’s gravest crime against the world working class and advocated a campaign against conscription. He argued, “The IWW is opposed to all wars and we must use all our power to prevent the workers from joining the army.” Against those who warned that opposition to conscription would provoke state repression and doom the IWW, Little responded, “Better to go out in a blaze of glory than give in.”[15] [103] Little’s voice in the internal IWW debate was silenced when he was murdered by management thugs during a miners’ strike in Montana in the summer of 1917. But even this view, while it had the merit of a steadfast defense of proletarian internationalism, suffered from political naivety in its fatalistic acceptance of repression.

Instead of attacking the war, and preparing its leadership and militants for clandestine activity, the IWW focused on union building efforts, organizing struggles in industries deemed vulnerable to pressure, apparently determined that if they were to be attacked by the government it would be for something important like fighting for better wages, rather than against the war. In an irony of history, it was the IWW, which consciously chose not to actively fight against the war once the US had entered the conflict, and not the socialist parties that opposed the war, that was targeted for repression. While individual socialists, like Eugene Debs who had spoken openly against conscription, were arrested and imprisoned, only the IWW, as an organization, faced indictment for conspiracy to sabotage the war effort. In this sense the war provided a pretext for the bourgeoisie to take revenge on the IWW for its past activities and for the fear it inspired. Indeed, we can perhaps say that the American bourgeoisie was more aware than the IWW’s leaders themselves of the danger that the organization represented. One hundred and sixty-five IWW leaders were indicted on September 28, 1917 on charges of obstructing the war effort and conscription, and conspiring to sabotage and interfere with the normal contractual economic functioning in society. The government was so intent on exploiting this opportunity to decapitate the IWW, that it even indicted people who were already dead or had left the organization long before the US entered the war. For example, among the indicted Wobblies were:

• Frank Little, who had been murdered in August 1917;
• Gurley Flynn and Joseph Ettor who had been expelled from the organization in 1916, long before the US entered the war;
• Vincent St. John, who had resigned from the organization, left politics, and gone off to prospect in the New Mexico desert in 1914.

At the Great Trial, the Wobbly defendants argued that they had not tried to interfere with the war effort. They pointed out that of the 521 wartime labor strikes, only three were organized by the IWW, the rest by the AFL. In his testimony, Haywood disowned the views of Frank Little, and pointed out that anti-war literature such as Deadly Parallel and the Sabotage pamphlet had been withdrawn from circulation once the US entered the war.

Despite the fact they were innocent of the charges, the Wobblies were convicted after less than an hour of jury deliberation, and the bulk of the IWW’s leadership were sent off to Leavenworth in chains. The organization fell under the control of decentralizing anarcho-syndicalists and went into decline, despite its involvement in general strikes in Winnipeg, Canada and Seattle, and important struggles in Butte Montana, and Toledo, Ohio.

The failure of the IWW

The romanticized image of the Wobbly organizer persists even today in American culture, an image of a rugged, itinerant revolutionary, who hops freight trains and hoboes from town to town, propagandizing and agitating for the One Big Union – a proletarian knight in shining armor. This model of the revolutionary as an exemplary individual figure, so appealing to the anarchist temperament, is of no interest to the proletariat. The class struggle is not waged by isolated, heroic individuals, but by the collective effort of the working class, a class that is both an exploited and  a revolutionary class, whose strength is not found in the brilliance of individuals but in the capacity of masses of workers to come to consciousness, to discuss and debate, and to take unified action.

Despite the IWW’s well-founded antagonism to political opportunism and parliamentary cretinism, the theoretical inadequacies characteristic of revolutionary syndicalism left it incapable of understanding the political tasks of the proletariat. The IWW militated in an extremely significant period in the history of the class struggle. It was a period in which world capitalism reached its historic apogee, became a fetter on the further development of the productive forces, and entered its decadent phase. No longer a historically progressive system, capitalism became ripe for revolutionary overthrow and replacement by a new mode of production controlled by the world working class. It was a period in which the proletariat, through its experiences in Russia in 1905, discovered the mass strike as a means to wage its struggle and the workers’ councils as the means to organize its revolutionary class dictatorship and to accomplish the transformation of society. It was a period in which decadent capitalism placed the historic choice of war or revolution before humanity, not as an abstract question, but as an immediate practical issue. These events and struggles gave impetus to a tremendous theoretical undertaking by the leftwing of the Social-Democracy to understand the forces in play, to draw the rapidly emerging lessons of class struggle, and to help shape the way forward. But in the midst of this swirl of historic events and theoretical elaboration, the IWW’s vision of class struggle and revolution remained mired in the framework of the trade unionist debate between craft and industrial unionism that characterized ascendant capitalism and which no longer corresponded to the tasks confronting the proletariat under capitalist decadence.

In the face of the first imperialist world war, the global conflagration that forced those who claimed to defend revolutionary principles and proletarian internationalism to reveal their true class nature, the IWW’s much vaunted internationalism collapsed into hesitancy and centrism. The majority of its leadership, including Haywood regarded the imperialist world war and resistance to that butchery not as a defining moment in the class struggle but rather as a distraction from the “real” work of building the union. In a twist of irony, notwithstanding the IWW’s hesitancy to struggle against World War I, the American ruling class seized the moment as an opportunity to use the organization’s past revolutionary rhetoric against it, and unleashed an unprecedented repressive attack against it,  which essentially decapitated it and confined it to the status of an anarcho-syndicalist cult ever after.

Any organization that clings to theoretical conceptions invalidated by history and by concrete experience is condemned either to disappear or to survive as a sect, incapable of understanding, much less of influencing, the class struggle. A vestigial anarchist sect that still calls itself the IWW celebrated its centenary last year but has no capacity whatever to contribute positively to the revolutionary struggle. The best militants in the IWW were lost to state repression at the end of World War I and to the new communist parties after it. The Russian Revolution held a tremendous attraction for the non-anarchists in the IWW, “drawing adherents like flies.”[16] [104] Prominent Wobblies who moved towards the newly founded Communist Party included Harrison George, George Mink, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, John Reed, Harold Harvey, George Hardy, Charles Ashleigh, Ray Brown, and Earl Browder – some of whom later became Stalinists. Big Bill Haywood also moved towards communism, even if he remained in the IWW until he fled to exile in Russia in 1922.  “Big Bill Haywood had told Ralph Chaplin, ‘the Russian Revolution is the greatest event in our lives. It represents all that we have been dreaming of and fighting for all our lives. It is the dawn of freedom and industrial democracy’.”[17] [105] Haywood became disillusioned with the Russian Revolution, in part because he was disappointed that the revolution did not take a syndicalist form, but a comment he made to Max Eastman succinctly summed up the failure of the IWW’s revolutionary syndicalism, of which he was such an important architect: “The IWW reached out and grabbed an armful. It tried to grab the whole world and a part of the world has jumped ahead of it.”[18] [106]  

There is no doubt that the revolutionary syndicalists of the IWW were profoundly dedicated to their class, but their response to opportunism, reformism and parliamentary cretinism was completely off the mark. Their industrial unionism and revolutionary syndicalism did not correspond to the historic period. The world had “jumped ahead of it” and left it far behind.

The organizational failure to understand what politics really means for the working class and to realize that their role was fundamentally that of a political party led to the great failure of the IWW faced with the imperialist war. First the organization as a whole failed completely to give a political leadership to the proletariat against the war. Second, the utter failure to understand what the war meant on the historic level in the development of capitalism led the leadership to trust in bourgeois democracy and “due process of law” at the Great IWW Trial. As a result the IWW was essentially smashed, its treasury depleted, its leading militants imprisoned or in exile, and this left it incapable of playing its part in throwing the immense weight of the American proletariat into the balance in support of the revolution in Russia.

J.Grevin

The first articles in this series looked back to examine what this change meant by contrasting the form and the content of 1905 with what had gone before, and how this corresponded to the new period of capitalism’s decadence. We showed that the unions had been superseded by the soviets as the organisational form best suited to the purpose and nature of the struggle now being undertaken by the working class. We have shown that it was wrong to consider the soviets as a product of Russia’s supposed backwardness and have highlighted, on the contrary, the fact that the formation of the soviets was an expression of the advanced level of consciousness achieved by the working class. In this new period, faced with new tasks the unions ceased to be a means for advancing the interests of the working class and increasingly became transformed into an obstacle to the development of the struggle and a trap for the militancy of the working class and its most determined elements. The development of unions in Russia in 1905 and again in 1917 reflected the revolutionary fervour of the working class that tried to make use of any means to advance its struggle, but also a real inexperience of the unions. It was the soviets that led the struggle and that gave it its revolutionary nature; the unions merely trailed behind.

The emergence of the soviets was inseparable from the mass strike, which appeared as the means for struggling against capitalism when partial reforms and palliatives were no longer attainable. Like the soviets, it arose from the needs of the class as a whole and not only drew the working class together but developed its class consciousness. In doing this it confronted the limitations of the unions and parts of the revolutionary movement who could only see in such a movement the spectre of anarchism. It fell to the left of the workers’ movement, with Rosa Luxemburg and then Anton Pannekoek in the lead, to defend the mass strike, not as a mere tactic of the leadership, but as an elemental, revolutionary and renewing force springing from the heart of the working class, capable of uniting its militancy and its consciousness at a new and higher level.

1905 showed that the struggle for reforms was being superseded by the struggle for revolution.

We have also shown that these changes were not specific to Russia, but affected the whole working class as capitalism entered its decadent phase. The working class, which had consolidated itself as an international class capable of fighting for its interests, would henceforth be faced with the struggle to overthrow capitalism and transform the relations of production rather than struggle for improvements within them. Around the world, the decades before the First World War saw an escalation and intensification of strikes that began to put the old ways of organising and old aims of struggle into question and which from time to time flared into open conflict with the state. In short, after 1905 the struggle of the working class became the struggle for communism.

The real significance of 1905 is thus that it pointed to the future and prepared the way for all of the struggles undertaken in decadent capitalism. That is, for all of the struggles of the last hundred years, for those of today and those of tomorrow.

1905 opens the road to the future

The role 1905 played in preparing the future could be seen with great clarity in 1917 when the soviets were the first weapon of the revolution. They were the form it took. Soviet power stood against the bourgeois power of the provisional government, as Trotsky eloquently describes in his History of the Russian Revolution:

“What was the real constitution of the country after the inauguration of the new power?

“The monarchist reaction was hiding in the cracks. With the very first ebb of the wave, the property owners of all kinds and tendencies gathered around the banner of the Kadet Party, which had suddenly become the only non-socialist party – and at the same time the extreme right party – in the open arena.

“…The masses poured into the Soviet as though into the triumphal gates of the revolution. All that remained outside the boundaries of the Soviet seemed to fall away from the revolution, seemed somehow to belong to a different world…

“…all the active elements of the masses poured into the Soviet, and activity prevails in times of revolution. Moreover, since mass activity was growing from day to day, the basis of the Soviet was continually broadening. It was the sole genuine basis of the revolution”.[1] [126]

The soviets and only the soviets are the organisational form appropriate both to the means and the ends of the struggle for communism. However, this was far from clear at the time, in particular for revolutionaries in Russia. This became evident during the discussion on the union question at the first congress of the Third International, as we show in the article “From Marx to the Communist Left, iii” in International Review n°123.[2] [127] In the discussion delegates from many European countries firmly denounced the counter-revolutionary role now played by the unions. In contrast, Zinoviev, making the report on Russia, argued: “The second form of worker’ organisation in Russia is the trade unions. They developed differently here than in Germany: they played an important revolutionary role in the years 1904-1905, and today are marching side by side with us in the struggle for socialism (…) A large majority of trade union members support our party’s positions, and all decisions of the unions are made in the spirit of those positions”. This in no way confirms that the unions in Russia had any special virtues, but is simply due to certain specificities of the Russian situation and, as the article just referred to concludes, “they were carried along in the wake of the soviets”: during the revolutionary phase, their role as instruments of the capitalist state against the working class was less evident in Russia than elsewhere.

While the revolution of 1917 was made possible by 1905 it did not lead on to the worldwide communist revolution. That could only have happened in 1917 if the revolution had succeeded in spreading and triumphing around the world. Nonetheless, many of its lessons have been drawn by the isolated groups of revolutionaries that survived the crushing of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and who have sought to rebuild the revolutionary movement. This has been the particular role of the communist left. The lessons have also been proved time and again by the experience of the working class in its day to day struggles and by its greater efforts, such as in Poland in the early 1980s. The drawing of those lessons began immediately after 1905 and it is to this work that we now turn.

Drawing the lessons of 1905 – the question of method

In this last part of our series we will look at how the revolutionary movement responded, both as regards the development of its positions and also as regards the methods it used. This is not an unimportant point if one considers that a change in the real situation requires a change in the means to comprehend that situation.

What is striking about the theoretical struggle and debate undertaken after 1905 is its collective and international nature, even though the participants were not always fully aware of these characteristics.

Whereas after the Paris Commune of 1870 Marx was able, on behalf of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association (the First International), to summarise its significance in a single pamphlet, after 1905 this was not possible, largely due to the complexity of the questions posed.

 In particular, the revolutionaries of the time were confronted with an unprecedented change in the historical period, a change that challenged many of the assumptions and acquisitions of the workers movement, such as the role of the unions and the form of the class struggle. The achievement of the left of the workers movement was not just that it sought to take up this challenge but that it attained such a profound level of insight into so many questions and left such a magnificent legacy of theoretical effort and, above all, a remarkable mastery of the marxist method. This achievement far outweighs the inevitable gaps and weaknesses in their efforts. To expect anything else, to expect perfection is not merely naive but shows a failure to understand the real nature of marxism and of the whole struggle of the working class. It would be like expecting the working class to win every strike, to see through every manoeuvre of the ruling class and ultimately to have been capable of making the communist revolution on the day it was born.

The sometimes fragmented nature of the debate and the contributions to it was not a weakness but an inevitable consequence of the development taking place in the form of the theoretical struggle that was a counterpart of the development of the "practical" struggle. Indeed, one can go so far as to say that the counterpart of the mass strike is the mass theoretical struggle. Obviously, the latter does not embrace the same numbers as the former, but it does express the same collective spirit and requires the same qualities of solidarity, modesty and self-sacrifice. Above all it requires active engagement, as our comrades of Internationalisme stressed nearly sixty years ago: “Against the idea that militants can only act on the basis of certainties…we insist that there are no certainties but only a continual process of going beyond what were formerly truths. Only an activity based on the most recent developments, on foundations that are being continually enriched, is really revolutionary. In contrast, activity based on yesterday’s truths that have already lost their currency is sterile, harmful and reactionary. One might try to feed the members with absolute certainties and truths, but only relative truths which contain an antithesis of doubt can give rise to a revolutionary synthesis”.[3] [128] It is this that separated the left of the workers movement - Lenin, Luxemburg, Pannekoek etc - from the centre embodied by Kautsky and the openly revisionist right headed by Bernstein. The gulf between the centre and the left could be seen in the debate over the mass strike where Kautsky was unable to see the underlying changes in the class struggle that Luxemburg analysed. Unable to go beyond the vision of the past, in which the mass strike was just a tool to be used by the central committee of the party, Kautsky saw nothing in Luxemburg’s arguments and in the second stage of the discussion even tried to block their publication.[4] [129]

The debates after 1905

It is possible to identify some of the key features of the documents and debates that appeared after 1905:

• they shared with the practical lessons of 1905 the characteristics of being tendencies rather than finished products;
• no single work was produced that provided a comprehensive analysis;
• no individual addressed every aspect of the subject;
• much of the discussion emerged from already existing discussions, such as on the mass strike, the role of the revolutionary organisation and the role of the working class in the democratic revolution.

This reflects the reality of a period of change in which there is both disjuncture and an attempt to understand and master that disjuncture. In a period of immense change many are disorientated. Some reject the whole of the past, some cling to what they know and try to ignore the change, while others recognise the changes and seek to adapt to them, while keeping what remains valid from the past. These different types of response existed within the workers’ movement determined the divisions that developed between the right, the centre and the left. Furthermore, the debates were fundamentally between these tendencies rather than between individuals. It was from the left that the real effort came to understand the new situation, while the right turned away from both the conclusions and the method of marxism and the centre increasingly abandoned its method in favour of a sterile, conservative orthodoxy, that was best exemplified by Karl Kautsky.

The fundamental achievement of the left was that it recognised that something had changed; it recognised that society was entering a new period and sought to understand it. In this the left defended the marxist method, and thus the real heritage of Marx. In Lenin’s, Luxemburg’s and Trotsky’s work there is clear evidence that the objective conditions were pushing them forwards and they each developed vital analyses:

• Lenin on the central role of the organisation and also on the relationship between strategy and tactics;
• Trotsky on the great historical dynamics at work, leading him to a clear vision of the role of the soviets and to come closest to recognising the opening of the period of proletarian revolution;
• Luxemburg on the dynamic within the class finding expression in the mass strike.

The theoretical effort of the working class was not restricted to these three but embraced many others: left tendencies emerged wherever there was a politically organised workers’ movement. Lenin and Luxemburg were both prompted to try and grasp what had changed within the structure of capitalism as a whole, although this lies outside the scope of this study.

Recognising that the legacy of 1905 is a collective one of the whole of the left of the workers’ movement, we will look at its efforts to understand the vital questions of the goal, the method and form of workers struggles in the new period rather than dealing with each individual in turn.

The goal: the proletarian revolution

None declared it but all glimpsed it: they recognised that the proletarian revolution was no longer beyond the horizon, was no longer an aspiration, but was becoming a visible reality. Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg all formally define the goal as the bourgeois revolution but their analysis of the nature of this bourgeois revolution and the role of the working class in particular implicitly challenges their own assertion. They all stress that the proletariat will be the main force at work and all recognise, albeit in varying ways and to varying extents, that this changes the situation fundamentally. Hence it is the method that unites them against those who simply applied the old schemas.

In 1906 Trotsky published Results and Prospects in which he set out the idea of permanent revolution, or the “uninterrupted revolution” as it was then described. In it he deals with the “prerequisites for revolution” and suggests they are almost all in place.

The first prerequisite is “productive-technical”, that is the level of development of the means of production. He argues that this has been in place “…ever since the time when social division of labour led to the division of labour in manufacture. It has existed to an even greater extent since the time when manufacture was replaced by factory, machine production”.[5] [130] He goes so far as to suggest that “sufficient technical pre-requisites for collective production have already existed for a hundred or two hundred years”. However, he adds that “The mere technical advantages of socialism were not at all sufficient for it to be realised… Because there were no social forces existent at that time ready and able to carry them out”.

This leads to the second prerequisite, “the social-economic ones”; in other words the development of the proletariat. Here Trotsky poses the question “what must be the relative numerical weight of the proletariat? Must it make up a half, two thirds or nine-tenths of the population?” only to reject such a “schematic effort” in order to assert that “The importance of the proletariat depends entirely on the role it plays in large scale production”. For Trotsky it is the qualitative role the proletariat plays that counts rather than the quantitative one. This has two important implications. Firstly, that it is not essential for the proletariat to form a majority of the population to introduce socialism. Secondly, and more specifically, that the proletariat had a much greater weight in Russia because of the concentration and scale of industry than was the case in countries such as Britain and Germany when the proletariat formed a similar proportion of the total population. After considering the role of the proletariat in other major countries Trotsky concludes: “All this leads us to the conclusion that economic evolution – the growth of industry, the growth of large enterprises, the growth of the towns, and the growth of the proletariat in general and the industrial proletariat in particular - has already prepared the arena not only for the struggle of the proletariat for political power but for the conquest of this power”.

The third pre-requisite is “the dictatorship of the proletariat” by which Trotsky seems essentially to mean the development of class consciousness: “It is… necessary that this class should be conscious of its objective interests; it is necessary that it should understand that there is no way out for it except through socialism; it is necessary that it should combine in an army sufficiently powerful to conquer political power in open battle”. He does not state specifically whether this has been met, but rejects the idea of many “socialist ideologues” that “The proletariat, and even ‘humanity’ in general, must first of all cast out its old egoistical nature, and altruism must become predominant in social life etc” and concludes “Socialism does not aim at creating a socialist psychology as a pre-requisite to socialism but at creating socialist conditions of life as a pre-requisite to socialist psychology”. This recognition of the dynamic relationship between the revolution and consciousness is one of the most important insights into the whole question of how the revolution develops. When he looks at the particular situation in Russia Trotsky suggests that 1905 has directly posed the question of revolution: “…the Russian proletariat revealed a colossal strength, unexpected by the Russian Social-Democrats even in their most optimistic moods. The course of the Russian revolution was decided, so far as its fundamental features were concerned. What two or three years ago was or seemed possible, approached to the probable, and everything points to the fact that it is on the brink of becoming inevitable”.[6] [131]

Earlier in Results and Prospects Trotsky had argued that historical development meant that the revolutionary role has passed from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. He asserted that the revolution of 1905 and the creation of the St Petersburg Soviet confirmed this. This meant that bourgeois revolutions as they were previously known were no longer possible and Trotsky specifically rejects the idea of the proletariat carrying out a revolution and then handing power to the bourgeoisie: “To imagine that it is the business of Social Democrats to enter a provisional government and lead it during the period of revolutionary-democratic reforms, fighting for them to have a most radical character, and relying for this purpose upon the organised proletariat – and then, after the democratic programme has been carried out, to leave the edifice they have constructed so as to make way for the bourgeois parties and themselves go into opposition, thus opening up a period of parliamentary politics, is to imagine the thing in a way that would compromise the very idea of a workers’ government. This is not because it is inadmissible ‘in principle’ – putting the question in this abstract form is devoid of meaning – but because it is absolutely unreal, it is utopianism of the worst sort – a sort of revolutionary-philistine utopianism”.[7] [132] If the proletariat holds the majority in government its task is no longer to realise the minimum programme of reforms but the maximum programme of the social revolution. This is not a matter of choice but of the dynamic of the situation. Trotsky illustrates this with the example of the eight-hour day. While this measure “by no means contradicts capitalist relations” its introduction is likely to meet with “the organised and determined resistance of the capitalists” resulting in lockouts and factory closures. A bourgeois government faced with this would retreat and repress the workers, but “for a workers government there would only be one way out: expropriation of closed factories and the organisation of production in them on a socialised basis”. In short, for Trotsky “…the Russian revolution will create conditions in which power can pass into the hands of the workers – and in the event of the victory of the revolution it must do so – before the politicians of bourgeois liberalism get the chance to display to the full their talent for governing”.[8] [133]

Lenin, like Trotsky, places the revolution in the context of the international development of the objective conditions: “…we must not be afraid… of Social Democracy’s complete victory in a democratic revolution, i.e. of a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, for such a victory will enable us to rouse Europe; after throwing off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, the socialist proletariat of Europe will in its turn help us to accomplish the socialist revolution…Vperoyd[9] [134] set the revolutionary proletariat of Russia an active task: winning the battle for democracy and using this victory to bring the revolution into Europe”.[10] [135]

This is from a long polemic contrasting the positions of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks with regard to the revolution of 1905, which both saw as bourgeois-democratic. The former (referred to in the following quote as the Congress resolution) calls for the proletariat to take the lead while the latter (referred to as the conference resolution[11] [136]) tends to leave the initiative to the bourgeoisie: “The resolution of the Conference speaks of the old order in the process of mutual struggle among the various elements of society. The Congress resolution says that we, the party of the proletariat, must effect this abolition; that only the establishment of a democratic republic signifies genuine abolition of the old order; that we must win that republic; that we shall fight for it and for complete liberty, not only against the autocracy, but also against the bourgeoisie, when it attempts (and it surely will do so) to wrest our gains from us. The Congress resolution calls on a definite class to wage a struggle for a precisely defined immediate aim. The conference resolution discourses on the mutual struggle of various forces. One resolution expresses the psychology of active struggle, the other that of the passive onlooker…”.[12] [137] This emphasis on the necessity for the proletariat to take the leading role was reiterated time and again by Lenin in opposition to that Mensheviks, who he referred to as the right of the party: “The Right wing of our Party does not believe in the complete victory of the present, i.e. bourgeois-democratic, revolution in Russia; it dreads such a victory; it does not emphatically and definitely put the slogan of such a victory before the people. It is constantly being misled by the essentially erroneous idea, which is really a vulgarisation of marxism, that only the bourgeoisie can independently ‘make’ the bourgeois revolution, or that only the bourgeoisie should lead the bourgeois revolution. The role of the proletariat as the vanguard in the struggle for the complete and decisive victory of the bourgeois revolution is not clear to the Right Social-Democrats”.[13] [138] “The present conditions in Russia impose on the Social-Democrats tasks of a magnitude that no Social-Democratic Party in Western Europe has to face. We are incomparably more remote than our Western comrades from the socialist revolution; but we are faced with a bourgeois-democratic peasant revolution in which the proletariat will play the leading role”.[14] [139] These quotes show the dynamic nature of the Bolshevik’s position such that, while not recognising that conditions had developed globally for the proletarian revolution, it was nonetheless capable of grasping the central role played by the proletariat and of expressing this clearly in terms of a struggle for power. Although Lenin states explicitly that 1905 was a bourgeois revolution,[15] [140] the analysis he develops of the particular role to be played by the proletariat opens the door to the apparent volte-face of April 1917 and the call for a proletarian revolution: “The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution – which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie – to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and poorest sections of the peasants”.[16] [141] The question of immediate tactics that occupies so much of Lenin’s writings, and which leads to apparent reversals of position (such as on elections to the Duma) springs from this constant concern to relate the overall understanding of the situation to the real activity of the working class and its revolutionary organisation rather than being trapped within timeless schemas.

Luxemburg’s position on the revolution of 1905 also recognises that it has posed the question of the proletarian revolution, again despite a formal assertion that its task is the bourgeois revolution. This is evident from her analysis of the mass strike as an expression of the revolution: “The mass strike is merely the form of the revolutionary struggle […] the mass strike, as shown to us in the Russian Revolution, is not a crafty method discovered by subtle reasoning for the purpose of making the proletarian struggle more effective, but the method of motion of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in revolution”.[17] [142] She also emphasises the central role played by the proletariat: “… on January 22nd… the Russian proletariat burst on the political stage as a class for the first time; for the first time the only power which historically is qualified and able to cast Tsarism into the dustbin and to raise the banner of civilisation in Russia and everywhere has appeared on the scene of action […] the power and the future of the revolutionary movement lies entirely and exclusively in the class conscious Russian proletariat”.[18] [143]

Luxemburg is most explicit about the changing historical period when she compares the French, German and Russian revolutions: “the present Russian Revolution stands at a point of the historical path which is already on the other side of the culminating point of capitalist society, at which the bourgeois revolution cannot again be smothered by the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but, will, on the contrary expand into a new lengthy period of violent social struggles, at which the balancing of the account with absolutism appears a trifle in comparison with the many new accounts which the revolution itself opens up. The present revolution realises in the particular affairs of absolutist Russia the general results of international capitalist development, and appears not so much as the last successor of the old bourgeois revolutions as the forerunner of the new series of proletarian revolutions of the West. The most backward country of all, just because it has been so unpardonably late with its bourgeois revolution, shows ways and methods of further class struggle to the proletariat of Germany and the most advanced capitalist countries”.[19] [144] Later she even seems to argue that the task facing the German proletariat is the proletarian revolution: “in a period of open political popular struggles in Germany, the last historical necessary goal can only be the dictatorship of the proletariat”.[20] [145]

The method: the mass strike

Luxemburg’s greatest contribution to the discussion fuelled by 1905 is her publication The Mass Strike, the Political Party and Trade Unions that was written in August 1906[21] [146] in which she analysed the nature and characteristics of the strike. After reviewing the traditional marxist position on the mass strike, making a critique of the anarchist and revisionist positions and looking at the actual development of the strike in Russia, Luxemburg draws out the main aspects of the mass strike.

Firstly, and contrary to how it was conceived by the anarchists and many in Social Democratic Party the mass strike is not “one act, one isolated action” but “is rather the indication, the rallying idea of a whole period of the class struggle lasting for years, perhaps for decades”.[22] [147] This leads on to a distinction between “Political demonstration” mass strikes and “fighting mass strikes”. The former are tactics wielded by the party, which “exhibit the greatest mass of party discipline, conscious direction and political thought, and therefore must appear as the highest and most mature form of the mass strike”[23] [148] but which, in reality, belong to the beginnings of the movement and become less important “with the development of the earnest revolutionary struggle”.[24] [149] They give way to the more elemental force of the fighting mass strike.

Secondly, this form of the mass strike overcomes the artificial separation between economic and political struggles: “Every new onset and every fresh victory of the political struggle is transformed into a powerful impetus for the economic struggle, extending at the same time its external possibilities and intensifying the inner urge of the workers to better their position, and their desire to struggle. After every foaming wave of political action a fructifying deposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic struggle shoot forth. And conversely. The workers’ condition of ceaseless economic struggle with the capitalists keeps their fighting energy alive in every political interval; it forms so to speak, the permanent fresh reservoir of the strength of the proletarian classes, from which the political fight ever renews its strength…”.[25] [150] The unity of the economic and political struggles “is precisely the mass strike”.[26] [151]

Thirdly “the mass strike is inseparable from the revolution”. However, Luxemburg rejects the schema, prevalent in much of the workers movement, where the mass strike could only lead to a bloody confrontation with the state in which the latter’s monopoly of firepower would inevitably lead to mass bloodshed. This was the basis on which the mass strike was opposed as a futile gesture. In contrast, while the Russian Revolution certainly involved a clash with the state and bloodshed, it arose from the objective conditions of the class struggle; it arose from the movement into action of ever-greater masses of the working class. In short, “the mass strike does not produce the revolution, but the revolution produces mass strikes”.[27] [152]

Fourthly, as the preceding point implies, genuine mass strikes cannot be decreed or planned in advance. This leads Luxemburg to emphasise the element of spontaneity while rejecting the idea that this was due to the supposed backwardness of Russia: “The revolution, even when the proletariat, with the social democrats at their head, appear in the leading role, is not a manoeuvre of the proletariat in the open field, but a fight in the midst of the incessant crashing, displacing and crumbling of the social foundation. In short, in the mass strikes in Russia the element of spontaneity plays such a predominant part, not because the Russian proletariat are ‘uneducated’, but because revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster with them”.[28] [153] Nor does this lead her to reject the importance of organisation: “The resolution and determination of the workers also play a part and indeed the initiative and wider direction naturally fall to the share of the most enlightened kernel of the proletariat”.[29] [154]

Luxemburg’s analysis is so different to that of the anarchists and the orthodox marxists because it is situated within a different context: that of the revolution. In the first pages of The Mass Strike she makes it clear that her conclusions, apparently so contradictory to those of Marx and Engels themselves, are the consequence of applying their method to a new situation: “…it is the same train of ideas, the same method, the Engels-marxisn tactics, which lay at the foundation of the previous practice of the German social democracy, which now in the Russian Revolution are producing new factors and new conditions in the class struggle”.[30] [155]

In short, Luxemburg presents an analysis of a revolutionary dynamic with the working class at its heart that arises from the changing objective conditions. This leads her to stress correctly the spontaneity of the mass strike, but also to recognise that this spontaneity is actually no such thing, but is the product of the experience of the working class. This separates her from the likes of Kautsky who, while seen at the time as supporting the mass strike remained wedded to the orthodox view and was incapable of grasping the fundamental changes taking place that the Russian revolution of 1905 embodied.

A second phase of the debate on the mass strike developed in 1910[31] [156] and led to the final split between Luxemburg and Kautsky. In this debate Pannekoek played an important role and not only defended positions close to those of Luxemburg but also developed them further. He begins by explicitly linking the question of the mass strike to the lessons of 1905: “The Russian proletariat… has taught the German people the use of a new weapon, the general strike”; “The Russian revolution has created the conditions for a revolutionary movement in Germany”.[32] [157] In his conception of the nature of the mass strike he follows Luxemburg in seeing it as a process and criticises Kautsky’s conception of it as a “once and for all event”. He argues that it forms a continuum with the day to day struggle and he establishes a link between the current form of actions, that are small scale, and those that will lead to the conquest of power. He relates mass action to the development of capitalism “under the influence of the modern forms of capitalism, new forms of action have developed in the labour movement, namely mass action. … as the practical potential of mass action developed, it began to pose new problems; the question of social revolution, hitherto an undeniably distant ultimate goal now became a live issue for the militant proletariat…”.[33] [158] He goes on to defend the dynamic, developmental aspects of the mass strike: “…what counts in the development of these actions, in which the deepest interests and passions of the masses break surface, is not membership of the organisation, nor a traditional ideology, but to an ever-increasing extent the real class character of the masses”.[34] [159] He concludes that the fundamental difference between his position and that of Kautsky is over the question of the revolution and, in doing so, he shows where Kautsky’s centrism will take him: “It is over the nature of this revolution that our views diverge. As far as Kautsky is concerned, it is an event in the future, a political apocalypse, and all we have to do meanwhile is prepare for the final show-down by gathering our strength and assembling and drilling our troops. In our view, revolution is a process, the first stages of which we are now experiencing, for it is only by the struggle for power itself that the masses can be assembled, drilled and formed into an organisation capable of taking power. These different conceptions lead to completely different evaluations of current practice; and it is apparent that the Revisionists’ rejection of any revolutionary action and Kautsky’s postponement of it to the indefinite future are bound to unite them on many of the current issues over which they both oppose us”.[35] [160]

The form: the soviets

Trotsky describes the soviets very powerfully in his book 1905, as we saw in previous parts of this series. At the end of the book, in a passage already partly quoted in this series, he sums up the significance of the soviet during the revolution:

“Prior to the Soviet we find among the industrial workers a multitude of revolutionary organizations directed, in the main, by the social-democratic party. But these were organizations within the proletariat, and their immediate aim was to achieve influence over the masses. The Soviet was, from the start, the organization of the proletariat, and its aim was the struggle for revolutionary power. As it became the focus of all the country’s revolutionary forces, the Soviet did not allow its class nature to be dissolved in revolutionary democracy: it was and remained the organized expression of the class will of the proletariat. In the struggle for power it applied methods which were naturally determined by the nature of the proletariat as a class: its role in production, its vast numbers, its social homogeneity. More than that, the Soviet combined its struggle for power as the head of all the revolutionary forces with directing independent class activity by the working masses in many different ways; it not only encouraged the organization of trade unions, but actually intervened in disputes between individual workers and their employees…

“The principal method of struggle used by the Soviet was the political general strike. The revolutionary strength of such strikes consists in the fact that, acting over the head of capital, they disorganize state power. The greater, the more complete the ‘anarchy’ caused by a strike, the nearer the strike is to victory. But on one condition only: the anarchy must not be created by anarchic means. The class which, by simultaneous cessation of work, paralyzes the production apparatus and with it the centralized apparatus of power, isolating parts of the country from one another and sowing general confusion, must itself be sufficiently organized not to become the first victim of the anarchy it has created. The more completely a strike renders the state organization obsolete, the more the organization of the strike itself is obliged to assume state functions. These conditions for a general strike as a proletarian method of struggle were, at the same time, the conditions for the immense significance of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies”.[36] [161]

After the defeat of the revolution he looked ahead to the role they would play in the future: “Urban Russia was too narrow a base for the struggle. The Soviet tried to wage the struggle on a national scale, but it remained above all a Petersburg institution… there is no doubt that in the next upsurge of revolution, such Councils of Workers will be formed all over the country. An All-Russian Soviet of Workers, organised by a national congress…will assume the leadership… History does not repeat itself. The new Soviet will not have to go through the experiences of these fifty days once again. Yet from these fifty days it will be able to deduce its entire programme of action…: revolutionary co-operation with the army, the peasantry, and the plebeian parts of the middle classes; abolition of absolutism; destruction of the military machine of absolutism; part disbandment and part overhaul of the army; abolition of the police and bureaucratic apparatus; the eight hour day; the arming of the people, above all of the workers; the transformation of the Soviets into organs of revolutionary, urban self-government; the formation of Peasant Soviets to be in charge of the agrarian revolution on the spot; elections to the Constituent assembly… It is easier to formulate such a plan than carry it out. But if victory is destined for the revolution, the proletariat cannot but assume this role. It will achieve a revolutionary performance, the like of which the world has never seen”.[37] [162]

In Results and Prospects Trotsky underlines that the soviets were a creation of the working class that corresponded to the revolutionary period: “These were not previously-prepared conspirative organisations for the purpose of seizure of power by the workers at the moment of revolt. No, these were organs created in a planned way by the masses themselves for the purpose of co-ordinating their revolutionary struggle. And these soviets, elected by the masses and responsible to the masses, are unquestionable democratic institutions, conducting a most determined class policy in the spirit of revolutionary socialism”.[38] [163]

Lenin’s attitude towards the soviets during 1905 has already been touched on in International Review n°123 where we quoted from an unpublished letter in which he rejected the opposition to the soviets from some Bolsheviks and argued for “both the Soviet of Workers deputies and the Party”[39] [164] and rejected the argument that it should be aligned with any one party. After the revolution Lenin consistently defended the role of the soviets in organising and uniting the class. Prior to the unity congress of 1906[40] [165] he drafted a resolution on the soviets of workers deputies that recognised them as a characteristic of the revolutionary struggle rather than a one-off phenomenon of 1905: “Soviets of Workers deputies spring up spontaneously in the course of mass political strikes […] these soviets are rudiments of revolutionary authority”.[41] [166] The resolution went on to set out the attitude of the Bolsheviks to the soviets and concluded that revolutionaries should take part and should induce the working class, as well as peasants, soldiers and sailors, to participate, but warned that the extension of the activities and influence of the soviet would collapse unless it was backed by an army “and that therefore one of the main tasks of these institutions in every revolutionary situation must be to arm the people and strengthen the military organisations of the proletariat”.[42] [167] In other texts Lenin defends the role of the soviets as organs of the general revolutionary struggle while arguing that they are not sufficient in themselves to organise the armed insurrection. In 1917 he recognised that events had gone beyond the bourgeois revolution to the proletarian and that at its centre stood the soviets: “Not a parliamentary republic – to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviet of Workers Deputies would be a retrograde step – but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants Deputies throughout the country from top to bottom”.[43] [168] Now, in words strikingly similar to Trotsky’s he analysed the nature of the dual power that existed in Russia: “This dual power is evident in the existence of two governments: one is the main, the real, the actual government of the bourgeoisie, the ‘Provisional Government’ of Lvov and Co., which holds in its hands all the organs of power; the other is a supplementary and parallel government, a ‘controlling’ government in the shape of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, which holds no organs of state power, but directly rests on the support of an obvious and indisputable majority of the people, on the armed workers and soldiers”.[44] [169]

From 1905 to the communist revolution

The issues that the revolution of 1905 brought to the fore have shaped all subsequent revolutionary practice and debate. In this sense we can conclude that 1905 was not just a dress rehearsal for 1917, as is commonly said, but the first act in a drama that has yet to reach its finale. The issues of practice and theory that we have touched on throughout this series were continued and developed. One constant has been that it has always been the left of the workers movement that led this work. During the revolutionary wave Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Pannekoek were joined by many more. In the wake of its defeat these ranks were drastically thinned as the counter-revolution as a whole and Stalinism in particular triumphed. Stalinism was the negation of all the vital, proletarian features of 1905: workers were slaughtered in the name of the “workers” state, the soviets were snuffed out in favour of a centralised bureaucracy and the notion of proletarian revolution was perverted into an ideological weapon of Stalinist state foreign policy.

However, throughout the world minorities resisted the counter-revolution. The most determined and thorough of these minorities were those organisations that we describe as belonging to the Communist Left and which have been the subject of numerous studies by the ICC.[45] [170] The issues of the goal, the method and the form of the revolution were at the heart of all of their work and though their efforts and self-sacrifice many of the lessons of 1905 have been deepened and clarified.

On the central question of the proletarian revolution itself the greatest step forward was the recognition that the material conditions for the worldwide communist revolution had existed since the beginning of the 20th century. This was defended in the first congress of the Third International and was developed further by the Italian Communist Left in the elaboration of the theory of capitalist decadence. This made it clear that the era of bourgeois revolutions was at an end and that the discussion in Russia about the role of the proletariat was not actually a reflection of the lateness of the bourgeois revolution in that country, but an indicator that the whole world was entering a new period in which the task was – and remains – the worldwide communist revolution. This clarification provided the only framework within which all other issues could be understood.

The recognition of the irreplaceable role of the mass strike was a reassertion of the fundamental marxist position that the proletarian revolution is made by the proletariat in class combat with the bourgeoisie. The parliamentary route was never an option; equally communism would not be the result of an accumulation of reforms won through partial struggles. Mass action pitted class against class. It was also the means through which the proletariat developed its consciousness and practical experience. As Pannekoek and Luxemburg recognised, it drew in workers at an accelerating pace, educating and training them for the struggle. It is a heterogeneous movement that arises from the working class and within which the revolutionary minorities play a dynamic role. Its very reality confirms the fundamental marxist position on the inter-relationship between consciousness and action.

The discussion on the role of the soviets or the workers councils led to clarification on the role of the unions, the relationship between the revolutionary organisation and the councils and the whole question of the transitional period from capitalism to communism.

 

North, 2/2/06

These Theses were adopted by the ICC when the students’ movement was still under way. The 4th April demonstration dashed the government’s hopes that it would be less well attended than that of 28th March. In particular, there were even more private-sector workers in the streets. President Chirac, in his 31st March speech on television, had attempted a ludicrous manoeuvre, announcing at one and the same time both the application of the “Equal opportunities” law, and asking that the law’s 8th article (instituting the Contrat Première Embauche, which was the main target of the students’ anger) should not be put into effect. Far from weakening the movement, this pathetic squirming only spurred it on. It increased the likelihood of spontaneous walkouts in the productive sector of the economy, as in 1968. The government was forced to accept the fact that its wretched manoeuvres had failed to break the movement, and, as a result though not without a few final contortions, it withdrew the CPE on 10th April. The Theses in fact envisaged the possibility that the government would not give way. That said, the epilogue to the crisis, which saw the government retreat in this way, confirms their central idea: the depth and importance of the mobilisation of the young generations of the working class in these spring days of 2006.

Now that the government has retreated on the CPE, which was the movement’s leading demand, the latter has lost its dynamic. Does this mean that things will “return to normal” as all the fractions of the bourgeoisie obviously hope? Certainly not. As the Theses say, “[the bourgeoisie] cannot suppress all the experience accumulated through weeks of struggle by tens of thousands of future workers, their awakening to politics and their developing consciousness. This will be a real treasure-trove for the future struggles of the proletariat, a vital element in their ability to continue down the path towards the communist revolution”. It is of the greatest importance that the actors of this magnificent struggle make this treasure bear fruit, by drawing out all the lessons of this experience, in both its strengths and its weaknesses. Above all, they need to bring into the open the perspective that society is faced with, a perspective already contained in the struggle they have just undertaken: against the increasingly violent attacks that capitalism in its death crisis will inevitably unleash on the exploited class, the only possible answer for the latter is to intensify its resistance and to prepare the system’s overthrow. Like the struggle which is coming to an end, this reflection needs to be undertaken collectively, through debate, new assemblies, discussion circles as open as the general assemblies were to all who want to take part, and in particular to the political organisations that support the struggle of the working class.

This collective reflection will only be possible if its actors maintain the same fraternal attitudes of unity and solidarity that dominated in the struggle. In this sense, now that the great majority of those who took part in the struggle are aware that it is over in its previous form, this is not the time for rearguard actions, for ultra-minority “bitter-end” pickets which are anyway condemned to defeat and which run the risk of provoking divisions and tensions among those who have, for weeks, conducted an exemplary struggle of the working class. 18th April 2006

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The movement’s proletarian nature

1) The current mobilisation of students in France is already one of the major episodes in the class struggle in this country in the last fifteen years. It is at least as important as the struggles of autumn 1995 against the reform of the Social Security system and as the one in the public sector in Spring 2003 on the issue of pensions. This affirmation may seem paradoxical, since it is not wage earners that are mobilising today (except for those participating in a certain number of days of action and demonstrations on February 7th, March 7th, March 18th and March 28th) but a sector of society that has not yet entered the field of work, young people in further education. However, this in no way puts into question the profoundly proletarian nature of this movement. This is for the following reasons:

• in recent decades, changes in the capitalist economy have led to a growing demand for a more skilled and qualified workforce and a large proportion of university students (which includes the University Institutes of Technology responsible for providing relatively short training courses for future “technicians”, in reality qualified workers) will, when they finish their studies, rejoin the ranks of the working class (this is no longer confined to classic industrial blue collar workers but also includes office workers and middle management employees in private industry as well as nurses, the vast majority of teachers in primary and secondary education and others in the public sector);
• at the same time, the social origins of students have also changed significantly, with a considerable increase in the number of students coming from the working class (in line with the above criteria), leading in turn to more and more students (about 50%) having to work in order to study or at least to achieve a minimum independence from their families;
• the main demand of the students is the withdrawal of an economic attack (the new law, “Contrat de Première Embauche”, CPE) that affects the whole working class and not just today's students (i.e. tomorrow’s workers) or existing young wage earners, because the presence in the workplace of a workforce living under the Damoclean sword of immediate and unmotivated redundancy during first two years of employment can only bring pressure on other workers.

The proletarian nature of the movement has been evident from the start when most of the general assemblies withdrew exclusively “student demands” (like the demand to withdraw the LMD, the European system of diplomas that was recently imposed in France and penalises certain students) from their list of demands. This decision corresponded to a desire expressed from the outset by the great majority of students, not just to seek solidarity from the whole working class (the term “wage earners” was generally the one used in the general assemblies) but also for it to join the struggle.

The general assemblies are the heart of the movement

2) The profoundly proletarian character of the movement is also demonstrated in the forms of struggle adopted, notably the sovereign general assemblies which express a real life that has nothing to do with the caricatures of general assemblies so often called by the unions. There was clearly a great heterogeneity among the various universities at this level. Some assemblies were still very similar in many ways to union assemblies, while others were the living centre of an intense process of reflection, with a high degree of involvement and maturity on the part of the participants. However, despite this heterogeneity, it is remarkable how many assemblies managed to overcome these obstacles after the first days when they had gone round in circles on issues like “voting on whether to have a vote or not on a particular question” (e.g. on the presence or not of people in the assemblies from outside the university, or on whether they should be able to speak). This had led to the departure of a lot of students. There was also the problem that the key decisions were being taken by student union members or political organisations. Over the first two weeks of the movement, the dominant tendency was the presence of more and more students in the assemblies and their increasingly active participation in the discussions, with a corresponding diminution in the intervention of the union members and the political organisations. The fact that the assemblies were taking increasing control of their own activities was clearly expressed by the fact that the students at the presidium organising the debates tended less and less to be those with union or political affiliations and more and more to be individuals with no affiliations or any real experience before the movement started. In a similar way the best organised assemblies would change the teams (usually of three members) who were responsible for organising and animating the debates on a daily basis, while the least lively and less organised assemblies were “led” by the same team each day, which moreover was often overmanned compared to the former.  It is important to note that the tendency existed for the second type of assembly to be replaced by the former. One of the important aspects of this evolution was the participation of student delegates from one university in the assemblies of other universities. This, in addition to reinforcing the feelings of strength and solidarity between the different assemblies, has allowed those assemblies that were more hesitant to gain inspiration from the advances being made by those in the forefront.[1] [223] This is also an important feature of the dynamic of workers’ assemblies in class movements that have reached a considerable level of consciousness and understanding.

3) One of the major expressions of the proletarian nature of the assemblies in the universities during this period is the fact that they were not only open to students from other universities, but were very quickly opened to people who were not students. From the start the assemblies called on people in the universities (teachers, technicians or office staff – the IATOS) to come and participate and to join the struggle, but they went even further. In particular, working and retired people, parents and grandparents of the university and school students in struggle, have in general been warmly and attentively welcomed by the assemblies whenever they made interventions that encouraged the movement’s extension, especially to the wage workers.

Opening assemblies up to people who are not employed in the company or in the sector immediately involved, not only as observers but as active participants, is an extremely important aspect of the movement of the working class. It is clear that when a decision has to be taken requiring a vote, it may be necessary to resort to certain ways of working so that only the people who belong to the productive or geographical unit that the assembly is based upon participate in making decisions. This prevents the professional organisers of the bourgeoisie and others in their service from “packing” the assemblies. To this end, a method used by many of the student assemblies was to count the student cards (different from one university to another) held up, not raised hands. The question of the openness of the assemblies is a crucial one for the struggle and for the working class. In “normal” times, i.e. outside periods of intense struggle, it is members of the organisations of the capitalist class (the unions or the “leftist” parties) who exert most influence among the workers, so that keeping outsiders out of assemblies is an excellent way for them to keep control of the workers, to obstruct the dynamic of their struggle and serve the interests of the bourgeoisie. The opening of the assemblies allows the most advanced elements of the class, and especially the revolutionary organisations, to contribute to the development of consciousness by the workers in struggle; and in the history of the class struggle this has always constituted a dividing line between currents who defend a proletarian orientation and those who defend capitalist order. There are numerous examples. Among the most significant is that of the Congress of Workers' Councils in mid-December 1918 in Berlin, after the November uprising of the soldiers and workers against the war had obliged the German bourgeoisie not only to bring the war to an end but also to get rid of the Kaiser and to hand political power over to the Social Democratic party. Because of the immaturity of consciousness within the working class, along with the methods used for appointing the delegates, this Congress was dominated by the Social Democrats who forbade the representatives of the Russian revolutionary soviets, and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht, the two most eminent figures of the revolutionary movement, from taking part, under the pretext that they were not workers. This Congress took the decision in the end to hand over all its power to the government led by the Social Democracy, a government that was to assassinate Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht a month later. Another relevant example is that of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA - the First International). At its 1866 congress certain French leaders, like the bronze engraver Tolain, attempted to impose the rule that "only workers are allowed to vote at the congress" – a rule chiefly aimed at Karl Marx and his closest comrades. At the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, Marx was one of its most ardent defenders while Tolain was in Versailles in the ranks of those responsible for crushing the Commune, with the massacre of 30,000 workers.

With regard to the current students' movement, it is significant that the greatest resistance to opening up the assemblies came from the members of the students’ union, the UNEF (affiliated to the Socialist Party) and that they are much more open where the influence of UNEF was least felt.

Unlike 1995 and 2003, the bourgeoisie was surprised by the movement

4) One of the most important characteristics of the current episode of the class struggle in France is that it took all the sectors of the bourgeoisie and its political apparatus (right wing and left wing parties and union organisations) almost totally by surprise. This is something that allows us to understand both the vitality and the depth of the movement as well as the extremely delicate situation that the ruling class in France is in at this time. In this respect we have to make a clear distinction between the present movement and the massive struggles in the autumn of 1995 and in the spring of 2003.

The mobilisation of workers in 1995 against the “Juppé plan” to reform the Social Security system had, in reality, been orchestrated by virtue of a very clever division of labour between the government and the unions. With typical  arrogance the then Prime Minister, Alain Juppé, combined the attacks against Social Security (which affected both employees of the public and private sectors) with specific attacks on the pensions of workers in the SNCF (the French railways) and other state sector transport workers. These workers were the spearhead of the mobilisation. A few days before Christmas, with the strikes a few weeks old, the government withdrew its special schemes for pensions leading, after an appeal by the unions, to a return to work in the sectors concerned. This return in the sectors most directly affected signified the end of the movement in all the other sectors. For their part, most of the unions (apart from the CFDT) had acted in a very militant way, calling for the extension of the movement and holding regular general assemblies. Despite its scale, the workers' mobilisation did not end in a victory but, fundamentally, in a defeat, since the basic demand, the withdrawal of the Juppé plan to reform the Social Security, was not achieved. However, with the government's withdrawal of its special pension schemes, the unions were able to dress the defeat up as a victory, enabling them to refurbish their image, tarnished by their repeated sabotage of workers' struggles during the 1990s.

The mobilisation in 2003 in the public sector was in response to the decision to increase the minimum number of years worked for entitlement to a full pension. This measure was directed against all state employees, but it was the teachers and other employees in the educational establishments, who, in addition to the attack on pensions, also suffered from a further attack under the cover of “decentralisation”. Teachers in general were not targeted by this latter measure, but they felt particularly affected by an attack on their colleagues and by the mobilisation of the latter. In addition, the decision to raise the minimum number of years in work to 40 years or even longer for some sectors of the working class (who because of the time they have to spend in training cannot begin to work before the age of 23 or even 25 years) meant that they will have to continue working in even more punishing and exhausting conditions well beyond the legal age of retirement at 60. Although he had a different style to that of Juppe, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin talked tough in the same way, declaring that "It's not the street that rules". Finally, despite the combativity of the education sector workers and their tenacity (some endured 6 weeks on strike), despite demonstrations that were among the biggest since May 68, the movement was unable to push back the government. All that happened was that the latter decided, when the mobilisation began to weaken, to go back on particular measures that affected non-teaching personnel from the education establishments, so as to destroy the unity that had developed between the various professional groupings and thus undermine the dynamic of the mobilisation. The inevitable return to work among the personnel of the schools signified the end of the movement; as in 1995, it had not succeeded in pushing back the main attack of the government, the one against pensions. However, whereas it was possible to present the episode from 1995 as a “victory” by the unions, which allowed them to strengthen their influence over all the workers, the return to work in 2003 was felt mainly as a defeat (notably for a large number of teachers who lost almost 6 weeks wages). This had a big effect on the workers’ confidence in the trade unions.

The political weakness of the French right

5) We can summarise the main characteristics of the attacks against the working class in 1995 and 2003 as follows:

• both sprang from the unavoidable necessity for capitalism, faced with the world economic crisis and the deficit in public finances, to continue the destruction of the Welfare State apparatus put in place after World War II, and in particular the Social Security system and the pension system;
• both had been meticulously prepared by the various organs of capitalism, in particular the right wing government and the union organisations, in order to inflict a defeat on the working class, both at the economic level as well as at the political and ideological level;
• both used the method of piling up attacks on a specific sector, provoking a more general mobilisation, and then “withdrawing” certain specific attacks on this sector in order to disarm the whole movement;
•             however, the political dimension of the attacks by the bourgeoisie, even if they drew on similar methods, was not the same in both cases, since in 1995, the result of the mobilisation had to be presented as a “victory” credited to the unions, while, in 2003, the obvious nature of the defeat was a factor of demoralisation and so discredited the unions.

Regarding the current mobilisation, a number of facts are clear:

• the CPE was not at all an indispensable measure for the French economy: this is clearly illustrated by the fact that a large number of employers and right wing MPs were not in favour of it, just like the majority of members of the government, especially the two ministers directly involved, the Minister for Employment (Gérard Larcher) and the Minister for “Social Cohesion” (Jean-Louis Borloo);
• together with the fact that this measure is not indispensable from the capitalist point of view, there was an almost complete absence of any preparation for getting it through; while the attacks of 1995 and 2003 were prepared in advance by “discussions” with the unions (to the point, in both cases, where one of the main unions, the CFDT, with its links to the Socialist Party, supported the government's plans), the CPE was a part of a series of measures that were grouped together under a law that was christened “Equal Opportunities”, submitted to parliament in a hurry and with no previous discussion with the unions. One of the most odious aspects of the law is the fact that it claims to be fighting job insecurity, while institutionalising insecurity for young workers under 26 years, and that it claims to be benefiting young people from the “problem” neighbourhoods who were in revolt in the autumn of 2005, while containing a series of attacks against the same young people, like putting youngsters of 14 years and older into work and those over 15 years into night work, under cover of doing apprenticeships. 

6) The government has been deliberately provocative in attempting to pass the law in such a cavalier way. It has used the provisions of the Constitution that allow it to by-pass parliament and decided to do this at a time when the schools and colleges were closed for the holidays. However, Villepin and the government have come unstuck with their “clever manoeuvre”. Rather than avoiding any reaction from students, they have made them even angrier and even more determined to resist this law. In 1995 Prime Minister Juppé's provocative declarations and arrogant attitude radicalised the strike action in a similar way. However, back then, the provocation was deliberate, since the bourgeoisie had foreseen the workers reaction and was confident that it could deal with it.  In a situation where the working class was still suffering from the weight of the ongoing ideological campaigns around the collapse of the so-called “socialist” countries (which was bound to reduce the possibility of developing the struggle), it had been able to manipulate these events in order to refurbish the unions’ credibility.  Today, on the contrary, Villepin had not anticipated that he would provoke the anger of the students, not to mention a large part of the working class, against this policy. In 2005, Villepin had succeeded in getting the CNE (Contrat Nouvelle Embauche) through parliament without any difficulty. This law allows companies with less than 20 employees to lay off workers of any age who have been employed for less than 2 years without giving a reason. It was expected that the CPE, which extends the provisions of the CNE to both public and private sector companies, but for workers under 26 years of age, would meet with a similar reception when it came in. Subsequent events have showed that the government made a serious error of judgement, since the media and all the political factions of the bourgeoisie agree that the government has ended up in a very delicate situation.  In fact, it is not only the government that is extremely embarrassed by this situation, but all the government parties (left and right), as well as the unions who are condemning Villepin’s methods. Moreover, Villepin himself has acknowledged his mistake to some extent by saying he “regretted” adopting this approach.

The government (and Villepin particularly) has clearly made mistakes. Villepin is presented by the left and the unions as a “loner”,[2] [224] a “high-and-mighty” person, incapable of understanding the real needs of the people.  His “friends” on the right (especially, of course, those close to his great rival, Nicolas Sarkozy) point out that as he has never been elected to office (unlike Sarkozy, who has been a deputy [i.e. an MP] and a mayor of an important town[3] [225] for many years), and that he has difficulty connecting with the ordinary voter and with the rank and file of his own party. It is also said that his taste for poetry and literature makes him a sort of “dilettante”, with an amateurish understanding of politics. However, the most common criticism directed at him, including by the bosses, is that he failed to consult the “social players” or the “intermediary bodies” (to use the terminology of the media sociologists), in other words the unions, before going ahead with this attack. The strongest criticism comes from the CDFT, the most moderate of the unions, which supported the government's attacks of 1995 and 2003.

We can say therefore that, in the circumstances, the French right has fully lived up to its reputation as the “stupidest” right wing in the world. More generally, it shows that the French bourgeoisie is, in a way, once again paying the price for the same inability to master the political game that has led to electoral “accidents” in the past, as in 1981 and 2002. In the first case, because the right was disunited, the left came into government, bucking the trend of the orientation in the other major countries in response to the unfolding social situation (especially in Great Britain, Germany, Italy and the US). In the second case, the left (because it too was disunited) failed to reach the second round of presidential elections which ended in a run-off between Le Pen (the leader of the far right) and Chirac. Chirac was re-elected with all the votes of the left, transferred to him as the “lesser evil”. Chirac was thus re-elected thanks to the left's, leaving him less room for manoeuvre than if he had defeated the champion of the left, Lionel Jospin. The reduction in Chirac's legitimacy goes some way to explain this government's weakness in facing up to and attacking the working class. That said, this political weakness of the right (and of the political apparatus of the French bourgeoisie in general) has not stopped it carrying out a massive attack on workers’ pensions. In this present case, this weakness in itself does not explain the scale of the current movement, notably the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of young future workers, the dynamic of the movement, and its adoption of truly proletarian forms of struggle.

An expression of the revival in workers’ struggles and the development of class consciousness

7) In 1968 too, the student mobilisation and the formidable workers’ strike (9 million on strike over several weeks – a total of more than 150 million strike days) resulted in part from the mistakes of the Gaullist regime at the end of its reign. The provocative attitude that the authorities displayed towards the students (the police entered the Sorbonne on May 3rd for the first time in hundreds of years and arrested and imprisoned a number of students who tried to object to being evicted by force) was a factor leading to the massive mobilisation of the students during the week of May 3rd to May 10th.  After the fierce repression of May 10th and 11th, and the affects it had on public opinion, the government decided to give way on two of the student demands: the reopening of the Sorbonne and the freeing of the students arrested the week before. This government retreat and the enormous success of the demonstration called by the unions on 13th May[4] [226] gave rise to a series of spontaneous walkouts in some big factories, like Renault in Cléon and Sud-Aviation in Nantes.  One of the reasons for these walk-outs, mainly by young workers, was the latter’s realisation that if the determination of the students (who after all have no economic muscle) had been successful in forcing the government to back down, then it could also be forced to back down by the workers, who have a much more powerful means of exerting pressure – the strike. The example set by the workers of Cléon and Nantes spread like wildfire, outstripping the unions. Frightened of being completely overwhelmed, they were obliged to jump on the bandwagon after two days and called a strike that paralysed the national economy for several weeks, with 9 million workers involved. Even then, it would have been very short-sighted to think that a movement on this scale could be the product of purely local or national causes. It had to be the product of a very significant change in the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat at the international level, in favour of the latter.[5] [227] This was to be confirmed a year later by the “Cordobazo” of May 29th 1969 in Argentina,[6] [228] the “Hot Autumn” in Italy in 1969 (also known as “Rampant May”), then by the big strikes in the Baltic region, the “Polish winter” of 1970-71 and by many other less spectacular movements, all confirming that May 1968 was no flash in the pan but the expression of the historic recovery of the world proletariat after more than four decades of counter-revolution.

8) Nor can the present movement in France be explained by particular circumstances (Villepin’s “mistakes”) or purely national factors. In fact it is a striking confirmation of what the ICC has been saying since 2003: a tendency towards the revival of international working class struggles and a development of consciousness within the class: “The large-scale mobilisations of the spring of 2003 in France and Austria represent a turning point in the class struggles since 1989. They are a first significant step in the recovery of workers militancy after the longest period of reflux since 1968” (International Review n°117. “Report on the class struggle”) “In spite of all its difficulties, the period of retreat has by no means seen the ‘end of the class struggle’. The 1990s was interspersed with a number of movements which showed that the proletariat still had untapped reserves of combativity (for example in 1992 and 1997). However, none of these movements represented a real shift at the level of consciousness. Hence the importance of the more recent movements which, though lacking the spectacular and overnight impact of a movement like that of 1968 in France, nevertheless constitute a turning point in the balance of class forces. The struggles of 2003-2005 have the following characteristics:

• they have involved significant sectors of the working class in countries at the heart of world capitalism (as in France 2003);
• they have been preoccupied with more explicitly political questions; in particular the question of pensions raised in the struggles in France and elsewhere poses the problem of the future that capitalist society holds in store for all of us;
• they have seen the re-emergence of Germany as a focal point for workers’ struggles, for the first time since the revolutionary wave;
• the question of class solidarity has been raised in a wider and more explicit way than at any time since the struggles of the 80s, most notably in the recent movements in Germany;
• they have been accompanied by the emergence of a new generation of elements looking for political clarity. This new generation has manifested itself both in the new influx of overtly politicised elements and in the new layers of workers entering the struggle for the first time. As evidenced in certain important demonstrations, the basis is being forged for the unity between the new generation and the “generation of ‘68” – both the political minority which rebuilt the communist movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s and the wider strata of workers who have been through the rich experience of class struggles between ‘68 and ‘89” (International Review n°122, “Resolution on the international situation”, 16th ICC Congress).

These characteristics, which we highlighted at our 16th Congress, have been amply demonstrated in the present movement of the students in France.

The link between the generations has been established spontaneously in the student assemblies: not only have older workers (including pensioners) been allowed to speak in the assemblies, they have been encouraged to do so and their interventions about their own experience of struggle have been listened to with great warmth and close attention by the younger generation.[7] [229]

A concern for the future, and not just with their immediate situation, has been at the very heart of the movement, which has drawn in young people who will only be faced with the CPE in a number of years’ time (more than 5 years for many high-school students). This concern for the future already emerged in 2003 on the issue of pensions, where we saw many young people on the demonstrations; this was already a sign of solidarity between the generations in the working class. In the current movement, the mobilisation against job insecurity, and thus against unemployment poses implicitly – and explicitly for a growing number of students and young workers – the question of what future capitalism has in store for society, a concern expressed by many older workers who are asking “what kind of society will we leave to our children?”

The question of solidarity, in particular between the generations but also between different sectors of the working class, has been one of the key issues of the movement:

• solidarity among the students themselves, in the efforts of those who are in the forefront, who are the best organised, to come to the aid of comrades facing difficult situations (by trying to reach out to and mobilise the more reticent students, in the way the general assemblies are organised, etc.);
• calling on the wage workers by arguing that the government’s attack is aimed at all sectors of the working class;
• the feeling of solidarity among the workers, even if this has not led to an extension of the struggle other than through participation in the days of action and the demonstrations;
• an awareness among many students that they are not the ones most threatened by job insecurity (which affects young people without degrees or diplomas on a much more massive scale) and that their struggle is of even more concern to the most underprivileged young people, in particular the youth from the “problem estates” who were involved in the riots last autumn.

The young generation takes up the torch of struggle

9) One of the main characteristics of the present movement is the fact that that it is being led by the younger generation. And this is no accident. For some years the ICC has been pointing out that within the new generation there is an unspectacular but profound process of reflection going on, manifesting itself mainly in a much more noticeable tendency of young people to gravitate towards communist politics – some of them have already joined our ranks. This is just the tip of the iceberg of a development of consciousness going on in much wider sectors of the new proletarian generation, a process which sooner or later will feed into huge social struggles: “The new generation of ‘searching elements’, minorities moving towards class positions, will have a role of unprecedented importance in the future combats of the class, which will be faced with their political implications much more profoundly than the struggles of 1968-89. These elements, who already express a slow but significant development of consciousness in depth, will make a major contribution to the massive extension of consciousness throughout the class” (International Review n°113, “Resolution on the international situation from the 15th Congress of the ICC”).

The current movement of the students in France expresses the emergence of this subterranean process which got going several years ago. It is a sign that the main impact of the ideological campaigns set in motion in 1989 about the “end of communism” and the “disappearance of the class struggle” is now behind us.

Soon after the historic resurgence of the world proletariat in 1968 we noted  that “the situation of the proletariat is different from how it was during the thirties. On the one hand, like all the other pillars of bourgeois ideology, mystifications which in the past weighed down the consciousness of the proletariat, have in part, gradually been exhausted. Nationalism, democratic illusions, anti-fascism, were all intensively utilised over the past half century, but they no longer have the impact they once had. On the other hand, the new generation of workers has not suffered the defeats of its predecessors. The proletarians who today confront the crisis, if they do not have the experience past generations of workers had, are no longer ground down by the same demoralisation.

“The formidable opposition with which the working class since 1968/69 has reacted against the first signs of the crisis, means that the bourgeoisie is not able today to impose the only outcome that, for its part, it could find for this crisis: a new imperialist holocaust. Before that can happen it must be able to defeat the working class. The perspective now is not imperialist war but generalised class war” (Manifesto of the ICC, adopted at its first congress in January 1976)

At our 8th Congress, thirteen years later, the report on the international situation completed this analysis in the following terms: “The generation which had been marked by the counter-revolution from the 30s to the 60s had to give way to one which had not been through it for the world proletariat to find the strength to overcome its impact. Similarly (although we have to moderate the comparison by underlining that between the generation of 68 and the one before it there had been a historic break, whereas there is a continuity with the one that followed it) the generation which will make the revolution cannot be the one which accomplished the essential historic task of opening up a new perspective for the world proletariat after the deepest counter-revolution in its history”.

A few months later, the collapse of the so-called “socialist” regimes and the important retreat by the working class that this brought about made it necessary to be more concrete about this prediction. With all due sense of proportion, the present revival of class combats can be compared to the historic resurgence of 1968 after 40 years of counter-revolution: the generations who had suffered this defeat and above all the terrible pressure of the mystifications of the bourgeoisie could not be at the forefront of this new episode in the confrontation between the classes. In a similar way, today’s generation, which was still at primary school when these campaigns were at their height, and was not directly affected by them, is now the first to take up the torch of the struggle.

A far greater awareness than in 1968 of being part of the working class

10) The comparison between the student mobilisations of today  in France and the events of May 68 enables us to draw out some of the more important features of the present movement. The majority of students in struggle today affirm very clearly “our struggle is different from 1968”. This is quite true, but it is important to understand why.

The first difference, and the most fundamental, resides in the fact that the movement of May 68 was situated at the very beginning of the open crisis of the world capitalist economy, whereas now, after worsening abruptly in 1974, the crisis is nearly four decades old. From 1967 on we began to see a rise in unemployment in several countries, notably France and Germany, which was at the root of the disquiet that was beginning to emerge among the students, and of the discontent which led the working class to enter the struggle. This said, the number of unemployed in France is ten times higher today than it was in May 68 and this massive unemployment (up to 10% of the active population according to the official figures) has already lasted for several decades. A whole number of differences result from this.

Even if these first effects of the crisis were an element behind the anger of the students in 1968, they were in no way comparable to the situation today. At the time, there was no major threat of unemployment or job insecurity at the end of your studies. The main concern for student youth at the time was that it would not be able to attain the same social status as the previous generation of people with university degrees. The 1968 generation was in fact the first to be confronted in a rather brutal manner with the proletarianisation of previously more prestigious job roles – a subject abundantly studied by sociologists. This phenomenon had begun a few years earlier, even before the open crisis had made its appearance, and followed a considerable increase in the number of students at the universities. This was the result of the needs of the economy but also of the hopes and desires of their parents, who had been through all the privations of the Second World War and wanted their children to reach a better social and economic situation than they had. This “massification” of the student population had been giving rise for a number of years to a growing malaise, particularly as a result of the persistence within the universities of structures and practices inherited from a time when only a chosen few could attend them, in particular a strongly authoritarian atmosphere. Another element in the malaise in the student world, which was expressed particularly in the USA from 1964 on, was the Vietnam war which undermined the whole myth of the “civilising” role of the great Western democracies, and which led large numbers of the student youth towards Third-Worldist ideas in their Guevarist or Maoist forms. These ideas were fuelled by the theories of pseudo-revolutionary thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, who announced the “integration of the working class” and the emergence of “new revolutionary forces” in the oppressed minorities (blacks, women, etc.), the peasants of the Third World, or indeed… the students. Many students at this time saw themselves as “revolutionaries”, just as they saw people like Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh or Mao as revolutionaries. Finally, one of the components of the situation at that time was the significant gap between the new generation and the previous one, which was the object of all kinds of criticisms. In particular, because this generation had worked hard to get out of the conditions of poverty and even famine resulting from the Second World War, it was reproached with being concerned only with material well-being. Hence the success of fantasies about the “consumer society” and slogans like “never work ever”. The product of a generation which had suffered the full force of the counter-revolution, the youth of the 1960s criticised the older generation for being conformist and submitting to the norms of capitalism. For their part many parents did not understand and could not accept the fact that their children were so contemptuous of the sacrifices they had made to give them a better life.

11) The world today is very different from 1968 and the student youth of today has little in common with that of the 1960s:

• it is not simply disquiet about the deterioration of their future status which is affecting the majority of students today. As proletarians, they have often already had to work to pay for their studies and they have few illusions in the shining social privileges awaiting them at the end of their studies. They know above all that their diplomas will give them the “right” to join the proletarian condition in one of its more dramatic forms: unemployment or job insecurity, sending out hundreds of CVs that will not be replied to, long queues at job agencies waiting for a slightly more stable job after a period of slaving away in low-paid apprenticeships and short-term contracts, to end up in jobs which have little to do with their training and aspirations.
• In this sense the solidarity which the students feel towards the workers today derives from their awareness that they belong to the same world, the world of the exploited, in struggle against the same enemy, the exploiters. It is very distant from the essentially petty bourgeois attitude of the students in 1968 towards the working class, an attitude which was marked by a certain condescension towards the workers even if there was also a certain fascination for the mythical blue-collar worker, the hero of rather ill-digested readings from the marxist classics, or of authors who weren’t marxists at all but Stalinists or crypto-Stalinists. The fashion after 1968 for intellectuals to go and work in the factories in order to “be with the workers” is not about to make a comeback today.
• This is why themes like “the consumer society”, even if they are still being peddled by a few backward-looking anarchoid types, have no echo among the students today. As for the slogan “never work ever” it no longer looks like anything radical but more like a terrible and agonising threat.     

12) This is why, paradoxically, “radical” and “revolutionary” themes are not very present in the discussions and concerns of the students today. Whereas in 1968 they often turned the universities into permanent forums debating the question of the revolution, the workers’ councils, etc, the majority of discussions being held today are around much more “down to earth” questions like the CPE and its implications, job insecurity, the methods of struggle (blockades, general assemblies, coordinations, demonstrations etc.). However, their polarisation around the demand for the withdrawal of the CPE, which apparently reveals a much less “radical” ambition than in 1968, does not mean that the current movement is less profound than the one 38 years ago. On the contrary. The “revolutionary” preoccupations of the students in 1968 (in fact, of a minority who formed the “vanguard” of the movement) were certainly sincere but they were strongly marked by Third-Worldism (Guevarism or Maoism) or by antifascism. At best, so to speak, they were influenced by anarchism (in the wake of Cohn-Bendit) or Situationism. Their vision of the revolution was petty bourgeois romanticism, or simply a radical appendage of Stalinism. But whatever were the currents who were putting out “revolutionary” ideas, whether bourgeois or petty bourgeois, none of them had any grasp of the real process through which the working class can move towards the revolution, and still less of the significance of the massive workers’ strikes which were the first expression of the end of the period of counter-revolution.[8] [230] Today, “revolutionary” preoccupations are not yet present to any significant degree in the movement but its undoubted class nature and the terrain on which the mobilisation is taking place – the rejection of a future of submission to the demands and conditions of capitalist exploitation (unemployment, precarious jobs, arbitrary action of the bosses, etc) – are part of a dynamic which will certainly result in important numbers of the present combatants becoming aware of the necessity for the overthrow of capitalism. This development of consciousness will in no way be based on chimaeras like the ones which prevailed in 1968 and which allowed many of the leaders of the movement to be recycled into the official political apparatus of the bourgeoisie (the ministers Bernard Kouchner and Joshka Fischer, senator Henri Weber, the European parliament’s spokesman for the Greens Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the press baron Serge July etc.) or which led others into the tragic dead-end of terrorism (the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Fraction in Germany, Direct Action in France). Far from it. This development of consciousness will be based on an understanding of the fundamental conditions which make the proletarian revolution necessary and possible: the insurmountable economic crisis of world capitalism, the historic impasse of the system, the necessity to see the proletariat’s defensive struggles as so many preparations for the final overthrow of capitalism. In 1968, the rapid hatching of “revolutionary” preoccupations was to a large extent a sign of their superficiality and their lack of theoretical-political consistency, corresponding to their basically petty bourgeois nature. The process through which the workers’ struggle becomes more radical, even if it can go through moments of surprising acceleration, is a much more long-term phenomenon, precisely because it is incomparably more profound. As Marx put it, “to be radical is to go to the root”, and this is an approach which will necessarily take time and will be based on drawing lessons from a whole experience of struggles.   

13) In fact, the depth of the present movement can’t be measured by the “radical” nature of the discussions it has given rise to. The depth of the movement is derived from the fundamental question posed by the demand for the withdrawal of the CPE: the future of insecurity and unemployment which capitalism in crisis offers to the younger generations and which signifies the historic bankruptcy of the system. But to an even greater extent the depth of the movement is demonstrated by the methods of struggle and forms of organisation which were noted in points 2 and 3: general assemblies that are animated, open, disciplined, showing a real concern for reflection and for a collective control of the movement through the nomination of commissions, strike committees, and delegations responsible to the general assemblies, the will to extend the struggle to all sectors of the working class. In The Civil War in France Marx noted that the truly proletarian character of the Paris Commune lay not so much in the economic measures it adopted (the suppression of night work for children and a moratorium on rent) but in the means and mode of organisation it took up. Marx’s analysis can be applied very well to the present situation. The most important aspect of struggles that the working class wages is not so much in the contingent aims it may set itself at a given moment, and which will be left behind in more advanced stages of the movement, but in its capacity to really take charge of the struggle and in the methods it adopts to achieve this. It is these means and methods of struggle which are the best guarantee of the capacity of the class to move forward in future. This is one of the main points made by Rosa Luxemburg in The Mass Strike which drew the lessons of the 1905 revolution in Russia. Leaving aside the fact that the current movement is of course not at all at the same political level as that of 1905, we can say that the means it has adopted are, in an embryonic form, those of the mass strike, such as found expression in August 1980 in Poland.

14) The depth of the students’ movement is also expressed by its ability avoid falling into the trap of violence which the bourgeoisie set for it on several occasions, including the use and manipulation of the “wreckers”: at the occupation of the Sorbonne, at the end of the 16th March demo, the police charge at the end of the 18th March demo, the violence by the “wreckers” against the demonstrators on 23rd March. Even if a small minority of students, especially those influenced by anarchistic ideologies, allowed themselves to be pulled into the confrontations with the police, the great majority of them were well aware of the need not to allow the movement to get dragged into repetitive confrontations with the forces of repression. In this sense, the movement of the students today has shown greater maturity than that of 1968. In the period from 3rd May to 10th May 1968, violence – the confrontation with the CRS and the barricades – was one of the components of the movement which, following the repression of the night of 10-11th May and the evasiveness of the government, opened the gates to the immense strike of the working class. Thereafter, however, barricades and violence became an element which allowed the government and the trade unions to regain control of the situation, notably by undermining the considerable sympathy the students had initially obtained from the population at large and from the working class in particular. For the left parties and the unions, it became easy enough to draw an equals sign between those who talked about revolution and those who were burning cars and continually going off to battle the CRS. All the more so because in many cases it was often the same people. For the students who saw themselves as “revolutionaries”, the movement of May 68 was already the Revolution, and the barricades they built day after day were presented as the descendants of those of 1848 and the Commune. Today, even when they pose the question of the general perspective of the movement, and thus of the necessity for revolution, the students are quite aware that the strength of the movement does not lie in confrontations with the police. In fact, even if it is still very far from posing the question of the revolution, and thus of reflecting on the problem of proletarian class violence in the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, the movement was implicitly faced with this problem, and was able to respond to it in the spirit of the proletariat’s nature and struggle. The proletarian movement has been confronted from the beginning with the extreme violence of the exploiting class, with repression when it tries to defend its interests, with imperialist war but also with the daily violence of exploitation. Unlike exploiting classes, the class that is the bearer of communism is not the bearer of violence; and even though it has to make use of it, it does not do so by identifying with it. In particular, the violence it has to use in the overthrow of capitalism, which it will have to use with great determination, is necessarily a conscious and organised violence and must always be preceded by a whole process of growth in consciousness and organisation through the various struggles against exploitation. The present mobilisation of the students, notably its capacity to organise itself and to discuss and reflect upon the problems it faces, including the problem of violence, thus marks a much clearer step towards the revolution, towards the overturning of bourgeois order, than the barricades of May 68.

15) It is precisely this question of violence which provides one of the essential points of difference between the students’ movement of spring 2006 and the riots in the suburbs of autumn 2005. There is obviously a common cause at the origin of these two movements: the insurmountable crisis of the capitalist mode of production, the future of unemployment and precariousness which it offers to the children of the working class. However, the riots in the suburbs, which basically expressed total despair in the face of this situation, cannot be considered in any sense as a form of class struggle. In particular, the essential components of proletarian movements – solidarity, organisation, the collective and conscious attempt to take charge of the struggle – were completely absent from these riots. No solidarity was shown by these desperate young people towards the owners of the cars they were burning, who were and  are victims of unemployment and job insecurity. Very little consciousness was shown by the rioters, whose violence and destruction was carried out in a blind way and often in the form of a game. As for organisation and collective action, it took the form of street gangs directed by a chief who often owes his authority to being the most violent member of the gang, and who often competed among themselves to see who could burn the most cars. In reality, the approach of the young rioters of October/November 2005 not only made them easy prey for all sorts of police manipulation, but also give us an indication of how the effects of the decomposition of capitalist society can be an obstacle to the development of proletarian struggle and organisation.

Persuading the youngsters from the “problem estates”

16) During the present movement, bands of young street gang members have taken advantage of the demonstrations to come to the centre of towns and engage in their favourite sport: fighting the cops and smashing shop windows, and this to the great satisfaction of the foreign media who had already distinguished themselves at the end of 2005 by putting their shock-horror pictures of the riots on the front pages of the newspapers and on the TV. It is clear that the images of violence, which for a whole period were the only ones presented to workers outside of France, were an excellent way of reinforcing the black-out of what was really going on in France and so depriving the world working class of material that could serve the development of its consciousness. But the violence of the gangs was not only used against the proletariat of other countries. In France itself, they were used to present the struggle led by the students as a kind of remake of the violence of last autumn. This didn’t come off: no one fell for this story and this is why the Interior Minister Sarkozy rapidly changed his tune and declared that there was a clear difference between the students and the “thugs”. The violence was then stirred up to the utmost in order to dissuade as many workers, students and high school pupils as possible from participating in the demonstrations, especially on 18th March. The exceptional level of participation in these demos showed that this manoeuvre didn’t work. Finally, on 23rd March, with the blessing of the police, the “wreckers” attacked the demonstrators themselves, to rob them or beat them for no reason. Many students were demoralised by these attacks: “When it’s the CRS beating us, that makes us want to fight back, but when its kids from the suburbs, for whom we are also fighting, that’s a real blow to our morale”. However, once again, the students showed their maturity and their consciousness. Rather than trying to organise violent actions against the young “wreckers” as did the union stewards who on the March 23rd demo started beating them and pushing them towards the police lines, they decided in several places to nominate delegations who were given the job of discussing with the young people in the underprivileged neighbourhoods, in order to explain to them that the struggle of the students and the high school pupils was also a struggle for all young people sunk in the despair of massive unemployment and social exclusion. In an intuitive manner, without knowing the history of the workers’ movement, the majority of the students put into practice one of the essential lessons of this experience: no violence within the working class. Faced with sectors of the proletariat who may be drawn into actions which are contrary to the general interests of the class, persuasion and appealing to consciousness are an essential means of action towards them, providing these sectors are not simple appendages of the bourgeois state (such as the commando units of strike-breakers).

17) One of the reasons for the great maturity of the current movement, especially on the question of violence, is the very strong participation of young women and girls in the movement. It is well known that at this age, young women are generally more mature than their male comrades. Moreover, on the question of violence it is clear that women in general are less likely to be dragged onto this terrain than men. In 1968, female students also participated in the movement but when the barricades became its main symbol, the role they were given was often that of supporting the masked “heroes” standing at the height of the barricades, of being nurses to the wounded and bringing sandwiches so that the young men could revive themselves in between clashes with the CRS. This is not at all the case today. On the picket lines at the university gates, there have been many female students and their attitude has exemplified  the meaning that the movement has inspired in  the pickets: not a means of intimidation towards those who wanted to get to their classes, but a means of explaining, of arguing and persuading. In the general assemblies and the various commissions, even if, in general, the female students are less “loud-mouthed” and less involved in political organisations, they have been a key element in the organisation, discipline and effectiveness of the assemblies and commissions, as well as in their capacity for collective reflection. The history of the proletarian struggle has shown that the depth of a movement can be measured to some degree by the proportion of women workers involved in it. In “normal” times, working class women, because they are subjected to an even more stifling oppression than the men, are as a general rule less involved in social movements. It is only when these movements attain a great depth that the most oppressed layers of the proletariat throw themselves into the struggle and into the general reflection going on in the class. The high degree of participation by young women and girls in the current movement, the key role they are playing within it, is an added indication not only of the authentically proletarian nature of the movement but also of its depth.

18) As we have seen, the present movement of the students in France is a significant expression of the new vitality of the world proletariat over the past three years, of its growing class consciousness. The bourgeoisie will obviously do all it can to limit this movement’s future impact. If it is able, it will refuse to give in to the movement’s demands in order to maintain the feeling of impotence that has affected the working class in France since the defeat of 2003. At all events, it will do everything it can to prevent the working class drawing out its rich lessons, above all by trying to sap the movement and demoralise its participants, or by recuperating it through the unions and left parties. However, no matter how the bourgeoisie manoeuvres, it cannot suppress all the experience accumulated through weeks of struggle by tens of thousands of future workers, their awakening to politics and their developing consciousness. This will be a real treasure-trove for the future struggles of the proletariat, a vital element in their ability to continue down the path towards the communist revolution. It is up to revolutionaries to participate in it fully, both in order to draw the maximum benefit out of the present experience and to use it for the struggles of the future.

ICC, 3rd April 2006

World events in the recent period strikingly illustrate the fundamental historic choices facing humanity today. On the one hand, the capitalist system has provided yet more proofs of the barbaric impasse into which it has led the whole of society. On the other, we see a confirmation of the development of the struggles and consciousness of the proletariat, the only force in society that can offer a future.

This alternative is not yet perceptible to the whole of the working class, or even to the sectors who have recently entered into struggle. In a society where “the dominant ideas are those of the dominant class” (Marx) only small communist minorities may, for the moment, be conscious of the real stakes that are contained in the present condition of human society. That’s why it is up to revolutionaries to reveal these stakes by denouncing all the attempts of the dominant class to conceal them.

Capitalist barbarism can only get worse

It is a long time since the world’s most powerful leader, President George Bush Snr, announced the end of the Cold War and, after the Gulf War of 1991, the opening of a period of “peace and prosperity”. Each new day presents us with a new military atrocity. Africa continues to be the theatre of bloody conflicts and terrible slaughters not only from weapons but also from the epidemics and famines that they provoke. When war seems to stop in one place it flares up even more fiercely in another, as we can see now in Somalia where the “Islamic Courts” are leading an offensive against the war lords (Alliance for the restoration of peace and against terrorism – ARPCT) allied to the United States. The US intervention in Somalia at the beginning of the 1990s only further destabilised the situation, and ended in 1993 with a bitter reverse for the United States. Although today the “Islamic Tribunes” seem ready to collaborate with American power it is clear that in Somalia, as in many other countries, the return to peace will be short-lived. Is it not the intention of the American administration to make “the struggle against terrorism one of the pillars of American policy towards the Horn of Africa” (declaration of the under-secretary of State for African Affairs, Mme Jendayi Frazer, 29 June) an indication of the impossibility of any future stabilisation of this region?

In fact a good proportion of the wars developing, if not beginning today are justified by this so-called “war against terrorism”. This is the case of the two major conflicts in the Middle East: the war in Iraq and that between Israel and the armed cliques in Palestine.

In Iraq the population has already suffered tens of thousands of deaths since the “end of the war” was proclaimed on May1st 2003 by George W Bush on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. The number of deaths of young American soldiers is also counted in the thousands (more than 2500) killed there since their government sent them to “keep the peace”. In fact not a day goes by without real bloodbaths in Baghdad and other Iraqi towns. This violence is not aimed, in the main, at the occupation troops but principally at the civil population to whom the victory of democracy is synonymous with permanent terror and poverty – worse than that suffered under Saddam Hussein. Iraq was invaded, following the outrage of 11 September 2001, in the name of the struggle against two threats:

• the threat of Al Qaeda terrorism allegedly linked to Saddam Hussein’s regime;
• that of “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) allegedly at the disposal of the Iraqi dictator.

It has been established that the only WMD present in Iraq were those of the “coalition” forces led by the United States. As for the struggle against terrorism, which has become the new official crusade of the world superpower, it has been totally ineffective. The presence of American troops in Iraq has been the best means to stimulate suicide bombing among despairing young people fantasised by Islamic preachers. That is true not only in this country but pretty much everywhere in the world including in the most developed countries. The outrage on the London Underground, exactly a year ago, confirms the existence and development within the great capitalist cities of terrorist groups waging “Holy War”.[1] [240]

The other major conflict of the Middle East, the Palestinian conflict, continues to languish in a military impasse that has belied the hopes of “peace” proclaimed by the dominant sectors of the world bourgeoisie following the Oslo Accords of 1992. On the one side, there is the apparatus of a rump state, the Palestinian Authority which daily displays its divisions openly in the street, settling scores between different armed cliques (like Hamas and Fatah). As a result it cannot keep order faced with the minor terrorist groups, showing therefore its incapacity to offer the least perspective to populations crushed by poverty, unemployment and terror. On the other side, a state armed to the teeth, Israel, whose essential policy as we see today is to unleash its military power against these terrorist actions, a military power whose victims are not so much the groups at the origin of these actions, but the civil populations; this in turn can only give new inspiration to the Jihad and to suicide bombings. In fact the State of Israel practices, on a smaller scale, a similar policy to that of its American big brother, a policy that far from re-establishing peace can only throw oil on the fire. [2] [241]

Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR at the end of the 1980s, which provoked the inevitable disappearance of the Western bloc, the United States has assumed the role of world cop to keep “order” and “peace”. This was the aim of George Bush Snr in his war against Iraq in 1991. This is how we analysed it on the eve of the war:

“The war in the Gulf shows that, faced with the tendency towards generalised chaos which is specific to decomposition and which has been considerably accelerated by the Eastern bloc’s collapse, capitalism has no other way out in its attempt to hold its different components together than to impose the iron strait-jacket of military force. In this sense the methods it uses to try to contain an increasingly bloody state of chaos are themselves a factor in the aggravation of military barbarism into which capitalism is plunging.’ (“Militarism and decomposition”, International Review n°64, 1st Quarter 1991).

“In the new historical period we have entered, and which the Gulf events have confirmed, the world appears as a vast free-for-all, where the tendency of ‘every man for himself’ will operate to the full, and where the alliances between states will be far from having the stability that characterised the imperialist blocs, but will be dominated by the immediate needs of the moment. A world of bloody chaos, where the American policeman will try to maintain a minimum of order by the increasingly massive and brutal use of military force.” (Ibid)

However there is a big gap between the world leaders’ speeches (even when they are sincere) to the reality of a system that obstinately refuses to bend to their will:

“In the present period, (…) the barbarity of war will, far more than in previous decades, become a permanent and omnipresent element of the world situation (whether Bush and Mitterand with their prophecies of a ‘new order of peace’ like it or not) involving more and more the developed countries.”  (Ibid).

The world situation over the past 15 years has tragically confirmed this prediction. Military confrontations continue to overwhelm the populations of many parts of the world. The instability and tensions in the relations between countries have known no respite and tend to worsen still further today. The ambitions of states like Iran and North Korea follow in the footsteps of countries like India and Pakistan by trying to acquire atomic weapons and the means to launch them on a distant enemy. The firing of several “Taepodong” missiles on the 4th July by North Korea, and the impotent reaction of the “international community” to this veritable provocation underlines the growing instability of the world situation. Obviously North Korea is not a real threat to American power, even if its missiles can reach the Alaskan coast. But these provocations are eloquent of the incapacity of the American cop, stuck in the Iraqi quagmire, to maintain its “order”.

The military plans of North Korea appear as a real absurdity: a consequence of the “mental illness” of its supreme leader Kim Jong-Il who condemns his population to famine while he squanders the meagre resources of the country in mad and ultimately suicidal military programs. In reality the policy led by North Korea is only a caricature of that led by all the world’s states, beginning with the most powerful of them, America. The US Iraqi adventure has also been attributed to the stupidity of George W Bush jnr, his father’s son like Kim Jong-Il. In reality if certain political leaders are crazy, paranoid or megalomaniac (this was true for Hitler or “Emperor” Bokassa of Central Africa, although it seems not to be the case of George W, even if he is not a politician of high calibre) the “crazy” policies that they may carry out are only the expression of the convulsions of a system which itself has gone insane because of the insurmountable contradictions at the economic base.

Here is the world, the future, that the bourgeoisie offers us: insecurity, war, massacres, famines and as a bonus, the promise of an irreversible degradation of the environment whose consequences have begun to manifest themselves with climatic change whose effects risk being still more catastrophic than those of today (storms, hurricanes, deadly floods, etc). And one of the most revolting things is that all the sectors of the dominant class have the nerve to present the crimes for which they are responsible as animated by the love of great human principles: prosperity, liberty, security, solidarity, the struggle against oppression…

It is in the name of “prosperity” and “well being” that the capitalist economy whose sole motor is the search for profit, plunges millions of human beings into poverty, unemployment and despair at the same time as it systematically destroys the environment. It is in the name of “liberty” and “security” that American power and many others launch their military adventures. It is in the name of solidarity between civilisations or “national solidarity” faced with terrorist or other threats that it reinforces the ideological clothing of these projects. It is in the name of the struggle against the “American Satan” and his accomplices that the terrorist cliques carry out their actions preferably against totally innocent civilians.

In fact it is not the ruling class and its terrorist clones that will do anything to defend these values, but only the exploited class par excellence, the proletariat.

Workers’ struggles herald and prepare the future

In the middle of all this bloody barbarism which characterises today’s world, the only ray of hope for humanity resides in the resurgence of working class struggles on the world scale, seen especially over the past year. Because the economic crisis develops on a world scale and spares no country or region the proletarian struggle against capitalism tends to develop more and more at the planetary level. It embodies the future perspective of the overthrow of capitalism. In this sense the simultaneous nature of class combats of recent months, in the most industrialised states as much as in the countries of the “Third World”, are significant of the present recovery of the class struggle. After the strikes which paralysed Heathrow Airport in London and New York public transport in 2005, it was the SEAT workers in Barcelona, then the students in France, followed immediately by the steel workers in Vigo, Spain, who have entered massively into struggle since the spring. At the same moment in the Arab Emirates in Dubai a wave of struggles exploded among immigrant labourers working on the construction sites.

Faced with repression the airport workers in Dubai went spontaneously on strike at the end of May in solidarity with the construction workers. In Bangladesh nearly 2 million textile workers in the Dhaka region went on a series of massive wildcat strikes at the end of May and the beginning of June protesting against miserable wages and the unbearable conditions of life that capitalism makes them suffer. [3] [242]

Everywhere, whether in the more developed countries like the US, Great Britain, France, and earlier Germany and Sweden, or in less developed countries like Bangladesh the working class is in the process of raising its head to develop its struggles. The enormous militancy that characterises the recent struggles reveals that everywhere the exploited class today refuses to submit to the unacceptable and barbaric logic of capitalist exploitation.

On the world scene, faced with the development of “every man for himself” and of the war of “all against all” amongst bourgeois cliques, the working class is in the process of opposing its own perspective: that of unity and solidarity against the incessant attacks of capitalism. It is this solidarity which has particularly marked all the workers’ struggles over the last year and shows a considerable advance in the class consciousness of the proletariat. Faced with the impasse of capitalism, of unemployment, redundancies and “no future” that this system promises to the workers and especially to its new generations, the exploited class is in the process of understanding that its sole strength resides in its capacity to oppose a massive unified front to the capitalist Moloch.

Thus two worlds confront each other. The first, after incarnating human progress against feudalism, has become the official defender of all the barbarism, brutality and despair which overwhelms the human race. For its part, even if it is not yet conscious of it, the working class represents the future, a future which will finally get rid of poverty and war. A future in which one of the most precious principles of the human species, solidarity, will become the universal rule. A solidarity which the recent workers’ struggles show has not been definitively buried by a society in decline, but which represents a future of combat.

Fabienne 8th July 2006

This text is now available in leaflet form to download and distribute here:
files/en/mideast_leaflet.pdf [247]

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Once again the Middle East is in flames. Israeli planes and warships are systematically bombing Beirut and other targets in southern and northern Lebanon. Hundreds of civilians have been killed or maimed and vital infrastructure destroyed. Refugees are fleeing the bombed areas in growing numbers. At the time of writing there are preparations for some kind of ground invasion by the Israeli army. To the south, in Gaza, only a few months after the withdrawal of Israeli forces, the entire area has again become a battleground between Israeli troops and armed Palestinian organisations. The Israeli military blockade of both regions is strangling the economy and causing untold hardship to the local populations. But the Israeli population is also becoming increasingly fearful:  Hizbollah rockets had already claimed several lives further north when 8 people were killed by a missile landing on a railway depot in Haifa.

 

The stated reason for this major offensive by the Israeli state is the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hamas in the south and Hizbollah in the north. But this is just a pretext: Israel has used the crisis as an opportunity for trying to cripple or liquidate the Hamas regime in the occupied territories, and for demanding that the Lebanese state disarm Hizbollah (something which is completely beyond its means). It is also trying to draw Syria and Iran into the conflict, making threatening noises towards Syria, while claiming that one of the aims of the bombardment of Lebanon is to prevent the kidnapped Israeli soldiers being transferred to Iran, which arms and supports Hizbollah.

 

Threat of regional war

 

The present conflict thus contains the threat of escalating into a regional war. And because the Middle East is such a vital strategic region, every war there involves conflict not just between Israel and the Palestinians or its Arab neighbours, but between the great world powers. In 1948, the Russians and the Americans supported the formation of the State of Israel as a means of breaking the grip of the old colonial powers, Britain and France, that had previously controlled the region. The Suez war of 1956 confirmed that America was now top dog in the region: it humiliated the French and the British by demanding that they end their incursion against Nasser’s Egypt. The wars of 1967, 1973 and 1982 were integrated into the global conflict between the American and the Russian blocs, with the US backing Israel and Russia supporting the PLO and the Arab regimes.

 

With the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989, the stage was set for a ‘Pax Americana’ in Israel/Palestine. The United States became the broker of the Oslo accords in 1993. It  hoped that settling the Israel/Palestine conflict would allow it to become undisputed master of the region. The huge show of US firepower in Iraq in 1991 had the same aim. 

 

But all the efforts of American imperialism to impose a ‘new order’ in the Middle East have come to nothing. Ever since the Oslo ‘peace’ accords, but especially since the ‘Second Intifada’ of 2000, there has been constant conflict in Israel/Palestine – a never-ending round of murderous suicide bombings, followed by brutal Israeli reprisals, followed by more suicide bombings, and more reprisals. Parallel to this, US efforts to assert its mastery in Afghanistan and Iraq – the ‘War on Terror’ - have blown up in its face, creating two new Vietnams and plunging both countries into total chaos.  As the situation escalates in Lebanon, the Iraqi population is being tormented daily by horrific sectarian massacres,  while in Afghanistan the US/British-backed government  has lost its hold over the majority of he country. Furthermore, the effects of the military quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan are reverberating back to the Israel/Palestine conflict and vice versa. Israel’s provocative stance towards Iran echoes America’s stand-off with Tehran over its nuclear programme, while the ‘progress’ made by Islamic terrorism in Iraq influences the actions of Hamas and Hizbollah. And the ruthless slaughter by terrorist gangs of civilians in New York, Madrid and London confirms that war in the Middle East has already rebounded to the very centers of the system. The headlong rush into military adventurism is the only means at the disposal of every power or clique, from the greatest to the most insignificant, to defend their imperialist interests against their rivals.

 

In short, the situation throughout the Middle East is demonstrating not America’s control of the situation, but the spread of uncontrollable chaos. This is shown graphically by Israel’s ultra-aggressive attitude.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--> [248]

 

The rivals of the US prepare to take advantage

 

As for the other great powers, they are waving peace placards as they did prior to the invasion of Iraq. France and Russia have clearly condemned Israel’s “disproportionate” military operation in Lebanon.  Britain is also adopting  a more independent line: it has issued sharp criticisms of Israel’s “collective punishment” of the Palestinians in Gaza and it has made a great show of sending in the warships to evacuate British nationals from Lebanon. These powers, however, are not interested in peace but in maintaining their own spheres of influence in the region. They will certainly try to profit from America’s weakness, but none of them are in a position to take on its role as the world’s policeman, and their conflicting imperialist interests make it impossible for them to evolve any coherent common policies. This is why at the recent G8 summit, the great powers took a ‘united’ stance on the Lebanon crisis which immediately gave way to mutual recrimination and disagreement.

 

All the states and forces involved in this conflict are busy drawing up military and diplomatic plans which correspond to their own interests. They certainly use the most ‘rational’ methods of calculation to arrive at these plans, but all of them are caught up in a fundamentally irrational process: the inexorable slide of the capitalist system into imperialist war, which today is increasingly taking on the character of a war of each against all. Even the mighty US is being dragged into this abyss. In the past, when civilizations were on their last legs, they became embroiled in endless war. The fact that capitalism has become a system of permanent war is the clearest proof that it too is in a state of profound decay and that its very continuation has become a deadly danger for humanity.

 

Class struggle is the only way out

 

If all of capitalism’s peace plans are doomed to fail, what alternative is there to the imperialist disorder that dooms them? Certainly not the various nationalist/religious gangs which claim to be ‘resisting’ imperialism in Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan – Hamas, the PLO, Hizbollah, al Qaida… They too are entirely caught up in the logic of imperialism, whether striking out on their own or lining up directly with existing capitalist states. Their aims – whether the establishment of new national states or the dream of a pan-Middle East Islamic Caliphate – can only come about through imperialist war; and their methods – which always involve the indiscriminate massacre of the civilian population – are precisely those of the states they claim to be opposing.

 

The only opposition to imperialism is the resistance of the working class against exploitation, because this alone can grow into an open struggle against the capitalist system, a struggle to replace this dying system of profit and war with a society geared towards human need. Because the exploited everywhere have the same interests, the class struggle is international and has no interest in allying with one state against another.  Its methods are directly opposed to the aggravation of hatred between ethnic or national groups, because it needs to rally together the proletarians of all nations in a common fight against capital and the state. 

 

In the Middle East the spiral of nationalist conflicts has made class struggle very difficult, but it still exists – in demonstrations of unemployed Palestinian workers against the Palestinian authorities, in strikes by Israeli public sector workers against the government’s austerity budgets. But the most likely source of a breach in the wall of war and  hatred in the Middle East lies outside the region – in the growing struggle of the workers in the central capitalist countries. The best example of class solidarity we can give to the populations suffering the direct horrors of imperialist war in the Middle East is to develop the struggle that has already been launched by the workers-to-be in the French schools and universities , by the metal workers of Vigo in Spain, the postal workers of Belfast or the airport workers of London. 

 

International Communist Current, 17.7.06

 

Seventy years ago, in May 1936, a huge wave of workers’ struggles broke out spontaneously against the increased exploitation provoked by the economic crisis and the development of the war economy. In Spain in July of the same year, the working class immediately began a general strike and took up arms in response to Franco military’s uprising. Many revolutionaries, including some of the best-known like Trotsky, interpreted these events as the beginning of a new international revolutionary wave. In fact they were misled by the enthusiastic support of the crowds, by a superficial understanding of the forces present and by the “radical” nature of some of the speeches.

On the basis of a clear analysis of the balance of forces at an international level, the Italian Communist Left (in its review, Bilan) realised that the Popular Fronts were far from being the expression of a development of the revolutionary movement. On the contrary, they showed that the class was becoming increasingly caught up in nationalist and democratic ideology and was abandoning the struggle against the effects of the historic crisis of capitalism. “The Popular Front has shown itself to be the concrete process of the dissolution of the class consciousness of the proletariat, the weapon intended to keep the workers on the terrain of the preservation of bourgeois society in every aspect of their social and political life.” (Bilan n°31, May-June 1936). With great rapidity, in both France and Spain, the political apparatus of the “socialist” and “communist” left would place itself at the head of these movements. By enclosing the workers in the false alternative of fascism/anti-fascism, they sabotaged the movement from within, oriented it towards the defence of the democratic state and finally enrolled the workers in France and Spain in the second world imperialist slaughter.

Today there is a slow resurgence of the class struggle and new generations are appearing in search of radical alternatives to the more and more manifest failure of capitalism. In this context, “anti-globalisation” movements, such as ATTAC, denounce the unbridled liberalism and the “dictatorship of the market”, that “snatches political power from the hands of states, and therefore of the citizens” and call for the “defence of democracy against financial dictatorship”. This “other world” put forward by the supporters of “anti-globalisation” often takes up measures inspired by the policies of the 1930s, 50s or 70s, when the state supposedly played a much more important role as an immediate economic actor. From this point of view, the policies of the Popular Front governments, with their programmes of state control of the economy, “of the unity of all strata of the working population against the capitalists and the fascist threat”, setting in motion a “social revolution”, are exaggerated in order to support the assertion that “another world”, that other policies, are possible within capitalism.

So it is absolutely essential on the occasion of this 70th anniversary to remember the context and significance of the events in 1936:

• to recall the tragic lessons of these experiences, in particular the fatal trap for the working class of abandoning the terrain of the intransigent defence of its specific interests in order to submit to the needs of one bourgeois camp or another;
• to denounce the lies bandied about by the “left”, that they were the incarnation of the interests of the working class throughout these events, by showing that they were in fact its executioner.

The 1930s were characterised by the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and the triumph of the counter-revolution. They were fundamentally different from the present historic period of the resurgence of struggles and the slow development of consciousness. However, the new generation of proletarians who are trying to escape from counter-revolutionary ideology, continually come up against this same “left”, its traps and ideological manipulations, although it now wears the new clothes of “anti-globalisation”. It is only possible to escape them by reappropriating the lessons, so dearly bought, of the past experience of the proletariat.

Did the Popular Front strengthen the struggle against capitalist exploitation?

The Popular Fronts claimed that they were “unifying the force of the people against the arrogance of the capitalists and the rise of fascism”. But did they really set going a dynamic that strengthened the struggle against capitalist exploitation? Were they really a step towards the development of the revolution? In order to reply to this, a marxist approach cannot base itself exclusively on the radical tone of the speeches and the violence of the social eruptions which shook various Western European countries at the time. It takes as its basis an analysis of the balance of forces between the classes at an international level and for the whole historic period. What was the general context of strengths and weaknesses of the proletariat and of its mortal enemy, the bourgeoisie, in which the events of 1936 took place?

The product of the proletariat's historic defeat

The powerful revolutionary wave forced the bourgeoisie to end the war, brought the working class to power in Russia and shook the foundations of bourgeois power in Germany and throughout Central Europe. Following this, throughout the 1920s the proletariat suffered a series of bloody defeats. The crushing of the German proletariat in 1919 and then in 1923 by the social-democrats of the SPD opened the way for Hitler’s rise to power. The tragic isolation of the revolution in Russia signed the death warrant of the Communist International and left the way open to the triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution, which annihilated all the old guard of the Bolsheviks and the living force of the proletariat. Finally the last proletarian spark was pitilessly extinguished in China in 1927. The course of history had been reversed. The bourgeoisie had obtained decisive victories over the international proletariat and the course towards world revolution was replaced by an inexorable march towards world war. This meant the most horrible return to capitalist barbarity.

 Nevertheless, in spite of such crushing defeats of the battalions of the world proletariat’s vanguard, there were still episodes of combativeness, sometimes important ones, within the class. This was particularly the case in those countries in which it had not suffered a direct defeat, either physically or ideologically within the context of the revolutionary confrontations of 1917-1927. So, at the high point of the crisis in the 30s, in July 1932, a wildcat strike broke out among the miners in Belgium, which rapidly took on insurrectional dimensions. It took off from a movement against wage reductions in the Borinage mines. When the strikers were sacked, the movement spread throughout the province and there were violent clashes with the police. In Spain from 1931 to 1934, the working class engaged in a number of struggles, which were brutally repressed. In October 1934 all of the mining areas in the Asturias and the industrial belt of Oviedo and Gijon erupted in a suicidal insurrection, which was crushed by the republican government and its army. It ended up in brutal repression. Also in France, although the working class was profoundly demoralised and exhausted by the “leftist” policy of the CP, according to which, right up until 1934 the revolution was forever imminent and it was necessary to “create soviets everywhere”, it still manifested a certain combativeness. During summer 1935, in the face of legislation decreeing large wage cuts for workers in the state sector, impressive demonstrations and violent confrontations with the police took place in the docks of Toulon, Tarbes, Lorient and Brest. In Brest, after a worker was beaten to death by soldiers with their rifle butts, the exasperated workers launched violent demonstrations and riots between 5th and 10th August 1935. These ended in 3 deaths and hundreds of wounded; dozens of workers were jailed.[1] [252]

These expressions of continuing militancy, often marked by rage, desperation and political disorientation, were really “outbursts of desperation” which showed up all the weaknesses of the international situation of defeat and dispersion of the workers. The review Bilan brings this out in relation to Spain: “If the international criteria mean anything we have to say that, given the evidence of a development of the counter-revolution at an international level, the orientation of Spain between 1931 and 1936 can only follow a parallel direction [i.e. to the counterrevolutionary course of events], rather than the opposite course of revolutionary development. The revolution can only evolve in full as a result of a revolutionary situation at an international level.” (Bilan n°35, January 1937).

However, in order to mobilise the workers of those countries where the revolutionary movement had not been crushed, the national bourgeoisies were obliged to have recourse to a particular mystification. In those countries where the proletariat had already been crushed in a direct confrontation between the classes, the ideological mobilisation for war behind fascism or Nazism, or behind the Stalinist ideology of the “defence of the socialist fatherland”, were the specific forms of the development of the counter revolution. In those political regimes that had remained “democratic” the same mobilisation for war was undertaken in the name of anti-fascism. In order to achieve this, the French and Spanish bourgeoisie (and others like the Belgian bourgeoisie, for example) used the arrival of the left in power to mobilise the class behind anti-fascism in defence of the “democratic” state and to establish the war economy.

The position taken by the left towards the proletarian struggles mentioned above shows clearly that the policies of the Popular Front were not developed in order to strengthen the dynamic of the workers’ struggles. During the insurrectional strikes in Belgium in 1932, the Parti Ouvrier Belge and its union commission refused to support the movement. This served to direct the anger of the workers against Social Democracy as well. The strikers attacked the Maison du Peuple at Charleroi and tore up or burned their POB and union membership cards. From the end of ’33 the POB put forward the “Plan de Travail” (“Work Plan”), as a “people’s alternative” to the capitalist crisis, in order to channel the anger and despair of the workers.

Spain is also a particularly clear illustration of what the proletariat can expect from a ”republican” and “left wing” government. From the beginning of its existence, the Spanish Republic showed that it had nothing to learn from the fascist regimes about massacring workers. A large number of struggles in the 1930’s were crushed by republican governments or by the PSOE up until 1933. The PSOE, which was in opposition at the time, incited the suicidal insurrection in the Asturias in October ’34 with “revolutionary” talk. It then isolated the movement completely, in conjunction with its union, the UGT, which prevented any extension of the movement. From this time on, Bilan exposed the character of the “left-wing” democratic regimes very clearly: “In fact, from its foundation in April ’31 to December 1931, the Spanish Republic’s ‘move to the left’ – the formation of the Azana-Caballero-Lerroux government, the amputation of its right-wing represented by Lerroux in December 1931 – does not in any way offer favourable conditions for the development of proletarian class positions or for the formation of organs able to lead the revolutionary struggle. It is by no means a matter of seeing what the republican and radical-socialist government ought to do for the good of the (...) communist revolution. It is a question of analysing the significance of this switch to the left or the extreme left, this unanimous concert from the socialists to the unionists for the defence of the republic. Has it created the conditions for the development of working class conquests and the revolutionary direction of the proletariat? Or was this move to the left dictated by capitalism’s need to drug the workers, who had been carried away by a profound revolutionary outburst, to ensure that they would not follow the way of revolutionary struggle. The path that the bourgeoisie was to tread in October 1934 was too dangerous in 1931 (...)” (Bilan n°12, November 1934).

Finally, it is particularly significant that the violent confrontations in Brest and Toulon in summer 1935 broke out at the very moment that the Popular Front was formed. As these developed spontaneously against the slogans of the political and union leaders of the “left”, the latter did not hesitate to slander as “provocateurs” those who were disturbing “republican order”: “neither the Popular Front, nor the communists who are in the front line, break windows, plunder cafes or rip the national flag” (Humanité editorial, 7th August 1935).

So from the beginning, as Bilan showed in relation to Spain from 1933 onwards, the policies of the Popular Front and the left-wing governments were by no means based on a dynamic towards the strengthening of proletarian struggles. On the contrary, they developed against it, they deliberately collided with those workers’ movements that were on a class terrain in order to suffocate these last bursts of resistance against the “total dissolution of the proletariat within capitalism” (Bilan n°22, August-September 1935): “In France, the Popular Front, faithful to its treacherous tradition, will not fail to call for the murder of those who refuse to bow before the ‘French disarmament’ and who, as in Brest and Toulon, engage in strikes for their own demands, in class battles against capitalism and beyond the grip of the pillars of the Popular Front” (Bilan n°26, December-January 1936).

Anti-fascism ties the workers to the defence of the bourgeois state

Did the Popular Fronts not “unite popular forces against the rise of fascism” at least? When Hitler came to power in Germany at the beginning of 1933, the left used the advance of extreme right-wing or fascist factions in the “democratic” countries to show that it was necessary to defend democracy by means of a broad anti-fascist front. This strategy was put into practice for the first time in France from the beginning of 1934 and was set in motion by a huge manoeuvre. A pretext was given by the violent demonstration of 6th February 1934 in protest at the effects of the crisis and corruption in the governments of the Third Republic. Groups of the extreme right (Croix de Feu, Camelots du Roi) were involved in this demonstration as well as militants of the CP. A few days later there was a complete about turn in the CP’s attitude, due to a change in strategy on the part of Stalin and the Komintern. The latter had decided to substitute the “class against class” tactic with a policy of rapprochement with the socialist parties. From that moment on, February 6th was presented as a “fascist offensive” and an “attempted coup d’etat” in France.

The riot of 6th February 1934 enabled the left to exaggerate the existence of a fascist threat in France and consequently to launch a broad campaign to mobilise the workers in the name of anti-fascism for the defence of “democracy”. The general strike called by both the CP and the SFIO from the 12th crowned anti-fascism with the slogan “Unity! Unity against fascism!”. The French CP rapidly assimilated the new orientation and at the national conference at Ivry in June’34 Thorez declared: “At the present time, fascism is the main danger. It is against this that we must concentrate the entire strength of our mass proletarian action and win over to this action all the working strata of the population”. This perspective resulted in the rapid signing of a bi-lateral agreement between the CP and the SFIO in July 1934.

In this way anti-fascism became the theme around which it was possible to regroup all bourgeois forces that were “enamoured of freedom” behind the flag of the Popular Front. It also enabled the interests of the proletariat to be tied to those of the national capital by forming the “alliance of the working class with the workers of the middle classes” to spare France “the shame and the ills of a fascist dictatorship”, as Thorez put it. As an extension of this, the French PC developed the theme of the “200 families who pillage France and sell off cheaply the national interest”. So everyone, with the exception of these “capitalists”, were suffering because of the crisis and were in solidarity with one another. In this way the working class, and its class interests, were drowned in the people and the nation in opposition to “a handful of parasites”.

On the other hand, fascism was denounced daily and hysterically as the only element leading to war. The Popular Front mobilised the working class in defence of the fatherland against the fascist invader and the German people were identified with Nazism. The slogans of the French CP called for everyone to “buy French!” and glorified national reconciliation. So the left dragged the proletariat behind the ship of state by means of the most outrageous nationalism, the worst expression of chauvinism and xenophobia.

The high point of this intensive campaign was an electoral alliance and the public formation of the Popular Front on 14th July 1935. For the occasion the workers were made to sing the French national anthem under joint portraits of Marx and Robespierre and were made to shout “Long live the French Republic of soviets!”. By focussing all action on the development of the electoral campaign for the “Popular Front for peace and work”, the “left” parties redirected struggles off the class terrain towards that of bourgeois electoral democracy, drowned the proletariat in the formless mass of the “French people” and channelled it towards the defence of national interests. “This was a result of the new positions of 14th July, which were a logical consequence of the policy called anti-fascism. The Republic was not capitalism, it was the realm of freedom, of democracy which is, as we know the platform of anti-fascism. The workers solemnly swore to defend this Republic against internal and external trouble-makers while Stalin told them to approve the arming of French imperialism in the name of the defence of the USSR” (Bilan n°22, August-September 1935).

The same strategy for mobilising the working class on the electoral terrain in defence of democracy was used in various countries. It integrated them into the generality of popular strata and mobilised them for the defence of national interests. In Belgium, the mobilisation of the workers behind the campaign around the “Plan de Travail” used means of psychological propaganda which in no way fell short of Nazi or Stalinist propaganda. It resulted in the POB going into the government in ’35. The anti-fascist hype, led by the left of the POB in particular, reached a climax in 1937 in a dual in Brusselles between Degrelle, the leader of the fascist Rex party, and the prime minister Van Zeeland, who had the support of all the “democratic” forces including the Belgian CP. In the same year Spaak, one of the leaders of the left wing of the POB, stressed the “national character” of the Belgian socialist programme. He also proposed that the party become a people’s party because it defended the common interest and no longer the interests of one class alone!

However, it was in Spain that the French example inspired the policies of the left most clearly. Following the massacre in the Asturias, the PSOE still focussed its propaganda around anti-fascism, the “united front of all democrats” and called for a Popular Front programme against the fascist threat. In January 1935 they signed a “Popular Front” alliance with the UGT union, the republican parties and the Spanish CP, with the critical support of the CNT and the POUM. This “Popular Front” called openly for the substitution of workers’ struggle by struggle on the bourgeois terrain against its fascist faction and in favour of its “anti-fascist” and “democratic” wing. The fight against capitalism was buried in favour of an illusory “programme of reform” of the system, which had to carry out a “democratic revolution”. By mystifying the proletariat through this false anti-fascist and democratic front, the left mobilised it on the electoral terrain and obtained an electoral triumph in February 1936: “This [the republican-socialist coalition in 1931-33] was a conclusive demonstration as to the use of democracy as a means of manoeuvring to maintain the capitalist regime. But following this, in 1936, and in just the same way, it was again possible to push the Spanish proletariat to line up, not behind class interests, but behind the defence of the ‘Republic’, of ‘Socialism’ and of ‘Progress’ against the monarchy, clerical fascism and reaction. This shows the profound disarray of the workers in Spain, where the proletariat has only recently given proof of its combativeness and its spirit of self-sacrifice.” (Bilan n°28, February-March 1936).

In fact, the anti-fascist policy of the left and the formation of “Popular Fronts” managed to atomise the workers, to dilute them within the population, to mobilise them for a democratic transformation of capitalism to the point of imbuing them with chauvinist and nationalist poison. Bilan was proved right when the Popular Front was formed officially on 14th July 1935: “Impressive mass demonstrations signal the dissolution of the French proletariat into the capitalist regime. In spite of the fact that there are thousands and thousands of workers marching through the streets of Paris, there is no longer a working class fighting for its own aims in France, any more than there is in Germany. In this regard 14th July marks a decisive moment in the process of the disintegration of the proletariat and the reconstruction of a sacred unity of the capitalist nation. (...) The workers have borne patiently the national flag, sung the national anthem and even applauded Daladier, Cot and other capitalist ministers who, along with Blum and Cachin, have solemnly sworn ‘to give bread to the workers, work to the young and peace to the world’. This means lead bullets, barracks and imperialist war for everyone.” (Bilan n°21, July-August 1935).

The Popular Front's economic measures: the state in the service of the workers?

But did not the left at least limit the horrors of free competition by “monopoly” capitalism through its measures to strengthen state control of the economy? Did it not therefore protect the living and working conditions of the working class? Once more, it is necessary to place the measures extolled by the left within the general framework of the situation of capitalism.

At the beginning of the 1930s there was total anarchy in capitalist production. The world crisis threw millions of proletarians onto the streets. The economic crisis, produced by the decadence of the capitalist system, manifested itself through a great depression in the 1930’s (the stock exchange crash of 1929, record inflation rates, fall in industrial production and growth, dramatic acceleration in unemployment). This pushed the victorious bourgeoisie inexorably towards imperialist war for the redivision of the over-saturated world market. “Export or die” became the slogan of every national bourgeoisie and was expressed clearly by the Nazi leaders.

Movement towards war and the development of the war economy

Following the First World War, Germany was deprived of its few colonies by the Versailles treaty and was left with crushing war debts and reparations. It was hedged in at the centre of Europe and from that time on there arose the problem that determined the policies of all the European countries during the next two decades. As it reconstructed its economy, Germany was faced with the desperate need to find outlets for its goods and its expansion could only take place within the European framework. Events accelerated when Hitler came to power in 1933. The economic needs that pushed Germany towards war found their political expression in Nazi ideology: the challenging of the Versailles Treaty, the demand for “living space”, that could only be in Europe.

This convinced certain factions of the French bourgeoisie that war was inevitable and that Soviet Russia would be a good ally to block Pan-Germanic aspirations. All the more so as, at an international level, the situation was becoming clearer: as Germany left the United Nations, the USSR joined it. Formerly, the latter had played the German card in order to oppose the continental blockade, imposed upon it by the Western democracies. But then Germany’s relationship with the USA grew closer as the latter invested in the German economy, resuscitated it thanks to the Dawes plan and supported the economic reconstruction of a Western “bastion” against communism. At this point Stalinist Russia re-oriented its foreign policy towards breaking this alliance. In fact, until very late important sections of the bourgeoisie in the Western countries believed it possible to avoid war with Germany by making a few concessions and, above all, by directing Germany’s necessary expansion towards the east. Munich 1938 expressed this continuing incomprehension of the situation and of the coming war.

 The trip to Moscow made by the French minister for foreign affairs, Laval, in May 1935 underlined dramatically this positioning of imperialist pawns on the European chessboard with the Franco-Russian rapprochement. Stalin’s signing of a co-operation treaty, meant his implicit recognition of France’s defence policy and encouraged the French CP to vote for military credits. A few months later, in August 1935, the 7th Congress of the CPSU[2] [253] drew the political consequences for Russia of a possible alliance with the Western countries in order to confront German imperialism. Dimitrov named the new enemy that had to be combatted: fascism. The socialists who had been violently criticised up to then, became a democratic force (among others) with whom it was necessary to ally in order to defeat the fascist enemy. The Stalinist parties in other countries followed the 180° turn of their elder brother, the CPSU, so becoming the most ardent defenders of the imperialist interests of the so-called “socialist fatherland”.

 In short, all the industrial countries felt a powerful need to develop the war economy; not only massive armaments production but also the whole infrastructure necessary for this production. All the great powers, “democratic” as well as “fascist”, developed a similar policy of major public works under the control of the state and an arms industry entirely directed towards the preparation of a second world war. Industry organised itself around them; it imposed a re-organisation of work, of which “Taylorism” was one of the choicest offspring.

The left and state control

One of the main characteristics of the economic policies of the “left” was the strengthening of measures for the state to intervene to support the crisis-ridden economy and state control over various sectors of the economy. It justified such measures as being those “of a ‘controlled economy’, of state Socialism, ripening the conditions that would allow ‘socialists’ to ‘peacefully’ and gradually conquer the main wheels of state” (Bilan n°3, January 1934). Such measures were generally extolled by the whole of European Social Democracy. They were taken up in the economic programme of the Popular Front in France, known as the Jouhaux plan. In Spain the Popular Front’s programme contained a broad policy of agrarian credits and a plan for vast public works in order to re-absorb unemployment, as well as workers’ legislation fixing, for example, a minimum wage. We can see their real significance by examining one of their principle models, the “New Deal”, which was set up in the United States after the 1929 crisis by the Democrats under Roosevelt. Also by analysing one of the most developed theoretical concretisations of this “State Socialism”, the “Plan de Travail” of the Belgian socialist, Henri De Man.

The “New Deal”, set up in the United States from 1932, was a plan for economic reconstruction and “social peace”. Government intervention aimed to re-establish the equilibrium of the banking system and re-float the financial market, to carry out major public works (the construction of dams by the Tennessee Valley Authority dates from this period) and to launch certain social programmes (pension system, unemployment insurance, etc.). The role of the new federal agency, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), was to stabilise prices and wages in co-operation with employers and unions. It created the Public Works Administration (PWA) to run the policy of large public works.

Did the Roosevelt government open the way – without knowing it – for the workers’ parties to conquer the main levers of state power? For Bilan, the opposite was true: “The intensity of the economic crisis, together with the unemployment and misery of millions of people, accumulated the threat of serious social conflicts that American capitalism had to dissipate or stifle by all means in its power” (Bilan n°3, January 1934). So, far from being measures to benefit the workers, the measures for “social peace” were direct attacks against the class autonomy of the proletariat. “Roosevelt aimed, not to direct the working class towards class opposition, but to dissolve it within the capitalist regime, under the control of the capitalist state. So social conflicts could no longer arise from the real (class) struggle between the workers and the bosses and were to be restricted to an opposition between the working class and the NRA, a state capitalist organ. So the workers were to give up any initiative in the struggle and resign their fate to their enemy” (Idem.).

One of the main architects of these measures of state control and the man who was the inspiration behind most of them, was Henri De Man. He was the head of the institute of the POB cadres and was vice president and the leading light of the party from 1933. His measures were put into practice by the Popular Fronts as well as by the fascist regimes (Mussolini was a great admirer of his). For De Man, who had made a detailed study of industrial and social development in the United States and Germany, the “old dogmas” had to be ditched. For him, the basis of the class struggle was the sense of social inferiority of the workers. So rather than orienting socialism around the satisfaction of the material needs of a class (the workers), it should be directed towards universal spiritual values, such as justice, respect for the human personality and a concern for the “general interest”. In this way the unavoidable and irreconcilable contradictions between the working class and the capitalists were eliminated. Not only must revolution be rejected but also the “old reformism”, which becomes inapplicable in periods of crisis. It is no use demanding a larger piece of a cake, which is constantly shrinking. A new and larger cake must be made. This was the aim of what he called the “constructive revolution”. Within this framework, for the POB “Christmas” congress of 1933 he developed his “Plan de Travail”, which envisaged “structural reforms” of capitalism:

• the nationalisation of the banks, which would continue to exist but which would sell some of their shares to a state credit institution and would submit to the orientations of the economic plan;
• this same credit institution would buy some of the shares of the large monopolies in certain basic industrial sectors (such as energy), so that these would become mixed enterprises under the joint ownership of capitalists and of the state;
• besides these “associated” enterprises, a free capitalist sector would continue to exist, stimulated and supported by the state;
• the unions would be directly involved in the co-ordination of this mixed economy by means of “workers’ control”, an orientation that De Man defended on the basis of the experience in the large factories in the US.

In what way did these “structural reforms”, extolled by De Man, lead to the defence of the working class struggle? For Bilan, De Man wanted “to show that the workers’ struggle must restrict itself naturally to national aims in terms of form and content, that socialisation meant progressive nationalisation of the capitalist economy or the mixed economy. Under the pretext of ‘immediate action’, De Man preached national adaptation of the workers within the ‘unique and indivisable nation’ and offered this as the supreme refuge of the workers who had been checked by capitalist reaction”. In conclusion, “The structural reforms of H. De Man aim to put the real struggle of the workers – and this is their only aim – into the domain of the unreal. They exclude any struggle for the defence of the immediate or historic interests of the proletariat in the name of a structural reform that, in terms of its conception and its means, can only help the bourgeoisie to strengthen its class state by reducing the working class to impotence.” (Bilan n°4, February 1934).

But Bilan went further and situated the proposed “Plan de Travail” in the context of the role that the left played in the historic framework of the period. “The advent of fascism in Germany closed a decisive period of workers’ struggles. (...) Social-Democracy, which was an essential element in these defeats, was also an element in the organic reformation of the life of capitalism (...) It used a new language in order to continue its task. It rejected verbal internationalism, as it was no longer necessary, and went over to a frank ideological preparation of the workers for the defence of ‘their nation’. (...) That’s where the real origin of De Man’s plan is to be found. The latter was a concrete attempt to sanction, by means of an adequate mobilisation, the defeat of revolutionary internationalism and the ideological preparation to incorporate the proletariat into the struggle around capitalism towards war. This is why its nationalsocialism has the same role as the national-socialism of the fascists.” (Bilan n°4, February 1934).

The analysis of the New Deal and of De Man’s Plan illustrates well that these measures by no means go in the direction of strengthening the proletarian struggle against capitalism. On the contrary, they aim to reduce the working class to impotence and to make it submit to the needs of national defence. As Bilan says, the De Man plan can in no way be distinguished from the programme of state control of the fascist and Nazi regimes or from Stalinism’s five year plans, which had been implemented in the USSR from 1928 and had in the beginning inspired the Democrats in the USA.

These kinds of measures were generalised because they corresponded to the needs of decadent capitalism. In this period, the general tendency towards state capitalism is one of the dominant characteristics of social life. “In this period each national capital, because it cannot expand in an unfettered way and confronted with acute imperialist rivalries, is forced to organize itself as efficiently as possible, so that externally it can compete economically and militarily with its rivals and internally deal with the increasing aggravation of social contradictions. The only power in society which is capable of fulfilling these tasks is the state. Only the state can:

• take charge of the national economy in an overall centralized manner and mitigate the internal competition which weakens the economy, in order to strengthen its capacity to maintain a united face against the competition on the world market;
• develop the military force necessary for the defence of its interests in the face of growing international conflict;
• finally, owing to an increasingly heavy repressive and bureaucratic apparatus, reinforce the internal cohesion of a society threatened with collapse through the growing decomposition of its economic foundation, (...).” (ICC Platform).

In reality then, all these programmes that aimed at a re-organisation of national production under the control of the state were directed entirely towards economic war and towards the preparation for another world slaughter (the war economy). They correspond perfectly to the need for bourgeois states to survive within capitalism in the decadent period. 

Victory of the Popular Fronts: “social revolution” on the march?

But are these pessimistic analyses not swept away by the massive strikes of May-June 1936 in France and the social measures taken by the Popular Front government, and by the “Spanish revolution” that began in July 1936? Do these events not confirm, on the contrary, in practice, the correctness of the approach of “anti-fascist” or “popular” fronts? When it comes down to it, were these not a concrete expression of the “social revolution” in action? Let us examine the reality of these events.

May-June 1936 in France: the workers mobilised behind the democratic state

The great wave of strikes which followed immediately on the rise to government of the Popular Front after its electoral victory of 5th May 1936 was to confirm the limits of the workers movement, marked as it was by a defeat in the revolutionary wave and bowed under the weight of the counterrevolution.

The “gains” of 1936

On 7th May, a wave of strikes broke out in the aircraft industry, followed by the engineering and automobile industries, accompanied by spontaneous factory occupations. Despite their combativeness, these struggles were a sign of how limited was the workers ability to undertake the combat on their own class terrain. In the first days of the movement, the left succeeded in dressing up as a “workers’ victory” the derailment of workers’ combativeness onto the terrain of the national interest. It is true that this was the first time that factory occupations had taken place in France: it was also the first time that anyone had seen the workers singing the Marseillaise together with the Internationale, or marching behind the red flag together with the national tricolour. The control apparatus of the CP and the unions remained master of the situation and succeeded in keeping the workers closed up in the factories to the soothing sound of the accordion, while their fate was settled at the top, in the negotiations which were to lead to the Matignon agreements. Unity there certainly was, but it was that of the bourgeoisie’s control apparatus over the working class, not of the working class itself. When a few objectors refused to understand that once the agreements had been signed it was time to go back to work, Humanité explained to them that “it is necessary to know how to stop a strike... it is even necessary to know how to agree to a compromise” (Maurice Thorez, speech of June 1936), and that “we must not frighten our Radical friends”.

During the Riom trial, held by the Vichy regime to punish those responsible for the “moral decadence of France”, Léon Blum himself explained just how the factory occupations had been part of the national mobilisation: “the workers were there as guardians, as overseers, and also in a certain sense as co-proprietors. And from the special point of view which concerns you, does not the fact of observing the community of rights and duties towards the national patrimony lead to ensuring and preparing its common and unanimous defence? (...) this is how one creates for the workers, little by little, a joint property in the fatherland; this is how one teaches them to defend the fatherland”.

The left got what it wanted: it led the workers combativeness onto the sterile ground of nationalism, of the national interest. “The bourgeoisie is obliged to have recourse to the Popular Front in order to channel an inevitable explosion of the class struggle to its own benefit, particularly so inasmuch as the Popular Front appears as the emanation of the working class and not as the capitalist force which has dissolved the proletariat in order to mobilise it for war” (Bilan n°32 June-July 1936).

To put an end to any workers' resistance, the Stalinists used their bludgeons on those who “let themselves be provoked into short-sighted actions” (M Thorez, 8th June 1936) and the the Popular Front government called in the police to shoot down the workers in Clichy in 1937. By beating up or killing the last recalcitrant minorities of workers, the bourgeoisie succeeded in dragging the whole of the French proletariat into the defence of the nation.

Fundamentally, there was nothing in the programme of the Popular Front to worry the bourgeoisie. On 16th May, Daladier, the president of the Radical party, was reassuring: “no article of the Popular Front programme contains anything to inconvenience the legitimate interests of any citizen, to worry investors, or to damage any healthy force of French labour. There is no doubt that it has not even been read by many of those who fought it most passionately” (L’Oeuvre, 16th May 1936). Nonetheless, to inculcate its anti-fascist ideology and to remain entirely credible in its role of defender of the fatherland and the capitalist state, the left had to hand out a few crumbs. The Matignon agreements and the pseudo-conquests of 1936 made it possible to present the left in power as “a great workers’ victory”, to win the workers’ confidence in the Popular Front and their defence of the bourgeois state even in wartime.

This famous Matignon agreement, signed on 7th June 1936 and celebrated by the CGT as “a victory over poverty”, and which to this day is still presented as a model of “social reform”, was therefore the carrot used to sell the Popular Front programme to the workers. What exactly did it offer?

Under the appearance of “concessions” to the working class, such as wage increases, the 40 hour week, and paid holidays, the bourgeoisie ensured above all the organisation of production under the leadership of an “impartial” state, as the CGT leader Léon Jouhaux pointed out: “(...) the beginning of a new era (...), the era of direct relations between the two great organised economic forces of the country (...) Decisions have been taken completely independently, under the aegis of the government, the latter playing the role of umpire where necessary, which corresponds to its function as the representative of the general interest” (radio speech of 8th June 1936). The aim was to get the workers to accept unprecedented increases in line speeds through the introduction of new methods of labour organisation designed to increase hourly productivity tenfold especially in the armament industry. This meant the generalisation of Taylorism, of production line working, and the dictatorship of the stopwatch in the factory.

It was Léon Blum in person who stripped away the “social” veil that had hidden the laws of 1936, in his speech at the Riom trial in 1942, which had been intended to lay the blame for the heavy defeat inflicted on the French army by the Nazis in 1940 at the door of the Popular Front and the 40 hour week: “What lies behind hourly productivity? (...) it depends on the good coordination and adaptation of the worker’s movements to his machine; it also depends on the moral and physical condition of the worker.

“There is a whole school of thought in America, the school of Taylor and the Bedeau engineers, who you can see on inspection on the factory line, who have undertaken very thorough studies of the material methods of organisation that maximise the machines hourly productivity, this being precisely their objective. But there is also the Gilbreth school which has studied and researched the data on the physical conditions which will enable the worker to obtain this productivity. The essential point is to limit the fatigue of the worker (…) do you not think that all our social legislation was of a kind to improve this moral and physical condition of the worker: the shorter working day, more leisure, paid holidays, the feeling of having conquered a certain dignity and equality, all these were intended to be elements to maximise the hourly productivity that the worker could extract from the machine.”

This is how and why the “social” measures of the Popular Front government were necessary to adapt and lull the proletariat to the new methods of production aimed at the rapid rearmament of the nation before war broke out. It is noteworthy moreover that paid holidays, in one form or another, were granted at the same time in most of the developed countries heading for war and therefore imposing on their workforce the same increases in production speeds.

In June 1936, inspired by the movements in France, a dockers’ strike broke out in Belgium. After first trying to stop it, the unions recognised the movement and orientated it towards demands similar to those of the Popular Front in France: increased wages, the 40 hour week, and one week’s paid holiday. On 15th June, the movement generalised towards Borinage and the regions of Liège and Limburg: 350,000 workers throughout the country were on strike. The main result of the movement was to refine the system of social consultation through the setting up of the national conference of labour where bosses and unions agreed on the national plan to optimise the competitiveness of Belgian industry.

Once the strikes had been brought to an end, and a lasting increase in hourly productivity achieved, it only remained for the Popular Front government to take back what it had conceded. The wage increases were eaten away by inflation in a matter of months (food prices rose by 54 % between 1936 and 1938), the 40 hour week was called into question by Blum himself one year later, and completely forgotten when Daladier’s Radical government in 1938 accelerated the whole economic machine in preparation for war: abolishing extra payments for the first 250 hours of overtime, putting an end to labour contracts banning piecework, and sanctioning all those who refused overtime in the cause of national defence. “In factories working for national defence, dispensations on the legal 40 hour week were always granted. In most other things, in 1938 I obtained the agreement of the workers organisation’s for a 45 hour week in factories working directly or indirectly for national defence” (Blum at the Riom trial). Finally, with the support of the Blum government and the agreement of the unions, the bosses recovered their paid holidays. Christmas and New Year were incorporated into the paid holiday time, and this was followed by the abolition of all the existing public holidays: the whole added up to 80 hours extra work – which corresponded exactly to the two weeks of paid holidays granted by the Popular Front.

As for the recognition of union delegates and labour contracts, this represented nothing more than the strengthening of the unions grip over the workers by extending their presence in the factories. To that end Léon Jouhaux, the socialist and trade union leader, explained it in these terms: “the workers organisation’s [i.e. the unions] want social peace. First of all so as not to embarrass the Popular Front government, and secondly so as not to hinder rearmament.” When the bourgeoisie prepares for war, the state must control the whole of society to direct all its energy towards this bloody end. And in factories it is the unions which allow the state to police the workforce.

If victory there was, it was the sinister victory of capital preparing its only “solution” to the crisis: imperialist war.

Preparing for war

From the outset of the Popular Front in France, with its slogan “peace, bread, liberty”, its anti-fascism and pacifism, the defence of the French bourgeoisie’s imperialist interests was mingled with democratic illusions. Within this framework the left skilfully exploited preparations for war internationally to demonstrate that the “fascist peril is at our frontier”, organising for example a whole campaign over the Italian aggression in Ethiopia. Still more clearly, the SFIO and the CP played different roles in relation to the Spanish Civil War: whereas the SFIO refused to intervene in Spain in the name of pacifism, the CP urged intervention in the name of the “anti-fascist struggle”.

If there was one thing for which French capital could thank the Popular Front government, it was its preparation for war.

First of all, the left was able to use the enormous mass of workers on strike as a means of pressure against the most retrograde forces of the bourgeoisie, imposing the measures necessary to safeguard the national capital in the face of the crisis, and making the whole thing look like a victory for the working class;

Secondly, the Popular Front launched a rearmament programme via the nationalisation of war industry about which Blum was to declare during the Riom trial: “I proposed a great fiscal project... whose aim was to direct all the forces of the nation towards rearmament and to make this intensive rearmament effort a condition for a definitive industrial and economic recovery. It resolutely left behind the liberal economy, to replace it with a war economy”.

And indeed, the left was aware that war was coming: it was the left which pushed for the Franco-Russian entente, and which denounced most violently the Munich tendencies of the French bourgeoisie. Its “solutions” for the crisis were no different from those in Nazi Germany, New Deal America, or Stalinist Russia: the development of the unproductive sector of the armaments industry. As Bilan pointed out: “it is no accident if these great strikes broke out in engineering industry, starting with the aircraft factories (...) these sectors are working flat out, thanks to the rearmament policy being followed in every country. This fact is felt by the workers, and they were forced to launch their movement to reduce the brutalising rhythm of the production line”.

Finally and above all, the Popular Front led the working class onto the worst terrain possible for it, that of its crushing defeat: nationalism.

Thanks to the patriotic hysteria developed by the left through anti-fascism, the proletariat was led to defend one fraction of the bourgeoisie against another, the democrat against the fascist, and one state against another, France against Germany. The French CP declared: “the time has come to put into practice the general arming of the people, to undertake the fundamental reforms which will increase tenfold the country’s military and technical powers. The army of the people, the army of workers and peasants, well taught and well led by officers faithful to the Republic”. In the name of this “ideal” the “Communists” celebrated the name of Joan of Arc, “the great liberator of France”, and the CP called for a French front with the same slogan as that used by the far right only a few years before: “France for the French!” Under the pretext of defending democratic freedoms threatened by fascism the proletariat was led to accept the sacrifices necessary for the health of French capital, and finally to sacrifice their lives in the slaughter of World War II.

The Popular Front found effective allies in its executioner’s task amongst its left-wing critics: Maurice Pivert’s Parti Socialiste Ouvrier et Paysan (“Socialist workers’ and peasants’ party”, PSOP), the Trotskyists and the anarchists. All played the part of touts amongst the most combative elements of the class and were constantly posing as the “most radical”, though the only thing radical about them was the mystification they peddled. The Jeunesses Socialistes de la Seine (“Socialist youth of the Seine”), or Trotskyists like Craipeau and Roux, practiced entryism, and were the first to argue in favour of and organise the anti-fascist militia; Pivert’s friends within the PSOP were the most virulent in criticising the “cowardice” of Munich. All were unanimous in defence of the Spanish Republic alongside the anti-fascists and all would take part later in the inter-imperialist bloodbath as part of the Resistance. All did their bit in defence of the national capital, they have all deserved well of the fatherland!

Spain, July 1936: the proletariat sent to the abattoir

Thanks to the formation of the Popular Front (Frente Popular), and its victory in the elections of February 1936, the bourgeoisie injected the working class with the poison of the “democratic revolution” and succeeded in binding the workers to the defence of the “democratic” bourgeois state. In fact when a new wave of strikes broke out immediately after the elections, it was held back and sabotaged by the left and the anarchists because “the strikes are playing into the hands of the bosses and the right”. This was to find a concrete and tragic expression during the military Pronunciamento of 19th July 1936. The workers reacted immediately to the coup d’etat by going on strike, occupying barracks and disarming the soldiers, against the orders of the government which called for calm. Wherever the government’s appeals were respected (“the government commands the Popular Front obeys”), the military took control and a bloody repression followed.

“The armed struggle on the imperialist front is the proletariat’s grave” (Bilan n°34)

However, the illusion of the “Spanish revolution” was strengthened by the supposed disappearance of the Republican capitalist state and the non-existence of the bourgeoisie, all of them hiding behind the pseudo-”workers government” and even more left-wing organisations like the “Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militia” or the “Central Council of the Economy” which kept up the illusion of dual power. In the name of this “revolutionary change”, so easily won, the bourgeoisie demanded and obtained from the workers national unity around the sole objective of beating Franco. However, “The alternative is not between Azaña and Franco, but between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; whichever of the two partners is beaten the real loser will be the proletariat which will pay the price of a victory of either Azaña or Franco” (Bilan n°33, July-August 1936).

Very quickly, the Republican government of the Popular Front with help of the CNT and the POUM, turned the workers reaction to the Francoist coup d’etat into an anti-fascist struggle and manoeuvred to replace the social, economic and political battle against all the forces of the bourgeoisie with a military confrontation in the trenches against Franco alone, while the workers were allowed to take arms solely to get themselves killed on the military front of the “civil war” far from their class terrain. “We might suppose that the arming of the workers had a congenital virtue from the political point of view and the once they were materially armed, the workers could get rid of their treacherous leaders and give their struggle a superior form. Nothing could be further from the truth. The workers that the Popular Front is succeeded in incorporating into the bourgeoisie, since they are fighting under the leadership and for the victory of a bourgeois fraction, are thus prevented from even the possibility of evolving towards class positions” (Bilan n°33, July-August 1936).

Moreover, there was nothing “civil” about this war. It rapidly became a pure inter-imperialist conflict, and a prelude to World War II, as the democracies and Russia took the side of the Republicans while Italy and Germany took the side of the Falangists. “Class frontiers, which alone could have dismantled Franco’s regiments and renewed the confidence of the peasants terrorised by the right, have been replaced by other specifically capitalist frontiers. National unity has been achieved for the imperialist slaughter, region against region, town against town in Spain and by extension, state against state in the two democratic and fascist blocs. Whether or not the world war has yet started, the mobilisation of the Spanish and international proletariat is now ready for mutual slaughter under the imperialist flags of fascism and anti-fascism” (Bilan n°34, August-September 1936).

The illusions of a “social revolution”

The war in Spain has developed yet another myth. By substituting the war between “democracy” and “fascism” for the class war of the proletariat against capitalism, the Popular Front disfigured the very content of the revolution: its central objective is no longer the destruction of the bourgeois state through the seizure of political power by the proletariat but the supposed measures of socialisation and workers’ management in factories. It is above all the anarchists and certain tendencies which identify with councilism which have exalted this myth, even going so far as to claim that in this Republican, anti-fascist, and Stalinist Spain, the conquest of socialist positions went much further them was possible in the October revolution in Russia.

Without developing this question here, it must be said that these measures, even if they had been more radical than they were in reality, would have changed nothing of the fundamentally counterrevolutionary nature of the events in Spain. For both the bourgeoisie and for the proletariat, the central point of the revolution cannot be anything other than the destruction or the preservation of the capitalist state.

Not only can capitalism perfectly well put up temporarily with measures of self-management or the so-called socialisation of the land (the creation of cooperatives) while it waits for the chance to restore order when the time is right, it can even encourage them itself as means of mystification, channelling the proletariat’s energy into illusory conquests and away from the central objective which is at stake in the revolution: the destruction of capitalist power, and its state.

Exaltation of the so-called social measures as the high point of the revolution is nothing but verbal radicalism, which turns the proletariat away from its revolutionary struggle against the state and camouflages its mobilisation as cannon fodder in the service of the bourgeoisie. Having abandoned its class terrain, the proletariat was not only to be enrolled in the anarchists’ and POUMists’ anti-fascist militias and sent to the slaughter on the front, it was also to be subjected to an increasingly brutal exploitation and ever more sacrifices in the name of war production and the anti-fascist war economy: wage reductions, inflation, rationing, the militarisation of labour, and the lengthening of the working day. And when the proletariat rose up in desperation, in Barcelona in May 1937, the Popular Front with the Generalitat of Barcelona, and with the active participation of the anarchists, openly suppressed the working class of the city, while the Francoists interrupted hostilities until the left had crushed the workers’ uprising.

From the Social Democrats to the leftists, and even including certain fractions of the right, everyone agrees that the rise of the left to government in 1936 in France and Spain (but also, though no doubt less spectacularly, in other countries like Sweden and Belgium) was a great victory for the working class and a sign of its militancy and strength during the 1930s. Against these ideological manipulations, today’s revolutionaries, like their predecessors of Bilan, must state loud and clear that the Popular Fronts and their so-called “social revolutions” were nothing but a mystification. The arrival of the left in power in this period on the contrary expressed the depth of the defeat of the world proletariat and made it possible to enrol the working class in France and Spain in the imperialist war of the whole bourgeoisie was preparing, by enrolling them en masse under the banners of anti-fascist ideology.

“And I thought above all that this was a great achievement and a great service that I had performed, to have brought these masses and this elite of the working class back to their feelings of love and duty towards the fatherland” (declaration by Blum at the Riom trial).

For the working class, 1936 marks one of the blackest periods of the counterrevolution when the worst defeats of the working class were presented to it as victories; when the bourgeoisie could, almost without opposition, impose on the proletariat still reeling from the defeat of the revolutionary wave begun in 1917, its own “solution” to the crisis: war.

Jos

One of the most terrible effects of the counterrevolution which drowned the revolution of October 1917 in blood, was the complete isolation of the handful of revolutionaries in the USSR who survived the gulag and the raids of the GPU and the KGB (which also managed to bury the theoretical contributions of the Russian Communist Left). When the disintegration of the USSR began to raise the iron curtain imposed by the Stalinist bourgeoisie, it was important that revolutionaries in the West and in the countries of the ex-USSR should try to rebuild their contacts, exchange their experience and their ideas, so that the revolutionaries in these countries can return to their place in the international movement of the proletariat. This is why the ICC has taken part, since 1996, in the conferences organised by the Praxis group in Moscow (and in Kiev in 2005), and conducts a regular correspondence with several groups and contacts in Russia and the Ukraine. We have already published several articles from this correspondence on our Russian language web site. We have also begun the publication of a Russian language print publication, Интернационализм (Internationalism), in order to improve the exchange of ideas with comrades who do not have access to the Internet.

We know that this work requires enormous patience on all sides. The language barrier and translation is already a major difficulty; the ideas of the Communist Left from which the ICC draws its heritage are little known in the ex-USSR; similarly, the ideas developed by the comrades in these countries are often strongly marked by the specific experience there and are unfamiliar to readers in the West. The two articles that we are publishing here are the fruit of this long-term work: the first, is an extract from our correspondence with a comrade from Voronezh (a town on the river Don to the south of Moscow) and contains our response to his arguments in favour of self-management; the second, is an article by a comrade from the Ukraine on the presidential elections in 2004 which overthrew the regime of Leonid Kuchma.

Contrary to the boasts made by western leaders at the time, the collapse of the imperialist bloc led by the USSR has not brought anything like prosperity to the world economy or to Russia itself. Nevertheless, since the disappearance of Stalinism, revolutionaries in the west have been able to make contact with internationalists in Russia and the Ukraine. At the same time the latter have been able to get to know the principles and analyses developed by the Communist Left in the West from the 1920s onwards. The Communist Left in Russia also participated in the elaboration of these principles, before they disappeared into the Stalinist gulags.[1] [257] Following our interventions in the conferences organised in Moscow[2] [258] and last year in Kiev, as well as the publication in Russian of some of our pamphlets, the ICC has begun to correspond with Russian comrades on various aspects of the principles of the Communist Left. In particular the question of self-management has been the theme of much correspondence with various comrades. We have decided to publish in the International Review, the following reply to a comrade in the Voronezh region (a town situated on the Don to the south of Moscow).[3] [259] This is because we think that the questions raised deserve the attention generally of internationalists in Russia and elsewhere. The argumentation of the Russian comrade is very serious, even if we do not agree with all his conclusions.

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Dear comrade,

We have received your last letter and we welcome once more your contribution on the law of value and self-management. We want to continue the discussion on these two questions. This is part of the discussion between communists that is indispensable if we are to define the programme for the proletarian revolution with maximum rigour.

You approach the problem in the following way:

“In your book, The Decadence of Capitalism, you say that under socialism commodity production will be eliminated. But it is impossible to eliminate commodity production without abolishing the law of value. According to Marx’s theory, under socialism the produce of labour will be exchanged according to the amount of labour time necessary (according to the work). That is, it is in conformity with the law of value.”

“In your pamphlet Platform and Manifesto, point 11 is entitled ‘Self-management: workers’ self-exploitation’. What does self-exploitation mean? Exploitation is the appropriation of the produce of another’s labour. If I understand correctly, self-exploitation is the appropriation of the produce of your own labour. If this is so, then Robinson Crusoe exploits himself when he consumes the produce of his own labour. Robinson Crusoe exploits himself.”

We will try to reply to these two questions, showing the connection between them.

The historic and transitory nature of the law of value

In your letter of 26th December 2004, you quote a passage from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme: “Society gives him (the individual producer) a certificate stating that he has done such and such an amount of work (after the labour done for the communal fund has been deducted), and with this certificate he can withdraw from the social supply of means of consumption as much as costs an equivalent amount of labour. The same amount of labour he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. Clearly, the same principle is at work here as that which regulates the exchange of commodities as far as this is an exchange of equal values.”[4] [260]

The main idea defended by Marx here is that after the revolution, when the proletariat holds power, it is still necessary for a time to relate workers’ “wages” to labour time. Consequently the labour time contained in products must be calculated in order to find the “exchange value” of goods and this is expressed in terms of “labour time vouchers”. Production for the market, the law of value and therefore the market still exist. We completely agree with him. So we understand your surprise when you read in our book, The Decadence of Capitalism, that in socialism production for the market will disappear. It is a matter of a confusion of terms. In our press we always use the word socialism as a synonym for communism as the final goal of the proletariat. That is, a society without classes and without a state, in which the produce of labour will no longer be goods for the market, in which the law of value will have been abolished. As early as the period in which he wrote The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx was very clear about this; in communism exchange would no longer take place, goods for the market would no longer exist. “In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the time of production devoted to different articles will be determined by the degree of their social utility.”[5] [261]

At this stage, exchange value will have been abolished. The united human community will decide how much labour time should be devoted to the production of this or that product. It will do so by means of its administrative organs that have the job of planning production in a centralised way. But it will no longer be necessary “to do the rounds” of exchange as happens in capitalism because what matters is the social usefulness of the goods. This will be a society of abundance in which not only the most elementary needs of human beings are satisfied but in which needs in themselves undergo a great development. In such a society, work itself will change its very nature. The time devoted to creating what is necessary for subsistence will be reduced to a minimum, for the first time ever work will become a truly free activity. Distribution, as well as production, will be different in kind. It will no longer matter how much time the individual contributes to social production, the principle that counts is “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”

The identification and defence of this final goal of the proletarian struggle – a society without classes, with no state or national boundaries, without market production, flowed through all the works of Marx and Engels and of the revolutionaries of subsequent generations. It is important to remember this because this goal fundamentally determines the movement that leads to it and the means used to work towards it.

After the experience of the Russian revolution and then the Stalinist counter-revolution, we think it is politically clearer to talk of a “period of transition from capitalism to socialism” rather than “socialism” or of a “lower stage of communism”. Obviously this is not just a matter of terminology. In fact the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be envisaged as a stable society or as a specific mode of production. It is a society that is evolving and in which the dynamic towards the future is vital. It is a period in which social upheavals maintain their political envelope, in which the old relations of production are under attack and weaken while new ones appear and gain in strength. Just before the passage in the “Critique of the Gotha Programme” quoted at the beginning of this text, Marx states that: “We are dealing here with a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary (our emphasis), just as it emerges from capitalist society. In every respect, economically, morally, intellectually, it is thus still stamped with the birth-marks of the old society from whose womb it has emerged.”[6] [262] A few pages later, he says clearly : “Between capitalist and communist society lies a period of revolutionary transformation from one to the other. There is a corresponding period of transition in the political sphere and in this period the state can only take the form of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Our last letter seems to have made it possible to clear up this misunderstanding and your reply expresses a basic agreement: “In my understanding of marxism, this period of transition is called socialism. I am not talking about market communism but of market socialism. (...) With the development of the productive forces, distribution on the basis of labour becomes distribution according to needs, bit by bit socialism becomes communism and in time the market will disappear.”

In your letter of 26th December 2004, you stress that there are only three forms of distribution of goods based on the socially necessary labour time contained in them:

• by the medium of money (M), in which case the exchange of goods (G) takes place in the form of G-M-G;
• by the medium of the work token (T) that Marx talks about: G-T-G;
• directly in the form of barter: G-G.

You go on to say that in all three cases there is an exchange of goods and therefore a market, that is a society which uses a general equivalent – money – to express labour time. This is so even though in the case of barter, money exists only potentially. As you say: “Money and tokens are almost the same thing because they measure the same thing – labour time. The difference between them is like that between a ruler marked out in centimetres and another marked out in inches.” We agree with you that this is the economic situation that the proletariat must face after it takes power and that to ignore this would be a regression from marxism. This is all the more so as the international civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will have given rise to a lot of destruction, so causing a drop in production. Communists must fight constantly against the illusion that there can be a rapid and problem-free elimination of the law of value. The way in which the proletariat will eliminate exchange and create the conditions for the state to wither away, means that the period of transition will be a period of revolutionary upheaval such as humanity has never known.

In spite of these particular points, it is clear that a disagreement still exists. You write, for example, in the same letter: “Under socialism, the product of labour will be exchanged according to the amount of labour time socially necessary. As long as the product of labour is exchanged according to the amount of labour time, the market and production for the market continue to exist. Therefore, in order to abolish production for the market, distribution based on labour time must be abolished. So, if you want to abolish production for the market, you have to abolish socialism. If you consider yourselves to be marxists, you must recognise that socialism is essentially based on the market. Otherwise off to the anarchists!”

From the passage above, we suppose that by “socialism” you mean the period of transition from capitalism to communism. By its very nature, this period is unstable: either the proletariat is victorious and the “transitional economy” is transformed in the direction of communism, that is towards the abolition of the market economy. Or else the proletariat loses ground, the laws of the market strengthen and there is the danger that the way will be open to the counter-revolution.

The ignorance of the anarchists

In the same letter you write that we find the same ignorance among the anarchists. In fact, for them, the emancipation of humanity depends exclusively on an effort of will and consequently communism can come about in any historical period. At the same time, they reject a scientific analysis of social development and are unable to understand what role the class struggle and human will can really play. In his Preface to Capital, Marx replied, without actually naming them, to the anarchists, who denied the inevitability of the transition period: “even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement – and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society – it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth pangs.”[7] [263]

According to Marx and Engels, the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is a period of transition between the two “stable” modes of production, capitalism and communism, is based on two factors:

• communism cannot flourish within capitalism (unlike capitalism which developed within feudalism);
• the development of the productive forces brought about by capitalism, although dramatic, is nevertheless insufficient for the complete satisfaction of human needs, which is a characteristic of communism.

Not only are the anarchists clearly unable to understand this but what’s more, their “vision of communism” in no way transcends the narrow bourgeois horizon. This can already be seen in Proudhon’s works. For him, political economy is the supreme science and he sets out to identify the good and the bad side of every capitalist economic category. The good side of exchange is that it opposes two equal values. The good side of competition is emulation. Inevitably, he also finds a good side to private property: “But it is clear that, although inequality is one of the characteristics of property, that is not all that it is. What makes property delightful, in the words of some philosopher whose name I no longer remember, is that you can dispose at will, not only of the value of the goods, but also of its specific character. You can exploit it as you please, reinforce it or conclude and make what use of it as is suggested by your interest, passion and whim”.[8] [264]

The reign of freedom is proclaimed but the limited and petty dreams of the small producer are dragged on board. For the anarchists, the ideal society is just an idealised capitalism whose masters are exchange and the law of value, in other words, the conditions for the exploitation of man by man. Marxism, on the contrary, is a radical critique of capitalism, which defends the perspective of a real emancipation of the proletariat and of the whole of humanity at the same time. Marx and Engels always fought against vulgar communism which restricts the revolution to the sphere of distribution and which ends up simply sharing out misery. They opposed the idea that there would be a spurt in the productive forces once they were freed from the constraints of capitalism. They called not only for the satisfaction of the elementary needs of human beings but also for the development of these needs, the transcending of the separation between the individual and the community, the development of all of the individual’s abilities, which are now stifled by the tentacles of the division of labour. “In a more advanced phase of communist society, when the enslaving subjugation of individuals to the division of labour, and thereby the antithesis between intellectual and physical labour, have disappeared, when labour is no longer just a means of keeping alive but has itself become a vital need; when the all-round development of individuals has also increased their productive powers and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can society wholly cross the narrow horizon of bourgeois right and inscribe on its banner : From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”[9] [265]

Marxism does not give in to the windy phrases of petty bourgeois radicalism and utopianism. It knows that the only way to escape from capitalism is to eliminate wages and exchange. These encapsulate all the contradictions of capitalism and are the basic causes of the wars, crises and poverty that ravage society. The political economy to be established by the dictatorship of the proletariat is entirely directed towards this aim. According to this conception there is not a spontaneous transformation but rather the destruction of capitalist social relations.

In recalling this, we can see the extreme confusion with which the anarchists claim to overcome the separation of the worker from the product of his labour. From their point of view, by becoming the owners of the factory where they work, the workers automatically become the owners of the product of their labour. They dominate them, they even manage to enjoy them in full. The result is that property becomes eternal and sacred. What we have here is a federalist kind of regime that is heir to the pre-capitalist mode of production. Lassalle follows the same trajectory. He learnt from Marx that exploitation entails the extraction of surplus value. So the problem is to be solved by demanding for the worker the entire produce of his labour. By doing so, as Engels says in Anti-Duhring: “The most important progressive function of society, accumulation, is taken from society and put into the hands, placed at the arbitrary discretion, of individuals.”[10] [266] According to the works of Marx these confusions about labour, labour power and the product of labour are completely inadmissible. This theoretical gibberish, shared by Lassalle and the anarchists, is the basis for self-management conceptions. This is not an orientation for the abolition of exchange and towards communism. It rather increases the obstacles in its path. This is how Marx, once more in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, concluded the sharp critique of these conceptions: “If I have dealt at some length with the ‘undiminished proceeds of labour’ on the one hand, and ‘equal right’ and ‘just distribution’ on the other, it is in order to show the criminal nature of what is being attempted: on the one hand, our party is to be forced to re-accept as dogmas ideas which may have made some sense at a particular time but which are now only a load of obsolete verbal rubbish; on the other hand, the realistic outlook instilled in our party at the cost of immense effort, but now firmly rooted in it, is to be perverted by means of ideological, legal and other humbug so common among the democrats and the French socialists.”[11] [267]

From this point of view, it seems to us that you stop half way in your reasoning. You agree with us that during this period, the working class will not be exploited. This is because the proletariat holds power, because there will be a process of collectivisation of the means of production. It is also because excess labour no longer takes the form of surplus value to be used for the accumulation of capital but is to be used increasingly to satisfy the needs of society (once the reserve fund and the sum destined for unproductive members of society is deducted). You say, quite rightly: “The difference between socialism (the period of transition) and capitalism is that under socialism the work force is no longer a commodity” (letter of 23rd January 2005). But in your next letter you say: “The law of value remains operative in its entirety, not partially”. This gives force to your expression “market socialism”. You see quite well the need to attack the wage but not the need to attack market exchange. However, the two are tightly linked.

The law of value expounded by Marx does not just elucidate the origin of market value, it solves the enigma of the enlarged reproduction of capital. Even if the proletariat receives a wage that corresponds to the real value of its labour power, it still creates much greater value by means of the productive process. The exploitation that allows this surplus value to be extracted from the proletariat’s labour already existed in simple market production, from which capitalism was born and developed. It is therefore impossible to eliminate the exploitation of the proletariat without attacking market exchange. Engels explains this clearly in The origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: “When the producers no longer directly consumed their product, but let it go out of their hands in the course of exchange, they lost control over it. They no longer knew what became of it, and the possibility arose that the product might some day be turned against the producers, used as a means of exploiting and oppressing them, Hence, no society can for any length of time remain master of its own production and continue to control the social effects of its process of production, unless it abolishes exchange between individuals.”[12] [268]

If the law of value remains “operative in its entirety”, as you say, then the proletariat remains an exploited class. If exploitation is to cease during the period of transition it is not enough to expropriate the bourgeoisie. It is also necessary that the means of production cease to exist as capital. The capitalist principle of dead labour, of accumulated labour that dominates living labour in order to produce surplus value must be replaced. Its place must be taken by the principle of living labour that dominates accumulated labour in order to produce for the satisfaction of the needs of the members of society. The dictatorship of the proletariat will have to combat the absurd and catastrophic productivism of capitalism. As is stated in the French Communist Left,  “at the beginning, the amount of surplus labour the proletariat has to perform will be as great as it was under capitalism. Thus the socialist economic principle will not, in its immediate application, be able to be measured quantitatively in the relation between paid and unpaid labour. Only the trajectory, the tendency towards altering this relationship can serve as an indication of which way the economy is going, as a barometer of the class nature of production.”[13] [269]

Self-management, a fatal trap for the proletariat

The second question under discussion is dealt with in point 11 of our platform: “Self-management: workers’ self-exploitation”. Here you express a clear disagreement with our position. It seems inconceivable to you that workers can exploit themselves. “But I do not at all understand”, you write, “how it is possible to exploit oneself. It’s like stealing from oneself.” Since the big workers’ struggles at the end of the 1960s, most of our sections have been confronted concretely with the question of the self-management by the workers of “their” enterprise within the framework of capitalist society. So they have been able to verify in practice that behind the self-management mask lurks the trap of isolation laid by the unions. There are numerous examples: the watchmaker Lip in France in 1973, Quaregnon and Salik in Belgium in 1978-79, Triumph in England in the same period and recently in the Welsh mining industry at Tower Colliery. The scenario is always the same: the threat of bankruptcy provokes workers’ struggle, the unions organise the isolation of the struggle and in the end manage to defeat it by inviting workers and management into buying out the factory, at the cost, if necessary, of redundancy pay or several months’ wages in order to increase the capital of the enterprise. In 1979, the Lip factory, which in the meantime had become a workers’ co-operative, went out of business under the pressure of its competitors. During the last general assembly, a worker gave vent to his rage and despair at the union representatives, who had become the real bosses of the factory: “You’re vile! Now it’s you who chuck us out the door... You lied to us! “[14] [270] The slogan of self-management serves to get workers to accept the sacrifices imposed by the economic crisis and strangle at birth their struggle to resist them.

This principle is entirely in accordance with marxism. We should point out that we are not the first to use the idea of the self-exploitation of the workers. This is what Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1898: “But in capitalist economy exchange dominates production (...) As a result of competition, the complete domination of the process of production by the interests of capital – that is, pitiless exploitation – becomes a condition for the survival of each enterprise. The domination of capital over the process of production expresses itself in the following ways. Labour is intensified. The work day is lengthened or shortened, according to the situation of the market. And, depending on the requirements of the market, labour is either employed or thrown back into the street. In other words, use is made of all methods that enable an enterprise to stand up against its competitors in the market. The workers forming a co-operative in the field of production are thus faced with the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism. They are obliged to take to themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur – a contradiction that accounts for the usual failure of production co-operatives which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers’ interests continue to predominate, end by dissolving.”[15] [271]

It is because the workers “take to themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur” that we call it self-exploitation. Your defence of self-management is based on the experience of the workers’ co-operatives in the 19th century and you quote in particular the “Resolution on the work of the co-operatives” adopted at the first congress of the IWA. In fact, on several occasions Marx and Engels encouraged the co-operative movement, essentially the co-operatives of production. This was not so much for their practical results but rather because they confirmed the idea that the workers were perfectly able to do without the capitalists. This is why they were keen to stress their limits and the permanent risk of their coming more or less directly under the control of the bourgeoisie. They were concerned to prevent the co-operatives from diverting the workers from the revolutionary perspective, from the need for them to seize power over the whole of society. This resolution stipulates:

“a) We recognise the co-operative movement as one of the forces for transformation in the present society, which is founded on class antagonisms. Its great merit is that it shows practically that the present system of the subordination of labour to capital, which is despotic and creates pauperisation, can be supplanted by the republican system of association between free and equal producers.

b) But the co-operative system is limited to minute examples coming out of the individual efforts of wage slaves. It is powerless in itself to transform capitalist society. In order to transform social production into a large and harmonious system of co-operative labour, general change is indispensable. Such change will never be obtained without the organised force of society. Therefore, state power must be torn from the hands of the capitalists and landed property owners and wielded by the producers themselves.”[16] [272]

You quote the first part of this passage but not the second, which offers an essential clarification and which reflects much more faithfully Marx’s real thinking. We know that Marx had to form the First International from various confused socialist schools, which he hoped to help evolve. Through the development of its consciousness the workers’ movement rid itself of “doctrinaire recipes” and Marx actively contributed to this. The co-operative associations belonged to this type of doctrine and tended to take the place of the class struggle, of workers’ protection, of the union struggle and even of the overthrow of capitalist society. For Marx it was indispensable that the working class rises to the level of a theoretical understanding of what it must do in practice. For this reason the formula, “ a large and harmonious system of co-operative labour” undoubtedly means communist society and not a federation of workers’ co-operatives.

For you the first part of the resolution means that the struggle for reforms is not in contradiction with the overthrow of capitalism, that it is in fact complimentary. But it could be so only in the period in which capitalism was progressive, when the bourgeoisie could still play a revolutionary role in relation to the vestiges of feudalism. This was the period in which the workers could participate in parliamentary and union struggles for the recognition of democratic rights, for the realisation of significant social reforms in order to hasten the maturation of the conditions for the communist revolution. Today on the other hand we are in the midst of the period of capitalist decadence. With the outbreak of the First World War, with the emergence of a new capitalist period, that of imperialism, of decadence, reforms have become impossible. If we fail to take account of this historic evolution in a marxist way, we end up forgetting Lenin’s warning in The Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky: “One of the most pernicious methods of opportunism is to reiterate a position that was valid in the past”.

You say that, according to Marx, “socialism is born out of the old and dying bourgeois society.” If we open the Communist Manifesto, for example, we find no such idea. In it Marx and Engels explain that the bourgeoisie gradually developed new relations of production within feudalism and that its political revolution completed the economic domination that it had already acquired. They showed that for the proletariat, the process is the opposite: “All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, “Bourgeois and Proletarians”). The political revolution of the proletariat is the indispensable condition for the emergence of new relations of production. What arises within bourgeois society are the conditions for socialism, not socialism itself.

The cruel laws of competition

To support your argument you develop the idea that “Decadence means economic stagnation, the flowering of delinquency, the increase of misery and unemployment. State power is weak and unstable (striking examples are the military empires of ancient Rome, which lasted only a few months). The class struggle becomes more acute. The most important thing, which you do not mention in your book, Decadence of Capitalism, is the appearance of new class relations within the old dying society. In the Roman Empire it was the colonists, the slaves used for agricultural work, serfs in essence. In the period of the destruction of bourgeois society it is self-managed enterprises, the co-operatives to be exact.” It is true that, in decadent capitalism, bourgeois society is marked by a high degree of instability. The bourgeoisie must confront unprecedented economic debility, it is ravaged by a crisis of over-production because there are not enough soluble markets at the international level. Imperialist rivalries intensify and erupt into world war. The bourgeoisie responds to this situation by strengthening the state. This is analogous to what happened with the decadence of the Roman Empire and with the absolutism of the monarchy in the case of feudalism. There is an increase of competition, the need for the intensification of the exploitation of the proletariat, the appearance of mass unemployment, a totalitarian state that reaches its tentacles into all aspects of civil society (and not a “weak and unstable” state). This is precisely what makes it impossible for workers co-operatives to survive today.

We completely agree with you that it is “the Left Communists who are right on this question (state capitalism) and not Lenin.” They understood intuitively that capitalism was strengthening in Russia even in the absence of a private bourgeoisie and that the power of the working class was in danger. In fact, under the pressure of the isolation of the revolution, the workers councils lost power to the state, with which the Bolshevik party had identified itself completely. But we do not at all agree with the remedies proposed by Kollontai’s Workers’ Opposition. Demanding that the management of the factories and the exchange of goods should be given into the hands of the workers of each factory would only have exacerbated the problem and made it even more complicated. Not only would the workers have obtained no more than symbolic power but they would also have lost their class unity, that had been so magnificently realised when the workers’ councils arose. They would also have lost the influence of a real vanguard party in their midst, the Bolshevik party.

On the contrary, you think that “It is much easier and more comfortable for the workers to control production at the level of the factories. (...) After October 1917 the economy was managed in a centralised way. Finally socialism degenerated into state capitalism against the will of the Bolsheviks. (...) So, under socialism, the workers’ councils will not have the job of managing the economy, they will not plan either the production or the distribution of goods. If these tasks are given to the workers’ councils, socialism will inevitably develop towards state capitalism.” For our part, we are convinced that centralisation is fundamental for workers’ power. If you remove the centralisation of socialism, you get the autonomous communities of the anarchists and a regression of the productive forces. What happened in Russia is that a centralised force, the state, supplanted another centralised force, the workers’ councils. Where did the bureaucracy and then the Stalinist bourgeoisie come from? It came from the state, not from the workers’ councils, which themselves underwent a process of decline that led to their death. It was not centralisation that led to the degeneration of the Russian revolution. If the workers’ councils were weakened at this point, if the Bolsheviks allowed themselves to become embroiled in the state, it is because the revolution was isolated. The machine guns that cut down the German proletariat also overcame the Russian proletariat, as if by ricochet. It was not long before the latter became no more than a wounded giant, weakened and bled dry. This confirms an important lesson of the Russian revolution: socialism is impossible in one country!

In conclusion, we will return to your conception of the self-management of factories under capitalism.[17] [273]

In these co-operatives the workers decide on the division of the profits collectively. Wages no longer exist, “the workers receive the use value and not the exchange value of their labour power” To start with, we think that there is a confusion here between “exchange value” and “use value”. The latter expresses the usefulness of what is produced, the use that can be made of it. One of the fundamental specificities of the productive process operated by the modern proletariat, in comparison with other historical periods, is that the use values it produces can only be appropriated by society as a whole. Unlike the shoes, for example, produced by the artisan cobbler the hundreds of thousands of microchips produced by the workers of Intel or AMD have no “use value” in themselves. They have use value only as parts of other machines produced by other workers in other factories and which themselves are part of the production chain of still other factories. This is also true of the modern “cobblers”: the workers of Jinjiang in China, who produce 700,000 shoes per year. It is hard to imagine that they could wear all of them! By the same token, it is difficult to imagine one self-managed factory paying the workers in combine-harvesters, which are by definition indivisible, and another one in ball-point pens.

However, let’s suppose that, as you said, the workers do receive the equivalent of the variable capital and the surplus value produced. They still cannot consume the entire profit of the factory but only a relatively small part. The rest must be transformed into new means of production. The laws of competition (and we are in a competitive situation) are such that every business must expand and increase its productivity if it does not want to go under. So part of the profit is accumulated and converted into capital. Of necessity, the proportion will be more or less the same as in a factory that is not self-managed. Otherwise the self-managed business would not expand as fast as the others and would go under in the end. The cost price of the self-managed factory would have to be at least no higher than those of the rest of the capitalist economy. Otherwise it would not find buyers for its goods. This inevitably means that the workers of self-managed factories would have to align their wages and their work rhythm with those of the workers employed in capitalist enterprises. In other words, they would have to exploit themselves.

Moreover, we find ourselves in the same conditions of exploitation as in all the other enterprises because the workforce is still under submission, alienated from dead labour, from accumulated labour, from capital. At most they can take back that fraction of the profit that in traditional capitalist enterprises is set aside for the personal consumption of the boss or which constitutes the dividends of the shareholders. The workers who rejoiced at having obtained a supplement to their wages would soon change their tune. The bosses that they elected in all confidence would quickly convince them to hand back this supplement and even to agree to wage reductions.

“But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, (or the transformation into self-managed enterprises, we could add) does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces”, Engels says in Anti-Dühring. Changing the legal status of an enterprise in no way changes its capitalist nature. This is because capital is not a form of property; it is a social relationship. Only the political revolution of the proletariat can eliminate capital by giving a new orientation to social production. It cannot do this by going backwards in terms of the level of international socialisation attained under capitalism. On the contrary, it must complete this socialisation by breaking through the national framework, the factory framework and the division of labour. Then the slogan of the Communist Manifesto will take on the full force of its meaning: “Workers of the world unite!”.

We await your reply. Accept our fraternal and communist greetings.

ICC, 22nd November 2005

In the first part of this summary of the second volume (International Review 125) we looked at how the communist programme was enriched by the huge advances made by the working class movement during the world-wide revolutionary upsurge provoked by the First World War. In this second part, we consider how revolutionaries struggled to understand the retreat and defeat of the revolutionary wave, while showing that this too was a source of invaluable lessons for the revolutions of the future. 

1. 1918: the revolution criticises its mistakes - (International Review n°99)

If the Russian revolution was, in Rosa Luxemburg’s words, “the very first experiment in proletarian dictatorship in world history” (The Russian Revolution), then it follows that any attempt to illuminate the path that a future revolution must follow must draw on the lessons of that experiment. Since the proletarian movement can only be harmed by any attempt to run away from reality, the effort to understand these lessons go back to the very earliest days of the revolution itself, even if it took many years of painful experience and equally painful reflection to fully understand the legacy that that the Russian revolution has left us.

The model for analysing the mistakes of the revolution is provided by Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet The Russian Revolution, written from prison in 1918. Luxemburg’s starting point is one of fundamental solidarity with the soviet power and the Bolshevik party, recognising that the difficulties they faced were first and foremost the result of the isolation of the Russian fortress, and could only be overcome if the world – and especially the German – proletariat assumed its responsibilities and carried out history’s execution order on capitalism.

Within this framework Luxemburg criticises the Bolsheviks on three counts:

• the land question. While recognising that the Bolshevik slogan of “land to the peasant” had been tactically necessary to win the peasant masses to the cause of the revolution, Rosa felt that the Bolsheviks were piling up difficulties against themselves by formalising the parcelling out of the land. But while Luxemburg correctly foresaw that this process would eventually create a conservative stratum of small landowners, it was also the case that the collectivisation of the land was in itself no guarantee of a march towards socialism if the revolution remained isolated;
• on the national question, Luxemburg’s criticisms of the slogan of national self-determination (which were echoed by certain elements within the Bolshevik party, such as Piatakov) were amply confirmed by experience. In reality “national self-determination” can only mean “self-determination” for the bourgeoisie; but in the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolution, the countries (ie the bourgeoisies) granted “national independence” by the soviet power everywhere took the decision to subordinate themselves to the great imperialist powers against the Russian revolution. The proletariat could not ignore the national sensitivities of workers in “oppressed” nations, but they could only be won to the revolutionary cause by appealing to their class needs, not to their nationalist illusions;
• on “democracy” and “dictatorship”, there are profoundly contradictory elements in Luxemburg’s views. On the one hand, she saw the Bolsheviks’ suppression of the Constituent Assembly as negative for the life of the revolution, revealing a curious nostalgia for the outmoded forms of bourgeois democracy. On the other hand, the Spartacus programme written shortly afterwards called for the replacement of the old parliamentary assemblies by congresses of workers’ councils, which indicates that Luxemburg’s views on this point had evolved quite rapidly. But Luxemburg’s criticisms of the Bolsheviks’ tendency to clamp down on free speech within the worker’s movement was well-founded: the measures taken against other working class groups and parties, and the transformation of the soviets into rubber stamps for the Bolshevik party-state, were indeed negative for the survival and integrity of the proletarian dictatorship.

Within Russia itself, the first reactions against the danger of the party going off course also date to 1918, and their principal focus (at least from within the current of revolutionary marxism) was the Left Communist tendency in the Bolshevik party.  This tendency is principally remembered for its opposition to the Brest-Litovsk treaty, which it feared would result in surrendering not only land but the principles of the revolution itself. In fact, at the level of principle, there is no comparison between Brest Litovsk and the Rapallo treaty only four years later: the first was conducted openly, with no attempt to hide its brutal consequences; the latter was drawn up in secret and involved a de facto alliance between German imperialism and the soviet state. On the other hand, the position put forward by Bukharin and other Left Communists in favour of a “revolutionary war” was, as Bilan later pointed out, founded on a serious confusion: the notion that the revolution could be extended primarily through military means in one form or another, whereas in fact it can only win the workers of the world to its banners through essentially political means (such as the formation of the Communist International in 1919).

More fruitful for understanding the lesson of the revolution were the first debates on state capitalism between Lenin and the Lefts. Lenin had argued for accepting German peace terms on the grounds that the soviet power needed a “breathing space” in which to reconstruct the minimum of social and economic life. The disagreements arose around two issues:

• the methods used in this process. Lenin, preoccupied by the fight for productivity and efficiency against the enormous weight of Russian backwardness, advocated stern measures such as the adoption of the Taylor system and one-man management in the factories, while the Lefts insisted that such methods could be harmful to the self-education and self-activity of the proletariat. Similar debates raged about the degree to which the principles of the Commune could be applied in the Red Army;
• the danger of state capitalism. For Lenin, precisely because of the fragmented and semi-mediaeval state of the Russian economy, state capitalism was a step forward. This was in line with his view that the huge strides taken by state capitalism in the developed countries during the war had been in some sense a preparation for the socialist transformation. The Lefts, on the other hand, tended to see state capitalism as an imminent threat to the power of the soviets, and warned of the danger of the party getting caught up in the process of bureaucratic state control, and eventually of opposing itself to the interests of the proletariat.

The Lefts’ critique of state capitalism was certainly embryonic and contained many confusions: it tended to see the main danger emanating from the petty bourgeoisie and were less clear that the state bureaucracy itself could take on the role of a new bourgeoisie; they also harboured illusions in the possibility of authentic socialist transformations within the confines of Russia. But Lenin was mistaken to see state capitalism as anything but the negation of communism; and in ringing the alarm bells about its development in Russia, the Lefts were proved to have been prophetic.                  

2. “1921: The proletariat and the transitional state” - (International Review n°100)

Despite the important differences within the Bolshevik party about the direction the revolution was taking, and in particular about the direction being followed by the soviet state, the necessity for unity faced with the immediate threat of the counter-revolution tended to keep these divergences within certain bounds. The same can be said for the tensions within Russian society as a whole: despite the frightful conditions endured by the workers and peasants during the civil war period, the nascent conflict between their material interests and the political and economic demands of the new state machine were kept in check through the struggle against the Whites. With victory in the civil war, however, the lid was off. And with the continuing isolation of the revolution due to a series of crucial defeats for the proletariat in Europe, this conflict now came to the fore as a central contradiction of the “transitional” regime.

Within the party, the fundamental problems facing the revolution were mediated through the debate on the trade union question, which came to a head at the 10th Congress of the Party, in March 1921. This debate was conducted through essentially three different positions, although there were many shades of opinion between and around them:

• the position of Trotsky. Having led the Red Army to victory against the Whites, often in the face of overwhelming odds, Trotsky had now become an avid partisan of military methods, and wanted them to be applied in all spheres of society, particularly in the field of labour. Since the state applying these methods was now a “workers” state”, he argued that there could be no conflict of interests between the working class and the demands of this state. He even went so far as to theorise about the historically progressive possibilities of forced labour. In this context, he recommended that the trade unions should operate openly as organs of labour discipline on behalf of the workers’ state. At the same time, Trotsky began to develop an explicit theoretical justification for the notion of the dictatorship of the communist party, and for the Red Terror;
• the position of the Workers’ Opposition around Kollontai, Shliapnikov and others. For Kollontai, the soviet state had a heterogeneous character, and was highly vulnerable to the influence of non-proletarian forces such as the bureaucrats and the peasantry. It was thus necessary for the creative work involved in the reconstruction of the Russian economy to be led by specific class organs of the workers, which for the Workers’ Opposition meant the industrial unions. Through the industrial unions, it felt, the working class could maintain control of production and make decisive strides towards communism. This current expressed a proletarian reaction to the growing bureaucratisation of the soviet state, but it also suffered from serious weaknesses: its advocacy of industrial unions as the best expression of working class interests signified a regression in understanding about the role of the workers’ soviets, which had emerged in the new revolutionary epoch as the proletariat’s instruments for managing not only economic but also political life. And at the same time, the Opposition’s illusions in the possibility of building new communist relations in Russia profoundly underestimated the negative effects of the isolation of the revolution, which was almost complete in 1921;
• the position of Lenin: Lenin was firmly opposed to the excesses of Trotsky in this debate. He argued against the sophism that since the state was a workers’ state, there could be no divergence of interest between it and the working class on the immediate level. In fact, Lenin reasoned at one point that the soviet state was really a “workers and peasants” state”; but in any case, it was a state with a very marked bureaucratic deformation, and in such a situation, the working class would still need to defend its material interests, if necessary against the state. The trade unions should therefore not be seen merely as organs of labour discipline, but should be able to act as organs of proletarian self-defence. At the same time Lenin rejected the position of the Workers’ Opposition as a concession to anarcho-syndicalism.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that there were deep flaws in the premises of this debate. To begin with, it was not accidental that the trade unions had lent themselves so readily to becoming organs of labour discipline for the state: that was a direction dictated by the new conditions of decadent capitalism. It was not the trade unions, but the organs created by the class in response to this new period – factory committees, councils, etc – which had the task of defending the autonomy of the working class. And at the same time, all the currents engaged in the debate were wedded to a greater or lesser extent to the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat should be exercised by the communist party.

Nevertheless, the debate expressed an attempt to understand, in a situation of immense confusion, the problem posed when the state power created by the revolution begins to escape the control of the proletariat and turn against its needs. This problem was to be highlighted even more dramatically by the Kronstadt revolt, which broke out in the middle of the 10th Congress in the wake of a series of workers’ strikes in Petrograd. 

The Bolshevik leadership initially denounced the rebellion as a pure conspiracy of the White Guards; later, the emphasis was on its petty bourgeois character, but the crushing of the revolt was still justified on the grounds that it would have opened the doors, both geographically and politically, to the open counter-revolution. Even so, Lenin in particular was compelled to see that the revolt was a warning that the forced-labour methods of the War Communism phase could not continue and that there would have to be some “normalisation” of capitalist social relations. But there was no compromise on the notion that the sole defence of proletarian power in Russia was the exclusive rule of the Bolshevik party. This view was shared by many of the Russian left communists: at the 10th Congress, members of the opposition groups were among the first to volunteer for the assault on the Kronstadt garrison. Even the KAPD in Germany denied that it supported the rebels. With an equally heavy heart, Victor Serge defended the suppression of the revolt as a lesser evil than the fall of the Bolsheviks and the rise of a new White tyranny.

But there were many voices of dissent within the revolutionary camp. The anarchists of course, who had already made many correct criticisms of the excesses of the Cheka and the suppression of working class organisations. But anarchism offers little in the way of lessons about such an experience, since for them the Bolsheviks’ response to the revolt was inscribed from the beginning in the nature of any marxist party.

But within Kronstadt itself, many Bolsheviks joined the revolt on the basis of supporting the original ideals of October 1917: for soviet power and the world revolution. The left communist Miasnikov refused to join those who had participated in the attack on the garrison and glimpsed the catastrophic results that would flow from the smashing of a workers’ revolt by the “workers” state. At the time, these were only glimpses: it was not until the 1930s and the work of the Italian communist left that the clearest lessons were drawn. Unambiguously identifying the revolt as proletarian in character, the Italian left argued that relations of violence within the proletarian camp had to be rejected on principle; that the working class must retain the means of self-defence in the face of the transitional state, which by its nature runs the risk of becoming a point of attraction to the forces of the counter-revolution; and that the communist party could not become entangled with the state machine but must guard its independence from it. Placing principles above the appearance of expediency, the Italian left was prepared to say that it would have been better to have lost Kronstadt than to have retained power at the cost of undermining the fundamental goals of the revolution.

In 1921 the party was faced with an historic dilemma: retain power and become an agent of the counter-revolution, or go into opposition and militate within the ranks of the working class. In practise the fusion between party and state was already too advanced for the whole party to have taken this road; what was posed in more concrete terms was the work of the left fractions, operating inside or outside the party to counter its slide into degeneration. The banning of fractions within the party after the 10th Congress meant that this work would increasingly have to be pursued outside and ultimately against the existing party.    

3. “1922-3: The communist fractions against the rising counter-revolution” - (International Review n°101)

The concessions to the peasantry – for Lenin, an unavoidable necessity illuminated by the Kronstadt uprising – were encapsulated in the New Economic Policy, seen as a temporary retreat that would enable a war-ravaged proletarian power to reconstruct its shattered economy and thus maintain itself as a bastion of the world revolution. In practice, however, the search to break the isolation of the soviet state led to fundamental concessions on matters of principle: not merely trade with capitalist powers, which in itself was not a breach of principles, but also secret military alliances with them, as in the Rapallo treaty with Germany. And such military alliances were accompanied by unnatural political alliances with the forces of social democracy, formerly denounced as the left wing of the bourgeoisie. This was the policy of the “United Front” adopted at the Third Congress of the Communist International. 

Within Russia, Lenin in 1918 had already claimed that state capitalism was a step forward for such a backward country; in 1922, he continued to argue that state capitalism could be made to work for the proletariat as long as it was directed by the “proletarian state”, which increasingly meant the proletarian party.  And yet at the same time he was forced to admit that, far from directing the state inherited from the revolution, the state was more and more directing them – not towards the horizon they wanted to reach, but towards a bourgeois restoration.

Lenin quickly saw that the communist party was itself being deeply affected by this process of involution. At first he located the problem primarily in the lower strata of uncultured bureaucrats who had begun to flock towards the party. But in his last years he grew painfully aware that the rot had reached the highest echelons of the party: as Trotsky pointed out, Lenin’s last struggle was focused essentially against Stalin and emergent Stalinism. But trapped within the prison of the state, Lenin was unable to offer more than administrative measures to counter this bureaucratic tide. Had he lived longer, he would surely have been pushed further towards an oppositional stance, but now the struggle against the rising counter-revolution had to pass to other hands.

In 1923, the first economic crisis of the NEP broke out. For the working class, this crisis brought wage cuts and job cuts and a wave of spontaneous strikes. Within the party, it provoked conflict and debate, giving rise to new oppositional groupings. The first explicit expression of the latter was the Platform of the 46, involving figures close to Trotsky (now increasingly ostracised by the ruling triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev) and elements from the Democratic Centralism group. The Platform criticised the tendency for the NEP to be seen as the royal road to socialism, calling for more rather than less central planning. More importantly, it warned against the increasing stifling of the party’s internal life.

At the same time the Platform distanced itself from the more radical oppositional groups which were emerging at the time, the most important of which was Miasnikov’s Workers’ Group, which had some presence within the strike movements in the industrial centres. Labelled as an understandable but “morbid” reaction to the rise of bureaucratism, the Manifesto of the Workers Group was in fact an expression of the seriousness of the Russian communist left:

• it clearly located the difficulties facing the soviet regime in its isolation and the failure of the revolution to spread;
• it made a lucid critique of the opportunist policy of the United Front, reaffirming the original analysis of the social democratic parties as parties of capitalism;
• it warned against the danger of the emergence of a new capitalist oligarchy and called for the reinvigoration of the soviets and factory committees;
• at the same time it was extremely cautious in its characterisation of the soviet regime and of the Bolshevik party. Unlike Bogdanov’s Workers Truth group, it had no truck with the idea that the revolution or the Bolshevik party had been bourgeois from the beginning. It saw its task as essentially that of a left fraction, working inside and outside the party for its regeneration.

The left communists were thus the theoretical avant-garde in the struggle against the counter-revolution in Russia. The fact that Trotsky had, by 1923, adopted an openly oppositional stance was of considerable importance given his reputation as a leader of the October insurrection. But compared to the intransigent positions of the Workers Group, Trotsky’s opposition to Stalinism was marked by its hesitant, centrist approach:

Trotsky missed a number of opportunities to lead an overt fight against Stalinism, in particular through his reluctance to use Lenin’s “Testament” to expose Stalin and remove him from the leadership of the party;

he tended to lapse into silence during many of the debates within the Bolshevik central organ.

These failings were partly due to questions of character: Trotsky was not an accomplished intriguer like Stalin and lacked his overwhelming personal ambition. But there were more fundamental political motivations behind Trotsky’s inability to take his criticisms to the radical conclusions reached by the communist left:

Trotsky was never able to understand that Stalin and his faction did not represent a mistaken, centrist tendency within the proletarian camp, but was the spearhead of a bourgeois counter-revolution;         

Trotsky’s own history as a figure at the very centre of the soviet regime made it extremely difficult for him to detach himself from the process of degeneration. An ingrained “patriotism of the party” made it extremely difficult for Trotsky and other oppositionists to fully accept that the party could be wrong.         

4. “1924-28: the triumph of Stalinist state capitalism” (International Review n°102)

By 1927 Trotsky had accepted that there was a danger of bourgeois restoration in Russia – a kind of creeping counter-revolution without a formal overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. But he largely underestimated the degree to which this process was already all but complete:

• because it was hard for him to understand that he himself had already contributed a great deal to the process of degeneration (through such policies as the militarisation of labour, the suppression of Kronstadt, etc);
• because, while understanding that the problems facing the USSR were a product of isolation and the retreat in the international revolution, Trotsky was not able to see the scale of the defeat that had descended on the working class; most important, he was unable to recognise that the USSR had already begun to integrate itself into the world imperialist system;

Trotsky believed that “Thermidor” would come about through the victory of those forces pushing for a return to private ownership (NEPmen, kulaks, the Bukharinist right). Stalinism was defined as a form of centrism, not as the spearhead of a state capitalist counter-revolution.

The economic theories of the left opposition around Trotsky made it extremely difficult to understand that the “soviet state” itself was becoming the direct agent of the counter-revolution, without any return to classical “private” ownership. The significance of Stalin’s declaration of socialism in one country was grasped late, and never in sufficient depth. Emboldened by the death of Lenin and the obvious stagnation of the world revolution, Stalin’s proclamation was an open break with internationalism and a commitment to building Russia into a world imperialist power. This was in complete contrast with the Bolshevism of 1917, which had insisted that socialism could only be the fruit of a victorious world revolution. But the more the Bolsheviks became tangled up in the management of the state and the economy in Russia, the more they began to theorise about the steps towards socialism that they could accomplish even in the context of an isolated and backward country. The debate over the NEP, for example, was largely posed in these terms, with the right arguing that socialism could come through the operation of market forces, and the left insisting on the role of planning and heavy industry. Preobrazhinsky, the main economic theorist of the left opposition, talked about overcoming the capitalist law of value through a monopoly of foreign trade and accumulation in the state sector: this was even termed “primitive socialist accumulation”.

The theory of primitive socialist accumulation falsely identified the growth of industry with the interests of the working class and socialism. In reality, industrial growth in Russia could only come about through the increasing exploitation of the working class. In short, primitive socialist accumulation could only mean the accumulation of capital. This is why the Italian left, for example, warned against any tendency to see industrial growth, or the development of statified industries, as a measure of progress towards socialism.

In fact, the struggle against the theory of socialism in one country was initiated by the Zinovievites after the break up of the ruling triumvirate. This led to the formation of the United Opposition in 1926, which originally included the Democratic Centralists as well. Despite formally adhering to the ban on fractions, the new Opposition was increasingly compelled to take its criticisms of the regime to the lower ranks of the party and even to the workers directly. They were met with threats, abuse, trumped up charges, repression and expulsion. And yet they were still unable to grasp the nature of what they were fighting against. Stalin was able to exploit their desire for reconciliation within the party to force them to back down from any activity described as “fractionalist”. The Zinovievites and some of Trotskyists followers capitulated immediately; and in 1928, when Stalin announced his “left turn” and adopted a policy of rapid industrialisation, many of the Trotskyists, including Preobrazhinsky himself, thought that Stalin was at last adopting their policies.

At the same time, however, elements of the opposition were coming under the increasing influence of the left communists, who were better able to see that the counter-revolution had already arrived. The Democratic Centralists, for example, while still holding out hope for a radical reform of the soviet regime, were much clearer that state industry does not equal socialism; that the fusion of the party with the state was leading to the liquidation of the party; that the soviet regime’s foreign policy was increasingly opposed to the international interests of the working class. Following the mass expulsions of the opposition in 1927 the left communists more and more took the view that the regime and the party were beyond reform. The remaining elements of the Miasnikov group played a key role in this process of radicalisation. But over the next few years, these animated debates about the nature of the regime would be held above all in Stalin’s jails.            

5. “Unravelling the Russian enigma: 1926-36” - (International Review n°105)

Given the scale of the defeat in Russia, the focus for the effort to understand the nature of the Stalinist regime now shifted to Western Europe. As the Communist Parties were “Bolshevised” – i.e., transformed into pliable instruments of Russian foreign policy – a series of oppositional groups emerged within them, but either rapidly split or were excluded.

In Germany, these groupings sometimes comprised thousands of members, although their numbers shrank rapidly. The KAPD still existed and was carrying out consistent work towards these currents. One of the best known was the group around Karl Korsch; and the correspondence in 1926 between him and Bordiga in Italy illuminates many of the problems facing revolutionaries at the time.

One of the characteristics of the German left – and one of the factors which contributed to its organisational demise – was a tendency to draw hasty conclusions about the nature of the new system in Russia.  Able to see its capitalist nature, they were often incapable of answering the key question: how can a proletarian power turn into its own opposite? And very often the response was to deny that it had ever had a proletarian nature – to argue that the October revolution was no more than a bourgeois revolution and the Bolsheviks no more than a party of the intelligentsia.

Bordiga’s response typified the more patient method of the Italian left: opposing any attempt to build organisations in a hurry, without a sound programmatic base, Bordiga argued for the need for an extended and profound discussion about a situation which was throwing up many new questions. This was the only basis for any substantial regroupment. At the same time, he refused to budge on the proletarian character of the October revolution, insisting that the question confronting the revolutionary movement was to understand how a proletarian power isolated in one country could go through a process of inner degeneration.

With the victory of Nazism in Germany, the geographical focus of discussion once again changed – this time to France, where a number of oppositional groups held a conference in Paris in 1933 to discuss the nature of the regime in Russia. This included the “official” followers of Trotsky, but the majority of the groups were located further to the left, and included the exiled Italian left. The conference witnessed numerous theories about the nature of the regime, many of them self-contradictory: that it was a class system of a new type and should no longer be supported, that it was class system of a new type but should still be supported, that it remained a proletarian regime but should not be defended…All this was testimony to the immense difficulty revolutionaries faced in really understanding the direction and significance of events in the Soviet Union. But it also shows that the “orthodox” Trotskyist position – that despite its degeneration, the USSR remains a workers’ state and must be defended against imperialism – was under attack from numerous angles.

It was to a large extent because of these pressures from the left that Trotsky wrote his famous analysis of the Russian revolution in 1936, The Revolution Betrayed.

This book provides evidence that, although increasingly sliding into opportunism, Trotsky remained a marxist.  Thus, he eloquently lambastes the Stalinist claims about the USSR as a paradise for the workers, and, basing himself on Lenin’s statement that the transitional state is “a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie”, provides valuable insights into the nature of this state and its incipient dangers for the proletariat. Trotsky had also by now concluded that the old Bolshevik party was dead and that the bureaucracy could no longer be reformed but must be forcefully overthrown. Nevertheless, the book is fundamentally flawed: arguing explicitly against the view that the USSR was a form of state capitalism, Trotsky sticks doggedly to the thesis that its nationalised property forms are proof of the proletarian character of the state. While theoretically conceding that there is a tendency towards state capitalism in the period of capitalist decline, he rejects the idea that the Stalinist bureaucracy could be a new ruling class simply because it owns no stocks and shares and cannot pass on property to its heirs, thus reducing capital to a juridical form rather seeing it as an essentially impersonal social relation.

As for the idea that the USSR could still be a workers’ state even though, by his own admission, the working class as such was entirely excluded from political power, this also revealed a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the proletarian revolution. This is the first revolution in history to be the work of a propertyless class, a class that cannot possess its own form of economy, and which can only achieve its emancipation through its ability to use political power as a lever to subject the “spontaneous” laws of the economy to conscious human control.

Most serious of all, Trotsky’s characterisation of the USSR condemned his movement to acting on the world stage as a radical apologist for Stalinism. This was evident in Trotsky’s argument that the rapid industrial growth under Stalin – based on the ferocious exploitation of the working class and part of the build-up of a war economy in preparation for a new imperialist redivision of the globe – proved the superiority of socialism over capitalism. It was evident above all in the Trotskyists’ unwavering defence of Russian foreign policy and the position of unconditional defence of the Soviet Union against imperialist attack – at a time when the Russian state itself had become an active player on the world imperialist arena. This analysis contains the seeds of this current’s final betrayal of internationalism during the Second World War.

Trotsky’s book did leave one door open to the idea that the question of the USSR had not been finally settled and that only decisive historical events such as world war could do so. In his last writings, perhaps aware of the fragility of his “workers’ state” theory, but still reluctant to accept the capitalist nature of the USSR, he began to speculate that, if Stalinism was shown to represent a new form of class society, neither capitalist nor socialist, then marxism would have been discredited. Trotsky himself was killed before he could pronounce on whether the war had indeed elucidated the “Russian enigma”. But only those among his former followers who discovered the trail blazed by the communist left and took up the state capitalist position (such as Stinas in Greece, Munis in Spain, and his own wife Natalia) were able to stay true to proletarian internationalism during and after the second world war.        

6. “The Russian Enigma and the Italian communist left 1933-46” - (International Review n°106)

The communist left found its most advanced expressions among those sections of the world proletariat who raised the greatest challenge to capitalism during the great revolutionary wave. Outside of Russia this was the German and Italian proletariat, and the German and Italian communist lefts were the theoretical avant-garde of the communist left everywhere else.

When it came to trying to understand the nature of the regime that had arisen in the ashes of defeat in Russia, the German left was often extremely precocious in the conclusions it drew. Not only was it able to see that the Stalinist system was a form of state capitalism, it also developed some keen insights into state capitalism as a universal tendency of capitalism in crisis. And yet all too often these insights were combined with a tendency to break solidarity with the October revolution and to declare Bolshevism as the spearhead of a bourgeois revolution – a view that fitted very well with a rush to abandon the very idea of a proletarian party and to profoundly underestimate the role of the revolutionary organisation.

The Italian left, by contrast, took a long time to come to a clear understanding of the nature of the USSR, but it approached the question with more patience and more rigour, beginning from certain fundamental premises:

• there could be no going back on their conviction that October had been a proletarian revolution;
• since world capitalism was a system in decline, the bourgeois revolution was no longer on the agenda in any of its component parts;
• there could above all be no compromise on the principle of proletarian internationalism, which meant a total rejection of the notion of socialism in one country.

And yet despite these solid foundations, the Italian left’s view of the nature of the USSR in the 1930s was extremely contradictory. On the surface, it shared with Trotsky the idea that since the USSR retained its nationalised property forms, it was still a proletarian state: the Stalinist bureaucracy was defined as a parasitic caste rather than an exploiting class in its own right.

But here the profound internationalism of the Italian left set it apart from the Trotskyists, whose position of defence of the degenerated workers’ state led it towards the maws of participation in imperialist war. The theoretical journal of the Italian left, Bilan, began publication in 1933. After some initial hesitations, the events of the ensuing few years (Hitler’s accession to power, support for French rearmament, adhesion to the League of Nations, the war in Spain) convinced it that even if the USSR remained a proletarian state, it was now playing a counter-revolutionary role on a world scale. Consequently the international interests of the working class demanded that revolutionaries refuse any solidarity with this state.

This analysis was linked to Bilan’s recognition that the proletariat had suffered a historic defeat and that the world was heading towards another imperialist war. Bilan predicted with chilling accuracy that the USSR would inevitably align itself with one or other of the blocs forming in preparation for this massacre, rejecting the Trotskyist view that, since the USSR was basically hostile to world capital, the imperialist powers would be forced to unite against it.

On the contrary, Bilan argued, despite the survival of “collectivised” property forms, the working class in the USSR was subject to a ruthless level of capitalist exploitation: the accelerated industrialisation baptised as the “building of socialism” was building no more than a war economy that would allow the USSR to play its part in the next imperialist carve-up. It thus totally rejected Trotsky’s hymns of praise to the industrialisation of the USSR.

Bilan was also aware that there was a growing tendency towards state capitalism in the western countries, whether it took the form of fascism or the democratic “New Deal”. And yet it hesitated to take the final step: to recognise that the Stalinist bureaucracy was indeed a state bourgeoisie, describing it as an “agent of world capital” rather than a new embodiment of the capitalist class

However, as the arguments in favour of the “proletarian state” more and more came into conflict with events in the real world, a minority of comrades in the Fraction began to put the whole theory into question. And it was no accident that this minority was the best equipped to survive the initial disarray that the outbreak of the war brought to the Fraction, which had been led into a blind alley by the revisionist theory of the “war economy”, which had predicted that the world war would not happen.

It had always been axiomatic that the Russian question would be solved one way or the other by the outbreak of the war; and for the clearest elements in the Italian left, the USSR’s participation in a predatory imperialist war provided the final proof. The most coherent arguments in favour of defining the USSR as imperialist and capitalist were developed by the comrades who carried on the work of Bilan in the French Fraction of the Communist Left, and after the war in the Gauche Communiste de France. Integrating some of the best insights of the German left, but without sliding into the councilist denigration of October, this current showed why state capitalism was the essential form adopted by the system in its epoch of decline. With regard to Russia, the last vestiges of a “juridical” definition of capitalism were jettisoned, reaffirming the fundamental marxist view that capital is a social relation which can just as well be administered by a centralised state as by a conglomeration of private capitalists.  And it drew from this the necessary conclusions about the proletarian approach to the transition period: that progress towards communism must be measured not in the growth of the state sector – which actually contains the greatest danger of a return to capitalism – but in the tendency for living labour to dominate dead labour, for the replacement of the production of surplus value by production geared towards the satisfaction of human need.  

7. “The debate on ‘proletarian culture’ in revolutionary Russia” - (International Review n°109)

Against the increasingly superficial approaches to the problem of culture in bourgeois thought, which tend to reduce culture to the most immediate expressions of particular countries or ethnic groups, or even to the status of passing social fashions, marxism situates the question in its broadest and deepest historical context: in the fundamental characteristics of humanity and its emergence from the rest of nature, and within the great cycles of successive modes of production that make up human history.

The proletarian revolution in Russia, so rich in lessons regarding the political and economic goals of the working class, was also accompanied by a brief but powerful explosion of creativity in the sphere of art and culture – in painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature; in the practical organisation of daily life along more communal lines; in the human sciences such as psychology, and so on. At the same time it posed the general question of mankind’s transition from bourgeois culture to a higher, communist culture.

One of the key issues at debate amongst the Russian revolutionaries was whether this transition would see the development of a specifically proletarian culture. Since previous cultures had been intimately linked to the world-outlook of the ruling class, it seemed to some that the proletariat too, once it had become the ruling class, would construct its own culture opposed to that of the old exploiting class. This was certainly the view of the Proletkult movement which developed a considerable following in the early years of the revolution.

In a resolution submitted to the Proletkult Congress of 1920, Lenin himself seemed to accept this idea of a specifically proletarian culture. At the same time, he criticised certain aspects of the Proletkult movement: its philistine “workerism”, which resulted in glorifying the working class as it is rather than seeing what it must become, and in an iconoclastic rejection of the previous cultural acquisitions of humanity. Lenin was also wary of Proletkult’s tendency to set itself up as a separate party with its own organisational apparatus and programme. Lenin’s resolution thus recommends that the orientation of cultural work in the Soviet regime should be under the direct aegis of the state. However, Lenin’s main interest in the cultural question lay elsewhere. For him, the question of culture was bound up less with the grandiose issue of whether there could be a new proletarian culture in Soviet Russia than with the problem of overcoming the immense cultural backwardness of the Russian masses, where mediaeval custom and superstition still exerted a powerful influence. In particular, Lenin saw the low cultural development of the masses as a breeding ground for the development of the scourge of bureaucracy in the Soviet state. Raising the cultural level of the masses was, for him, a means to combat this scourge and increase the capacity of the masses to maintain political power.

Trotsky, on the other hand, developed a more thorough-going critique of the Proletkult movement. In his view – expounded in a chapter of his book Literature and Revolution – the term proletarian culture itself was a misnomer. The bourgeoisie, as an exploiting class which was able to develop its economic power for a whole period within the framework of the old feudal system, could also develop its own specific culture. This is not the case for the proletariat, which as an exploited class does not have the material basis to develop its own culture within capitalist society. It is true that the proletariat must constitute itself as a ruling class during the transition period to communism, but this is only a temporary political dictatorship, the ultimate aim of which is not to indefinitely preserve the proletariat but to dissolve it into a new human community. The culture of this new community will be the first truly human culture, integrating into itself all the prior cultural advances made by the human species.

Literature and Revolution was written in 1924, and it was in effect an element in Trotsky’s struggle against the rise of Stalinism. Although in its early years Proletkult’s advocacy of proletarian self-initiative had often made it a rallying point for leftwing groups opposing the development of the Soviet bureaucracy, later on its heirs tended to identify with the ideology of socialism in one country, which seemed consistent with the idea that a “new” culture was already being built in the Soviet Union. Trotsky’s writings on culture exposed the hollowness of such claims and also vigorously opposed the transformation of art into state propaganda, advocating an “anarchist” policy in the cultural sphere, which could not be dictated to, either by the party or the state.    

8. “Trotsky and the culture of communism” - (International Review n°111)

Trotsky’s view of the communist culture of the future was contained in the last chapter of Literature and Revolution. Trotsky begins by reiterating his opposition to the term “proletarian culture” to describe the relationship between art and the working class during the period of transition to communism. Instead he offers the distinction between revolutionary art and socialist art. The first is defined essentially by its opposition to existing society; Trotsky even considers that it will tend to be marked by “a spirit of social hatred”. He also posed the question of what “school” of art would be most attuned to a period of revolution, and used the term “realism” to describe it. But this did not mean, for Trotsky, the mind-numbing subordination of art to state propaganda associated with the Stalinist school of “Socialist Realism”. Nor did it mean that Trotsky was blind to the possibility of incorporating the acquisitions of forms of art which were not directly linked to the revolutionary movement, or were even characterised by a desperate flight from reality.

Socialist art, for Trotsky, would be imbued with the higher and more positive emotions that will flourish in a society founded upon solidarity. At the same time Trotsky rejects the idea that, in a society which has abolished class divisions and other sources of oppression and anxiety, art would tend to become sterile. On the contrary, it will tend to suffuse all aspects of daily life with a creative and harmonious energy. And since human beings in a communist society will still be faced with the fundamental questions of human life – above all, love and death – there will still be room for the tragic dimension of art. Here Trotsky is fully in accord with Marx’s approach to art in the Grundrisse, where he explains why the art of previous human epochs does not lose its charm for us; it is because art cannot be reduced to the political aspect of human life, or even to the social relations of a particular epoch of history, but connects to the fundamental needs and aspirations of our human nature.

Nor would the art of the future become monolithic. On the contrary, Trotsky envisages the formation of “parties” arguing for or against particular artistic approaches or projects, in other words, a lively and continual debate amongst the freely-associated producers.

In this society of the future then, art will be integrated into the production of goods, into the building of cities and the shaping of the landscape. No longer the domain of a minority of specialists, it will become part of what Bordiga called “a plan for living for the human species”; it will express man’s capacity to build a world “in accordance with the laws of beauty”, as Marx put it.

In shaping the landscape around him, the man of the future will not be seeking to restore a lost rural idyll. The communist future will be founded upon the most advanced discoveries of science and technology. So too, the city rather than the village will remain the nodal unit of the future. But Trotsky does not turn his back on the marxist vision of new harmony between town and country, and thus of an end to the gargantuan, overcrowded mega-city which has become such a destructive reality in decadent capitalism. This is evident, for example, in Trotsky’s idea that the tiger and the wild forest will be protected and left in peace by future generations.

Finally, Trotsky dared to paint a picture of the human inhabitants of this far communist future. This will be a humanity which is no longer dominated by blind natural and social forces. A humanity no longer ruled by the fear of death, and thus able to give full expression to the instincts for life. The men and women of that future will move with grace and precision, following the laws of beauty in “work, walk and play”.  Their average type will “rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx”.  Even more can be said: in mapping and mastering the depths of the unconscious mind, mankind not only becomes fully human, but also, in a sense, evolves into a new species: “Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social/ biological type; or, if you prefer, the Surhomme, man beyond man”.

This is certainly one of the boldest ever attempts by a communist revolutionary to describe his vision of man’s possible destiny. Since it firmly based itself on mankind’s real potential, and on the world proletarian revolution as its indispensable precondition, it cannot be dismissed as a regression to utopian socialism; but at the same time it succeeds in planting the most inspired speculations of the old utopians on a more solid ground. This is communism as a sphere of unlimited possibility.        

CDW

Faced with the war that is ravaging the Middle East, and with the recent conflict which has bathed Lebanon and Israel in blood, the position of revolutionaries must be completely unambiguous. This is why we fully support the rare internationalist and revolutionary voices that are raised in this region, such as the Enternasyonalist Komunist Sol group in Turkey . We have published this group’s position statement on the situation in the Lebanon and Palestine in various organs of our territorial press. In it they firmly reject any support for the cliques and factions of the rival bourgeoisies that are fighting it out and whose immediate victims are millions of proletarians, be they Palestinian, Jewish, Shi'ite, Kurdish, Druze or whatever. It states quite correctly that “imperialism is the natural policy carried out by any national state or any organisation that functions as a national state.” It also denounces the fact that “in Turkey, as in the rest of the world, most leftists gave total support to the PLO and Hamas. In the most recent conflict they have all said with one voice ‘we are all Hezbollah’. By following this logic, which holds that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, they fully supported this violent organisation which has pushed the working class into a disastrous nationalist war. The support that the leftists give to nationalism shows us why they do not have much to say that differs from what is said by the MPH (national movement party – the fascist grey wolves) (…) The war between the Hezbollah and Israel and the war in Palestine are both inter-imperialist wars and the various camps involved use nationalism to drag the working class of their region into their camp. The more that workers are sucked into nationalism, the more they lose their ability to act as a class. That is why Israel, Hezbollah, the PLO and Hamas should not be supported in any circumstances.” This shows that the proletarian perspective lives and is still affirmed. This can be seen not only through the development of working class struggles throughout the world: in Europe, the United States, Latin America, India and Bangladesh but also through the appearance in various countries of small groups and politicised elements trying to defend internationalist positions. Such positions are the hallmark of proletarian politics.

The war in the Lebanon last summer represented a new stage covering the whole of the Middle East in blood and flame and pushing the planet further into the grip of increasingly uncontrollable chaos. All the imperialist powers within the so-called “international community”, from the biggest to the smallest, have contributed to this war. 7,000 aerial attacks on Lebanese territory alone, not to mention the innumerable rocket strikes on northern Israel, more than 1,200 deaths in Lebanon and Israel (300 of which were children under 12 years old), nearly 5,000 wounded, a million civilians who had to flee from the bombs or combat zones. Others, too poor to flee, dug themselves in as best they could, terror in their hearts… Districts and villages have been reduced to ruins; hospitals are overworked and full to bursting point. This is the balance sheet of a month of war in Lebanon and Israel following the Tsahal offensive to reduce Hezbollah’s powerful hold and in response to one of the numerous murderous attacks of Islamic militia beyond the Israeli-Lebanese border. The destruction is estimated at 6 billion euros, not counting the military cost of the war itself.

Brutally and relentlessly, the Israeli state has thrown itself into a veritable scorched earth policy against the civilian population in the villages of South Lebanon. The latter have been carelessly chased off their land, out of their homes, starved to death. They have no drinking water and are exposed to the most terrible epidemics. There are also 90 bridges and countless communication routes that have been systematically cut (roads, motorways…), three power stations and thousands of homes have been destroyed. The pollution is overwhelming and the bombardments incessant. The Israeli government and its army have never stopped declaring that they want to “spare civilians” and a massacre like the one in Canaan was called a “regrettable accident”. This is reminiscent of the famous “collateral damage” during the wars in the Gulf and in the Balkans. However it is in the civilian population that the bulk of the victims are to be found: 90% of those killed!

As for Hezbollah, although their means are more limited and therefore less spectacular, they have carried out exactly the same murderous and bloody policy of random bombing. Its missiles fell on the civilian population and the towns in the north of Israel (75% of those killed were actually part of the Arab population that they pretend to protect).

They are all war mongers

Hamas' arrival in power in the Palestinian territories was itself an expression of the political impasse in the Middle East. The intransigence of the Israeli government contributed to this victory by “radicalising” a majority of the Palestinian population and the open splits between fractions of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, mainly between Fatah and Hamas prevented any solution through negotiation. In the face of this impasse, Israel’s reaction was one that is increasingly favoured by every state in today’s world: it leapt in headlong. In order to reassert its authority Israel launched an attack with the intention of blocking the growing influence in South Lebanon of Hezbollah, which is aided, financed and armed by the Iranian regime. The first pretext given by Israel for starting the war was that it was to liberate two Israeli soldiers taken prisoner by Hezbollah. Four months after they were taken, they are still prisonersShi'ite. The second, was the need to “neutralise” and disarm Hezbollah, whose incursions from South Lebanon are a permanent threat to Israeli security.

The war ended in a serioussetback for Israel, brutally exploding the myth of the invincibility and invulnerability of its army. Civilian and military members of the Israeli bourgeoisie blame the fact that the war was badly prepared. Hezbollah by contrast came out of the conflict strengthened and has gained new legitimacy in the eyes of the Arab populations because of its resistance. At the beginning Hezbollah, like Hamas, was just one of the innumerable Islamic militia formed against the state of Israel. It was formed at the time of the Israeli offensive in South Lebanon in 1982. Because of its Shi'ite component it prospered under the copious financial support of the Iranian ayatollahs and mullahs. Syria also made use of it, giving it important logistic support which enabled it to create a rear base when it was forced to withdraw from Lebanon in 2005. This band of blood-soaked killers has patiently created a network of recruiting sergeants under the cover of  providing medical, health and social aid, helped by generous funds drawn from the oil revenue of the Iranian state. These funds also enable it to finance the repair of houses destroyed or damaged by bombs or rockets in order to enrol the civilian population into its ranks. According to some reports, this “shadowy army” includes children between 10 and 15 years old, who serve as cannon fodder in these bloody settlings of accounts.

At the moment Syria and Iran form the most homogenous bloc around Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran in particular clearly has ambitions to become the main imperialist power in the region. The possession of atomic weapons would guarantee it this role. This is understandably one of the big concerns of the American super power since the “Islamic republic” has, from its foundation in 1979, shown permanent hostility towards the United States.

So it was with the green light from the US that Israel launched its offensive against Lebanon. Buried up to its neck in the mire of the Iraq and Afghan wars and following the failure of its “peace plan” to solve the Palestinian question, the United States' strategy to establish a “Pax Americana” in the Middle East is a patent failure. In particular the American presence in Iraq over the last three years is directly responsible for a horrific civil war between rival factions, with 80-100 deaths per day among the civilian population. In this situation it was out of the question for the United States to intervene in person although their objective in the region is to attack those countries that they denounce as “terrorist” and the incarnation of the “axis of evil”. For them this means Syria and, above all Iran, which supports  Hezbollah. The Israeli offensive, which was supposed to act as a warning to these two states, shows the perfect convergence of interests between the White House and the Israeli bourgeoisie. This is why Israel’s failure also means a new retreat for the United States and a continued weakening of American leadership.

The cynicism and hypocrisy of all the big bourgeoisies

A high point of cynicism and hypocrisy was reached by the UN, which during the month long war in the Lebanon never stopped proclaiming its “desire for peace”, while adding that it was “powerless”[1] [334]. This is a disgusting lie. This “thieves’ den” (to use Lenin's term for the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations) is the swamp in which wallow the most monstrous crocodiles of the planet. The five permanent members of the Security Council are the foremost states that prey on the planet:

• The United States, whose hegemony resides in its having the most powerful military armada in the world and whose warlike escapades since Bush senior’s announcement in 1990 of a “period of peace and prosperity” speak for themselves (the two Gulf wars, the intervention in the Balkans, the occupation of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan).
• Russia, which has been and is responsible for the most appalling atrocities during the two wars in Chechnya, has taken the implosion of the USSR badly and dreams of revenge. Today it is revealing new imperialist pretensions by taking advantage of the weakening of the United States. This is why it is playing the card of support for Iran and, more covertly, for Hezbollah.
• China, taking advantage of its growing economic influence, dreams of gaining new zones of influence outside South East Asia. In particular it is trying to woo Iran, a privileged economic partner from whom it buys oil at a particularly advantageous price. The latter two powers have continually tried to sabotage the resolutions of the UN, to which they themselves belong.
• Great Britain, which up to now has accompanied the United States on its main punitive expeditions in order to defend its own interests, is trying to re-conquer the zone of influence it once held by means of its old protectorate in the region (Iran and Iraq in particular).
• The French bourgeoisie looks back with nostalgia at the period in which it divided up zones of influence in the Middle East with Great Britain. This is why it rallied to the American plan for the Lebanon as author of the famous UN resolution 1201, even drawing up the plan for the deployment of the UNIFIL. It is also why it agreed to raise the number of its troops committed to the UNIFIL force in South Lebanon from 400 to 2,000.

Other powers have also entered the lists, such as Italy which, in exchange for a larger contingent of UN forces, in February 2006 was given the supreme command of the UNIFIL in Lebanon. Only a few months after the withdrawal of Italian troops from Iraq, Romano Prodi, having harshly criticised the Berlusconi government's commitment there, offered the same number for Lebanon. This confirms the ambition of Italy to sit at the table of the big powers, even at the risk of getting its fingers burned again. All the powers are wallowing in war.

The Middle East gives a concentrated picture of the irrational nature of war today, in which every imperialism gets bogged down more and more trying to defend its own interests and, so doing, enlarges the zone of conflicts, which become bloodier and bloodier and involve more and more states. The extension of the regions of the world in which there are bloody conflicts is a demonstration of capitalism's inevitably war-like nature. War and militarism have become well and truly the permanent way of life of decadent capitalism in advanced decomposition. This is one of the essential characteristics of the tragic impasse of a system that has nothing to offer humanity except misery and death.

The American bourgeoisie caught in a dead-end

The guardian of “world order” has now itself  become a powerful and active factor in the acceleration of chaos.

How is it possible that the world's foremost army, with the most up to date technology, the most powerful reconnaissance service, sophisticated armaments able to locate and reach precise targets thousands of kilometres away, has got entangled in such a mess? How is it possible that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, is led by a semi-moron surrounded by a pack of activists which hardly conforms to the traditional image of a responsible “great democracy” of the bourgeoisie? It is true that Bush Junior, described by the writer Norman Mailer as the “worst president in the history of the United States: ignorant, arrogant and completely stupid” is surrounded by a team of particularly “enlightened” “thinkers” who dictate his policy. These range from the vice-president Dick Cheney to the secretary of State for Defence Donald Rumsfeld and include his guru-manager Karl Rove and the “theoretician” Paul Wolfowitz. From the beginning of the 1990s Wolfowitz has been the most consistent spokesman for a “doctrine” which states clearly that “the essential political and military mission of America in the period following the Cold War will be to ensure that no rival super-power can emerge in Western Europe, Asia or in the territory of the ex-Soviet Union”. This “doctrine” was made public in March 1992, just after the collapse of the USSR and the re-unification of Germany and when the American bourgeoisie still had illusions in the success of its strategy. With this aim in mind, these same people stated a few years ago that in order to mobilise the nation and impose American democratic values upon the whole world and prevent imperialist rivalries, “a new Pearl Harbour was necessary”. We should remember that the Japanese attack on the American naval base in December 1941, which killed or injured 4,500 on the American side, enabled the United States to enter the war on the allied side because it tipped a public opinion which till then had hesitated to enter the war. The highest political authorities in America were aware of the attack plan and did not intervene. Since Cheney and company came to power, thanks to the victory of Bush Junior in 2000, they have been putting their planned policy into operation. The 11th September attacks served as the “new Pearl Harbour” and it was in the name of their new crusade against terrorism that they justified the invasion of Afghanistan and then of Iraq. At the same time, new and particularly expensive military programmes were set up and an unprecedented strengthening of police control over the population was brought in. The fact that the United States uses such leaders to play out the fate of the planet like so many sorcerers’ apprentices obeys the same logic of decadent capitalism in crisis as that which brought Hitler to power in Germany in a different period. It is not this or that individual at the head of the state that makes capitalism develop in a certain direction. On the contrary, it is this system's decay that brings this or that individual to power, to represent this development and putt it into action. This is a very clear expression of the historic impasse in which capitalism is foundering.

The result of this policy is catastrophic: 3,000 soldiers dead since the beginning of the war in Iraq three years ago (over 2,800 of these are American troops), 655,000 Iraqis killed between March 2003 and July 2006. In the meantime the murderous attacks and the confrontations between Shi'ite and Sunni factions have intensified. The 160,000 occupation troops that are on Iraqi soil under the high command of the United States, are incapable of “fulfilling their mission to maintain order” in a country that is on the brink of civil war. In the north the Shi'ite militia are trying to impose their control and increase their demonstrations of force. In the south the Sunni activists, who proudly proclaim their links with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, have just announced the formation of an “Islamic Republic”. In the centre, around Baghdad, the population is exposed to bands of looters and booby-trapped cars and if the American troops make any attempt to walk abroad they run the risk of running into an ambush.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have swallowed up colossal sums which increasingly swell both the budget deficit and the United States' enormous debt. The situation in Afghanistan is no less disastrous. The interminable hunt for Al Qaeda and the presence there of an occupation army has given credibility to the Taliban, who were ousted from power in 2002 but, being re-armed by Iran and more discretely by China, are now increasing their ambushes and attacks. The “terrorist devils”, as Bin Laden and the Taliban regime are now called, were both in former times the “creatures” the United States used to oppose the USSR in the period of the imperialist blocs and after the invasion of Afghanistan by Russian troops. Bin Laden is a former spy recruited by the CIA in 1979, who served in Istanbul as a financial mediator to traffic arms from Saudi Arabia and the United States to Afghan underground forces. From the beginning of the Russian intervention, he became quite “naturally” the mediator allowing the United States to finance the Afghan resistance. The Taliban were originally armed and financed by the United States and came to power with the full blessing of Uncle Sam.

It is also clear that the great crusade against terrorism has by no means managed to eradicate it but has, on the contrary, led to an increase in terrorist actions and kamikaze attacks in which the only aim is to create as many victims as possible. Today the White House remains impotent while the Iranian state cocks a snoot at it in the most humiliating way. This is encouraging fourth or fifth rate powers such as North Korea, which went ahead with a nuclear test on 8th October, becoming the 8th country possessing nuclear arms. This challenge endangers the balance of power in the whole of South East Asia and will in its turn encourage other aspiring powers to acquire nuclear weapons. It will also serve as a justification for the rapid re-militarization and re-armament of Japan and its orientation towards the production of nuclear weapons in order to confront its immediate neighbour. This “domino effect” of the rush towards militarism and of “every man for himself” is by no means an insignificant danger.

Nor should we neglect the appalling chaos that ravages the Gaza strip. Following the electoral victory of Hamas at the end of January, direct international aid was suspended and the Israeli government organised a blockade on the transfer of funds to the Palestinian Authority from taxes and customs duty. 165,000 PA employees have not been paid for 7 months. However their anger as well as that of the population, 70% of whom live below the poverty line and with an unemployment rate of 44%, is easily dispersed in the street confrontations which have taken place regularly between Hamas and Fatah militants since 1st October. One attempt after another to form a government of national unity has aborted. Even while it was withdrawing from South Lebanon, Tsahal besieged the zones bordering on Egypt on the edge of the Gaza Strip and again started missile bombardments of the town of Rafallah. The pretext was that it was hunting down Hamas activists. For those who manage to keep a job there are interminable controls. The population lives in a constant climate of terror and insecurity. Since 25th June, 300 deaths have been counted in this zone.

It is obvious that American policy is a fiasco. This is why the Bush administration is seriously challenged even by its own Republican camp. The ceremonies commemorating the 5th anniversary of 11th September occasioned a spate of heated criticisms of Bush reported in the American media. Five years ago the ICC was accused of having a Machiavellian vision of history when it put forward the hypothesis that the White House knew about the planned attacks and allowed them to take place in order to justify the military adventures that they were planning[2] [335]. Today an unbelievable number of books, documentaries and articles on the Internet not only cast doubt on the official version of 11th September but many of them also put forward much cruder theories and denounce it as a plot and a manoeuvre of the Bush team. According to the most recent opinion polls, within the population itself more than one third of Americans and almost a half of the New York population think that the attacks were manipulated and that 11th September was an “inside job”.

In addition, 60% of the American population think that the war in Iraq was a “bad thing”; a majority of them do not believe that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms or links with Al Qaeda and think that such claims were an excuse to justify an intervention in Iraq. Half a dozen recent books (including one by the star journalist Bob Woodward who uncovered the Watergate scandal at the time of the Nixon administration) make relentless inquiries that denounce the “lie” of the state and call for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. This does not at all mean that the militarist policy of the United States has been scuttled. However the government is obliged to take into account and try to deal with its contradictions in order to adapt. Bush’s so-called “gaffe”, when he admitted that there was a similarity with the Vietnam war, goes together with the “leaks”… orchestrated by interviews given by James Baker himself. The old head of general staff in the Reagan period, who was also secretary of state at the time of Bush senior, proposed to open up a dialogue with Syria and Iran and for a partial withdrawal of troops from Iraq. This very limited attempt at a riposte shows to what extent the American bourgeoisie has been weakened. To simply withdraw from Iraq would constitute the most burning affront in the whole of its history and this is something that it cannot possibly allow. The comparison with Vietnam is really a deceptive under-estimation. At the time, the withdrawal of its troops from Vietnam made it possible for the United States to re-orient its strategy and pull China into its own camp against the USSR. Today the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq would be nothing other than a capitulation without compensation and would completely discredit the American superpower. It would also bring about the collapse of Iraq which would, in turn, considerably worsen the chaos throughout the region. These contradictions are a telling demonstration of the crisis and weakening of American leadership and the development of “everyone for himself”, which testifies to the growing chaos in international relations. Moreover, a change in the Congress majority at the next mid-term elections and even the eventual election of a democratic president in two years time will not make possible any “choice” other than a flight into new military adventures. The incompetence of the present American administration is almost unprecedented. But whatever team takes over, it cannot change one fundamental fact. Confronted with a capitalist system which is bogged down in its mortal crisis, the ruling class is unable to give any response other than the flight towards military barbarism. And the world's leading bourgeoisie cannot but defend its rank in this domain.

The class struggle is the only alternative to capitalist barbarism

In the United States, the weight of chauvinism that was wide-spread just after 11th September has largely disappeared following the double fiasco of the anti-terrorist struggle and the quagmire of the war in Iraq. Recruitment campaigns for the army have difficulty finding candidates willing to risk their skins in Iraq while the troops there are prey to demoralisation. Despite the risks, thousands of deserters have sought refuge in Canada.

This situation does not show the impasse of the bourgeoisie alone; it also announces another alternative. The increasingly unbearable weight of war and barbarism upon society is an indispensable element for the development of consciousness by the proletariat of the unstoppable bankruptcy of the capitalist system. The only way that the working class can oppose imperialist war, the only way it can offer solidarity to its class brothers exposed to the most terrible massacres is to mobilise on its own class terrain against its exploiters. It must fight and develop its struggles on the social terrain against its own national bourgeoisie. This is something that the working class is beginning to do, for example the solidarity strike of employees at Heathrow airport in August 2005 with the Pakistani workers sacked by the restaurant group, Gate Gourmet. This took place in the midst of the anti-terrorist campaign following the bomb attacks in London. Another example is the mobilisation of future proletarians against the CPE in France or the metal workers of Vigo in Spain. We can also cite the 18,000 Boeing mechanics in America, September 2005 who fought against the reduction of pension payments while refusing the states discrimination between young and old workers. Then there is the strike of the New York tube and public transport workers just before Christmas 2005 against an attack on pensions that was aimed at those who would be employed in the future. In this way they affirmed the awareness that to fight for the future of their children is part of their struggle. These struggles are still very weak and the path that will lead to a decisive confrontation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is still long and difficult but they attest to a recovery of class combats at an international level. They constitute the only possible glimmer of hope for a different future, of an alternative for humanity to capitalist barbarism.

W (21/10/06)

On the night of the 23rd and 24th October 1956 the Budapest workers, followed almost immediately by those in the rest of Hungary, rose up in an armed insurrection involving the whole country. They were outraged by the terrible exploitation and terror imposed by the Stalinist regime in power since 1948. Within 24 hours the strike spread to the main industrial cities and the working class, organised in councils, took control of the uprising.

This was a real revolt of the Hungarian proletariat against the capitalist order in its Stalinist form, which weighed like a leaden yoke upon the workers of the Eastern European countries. This is a fact that the bourgeoisie has spent the last 50 years hiding or (more often) distorting. In the censured, falsified version, the role and the decisive action of the proletariat are reduced to a minimum. And when it comes to the central role of the workers’ councils, no more than lip service is paid to them in anecdote. Or else they are lost in a mishmash of committees, national or municipal councils, each more nationalist than the other, when they are not quite simply tossed into the dustbin.

Even in 1956 the most disgusting lies circulated in the East as well as the West. According to the Kremlin, and this was relayed by the European CPs, the events in Hungary were no more than a “fascist insurrection” manipulated by “western imperialists”. For the Stalinists at the time there were two aims. They had to prepare and justify the crushing of the Hungarian proletariat by Russian tanks. They also had to maintain the illusion in the eyes of workers in the West that the Soviet bloc was “socialist” and prevent them at all costs from realising that the uprising of their Hungarian brothers was a proletarian struggle.

So the Hungarian insurrection was presented by one side as ”the work of fascist bands in the pay of the United States”, whereas for the other, the bourgeoisie of the Western bloc, it was palmed off as a struggle for “the triumph of democracy”, for “freedom” and “national independence”. These two lies are complementary and share the aim of hiding from the working class its own history and therefore its profoundly revolutionary nature. However, it is the version claiming that it was a patriotic struggle, in which there was a hodgepodge of classes called “the people” fighting for “the victory of democracy”, that has become the sole axis of bourgeois propaganda, now that the crimes of Stalinism have come to light and the Eastern bloc has collapsed.

By commemorating the crushing of this struggle every ten years, the bourgeoisie is continuing the work it began at the time of the events. Its sole aim is to prevent the working class from understanding that the Hungarian revolution expresses its own revolutionary nature, its ability to confront the state and organise itself into councils in order to do so. This, its revolutionary nature, is all the more striking in that it manifested itself in 1956, in the midst of the most difficult period of  counter-revolution. In that epoch the proletariat internationally was at its weakest, beaten down by the Second World War, muzzled and controlled by the unions and their partner, the political police. This is also why, given the difficulties of the period, the 1956 revolt could not have matured into a conscious attempt on the part of the proletariat to take political power and build a new society.

Frenzied exploitation under Stalinism

As usual, reality is very different from how the bourgeoisie present it.

The Hungarian insurrection was, above all, a proletarian response to the savage overexploitation that was being extracted in those countries that had fallen under the imperialist domination of the USSR after the Second World War.

Following the agony of war, the battering from the fascist regime under Admiral Horthy[1] [340] and then those of the transitional government (1944-1948), the blows of the Stalinists marked another descent into hell for the Hungarian workers.

At the end of the war, in those areas in Eastern Europe that had supposedly been “liberated” from Nazi occupation, the Soviet “liberator” had the firm intention of establishing itself and of extending its empire up to the doors of Austria. The Red Army (closely followed by the Russian political police, the NKVD) dominated a zone from the Baltic to the Balkans. Throughout the region pillaging, theft and mass deportation to forced work camps were a bloody accompaniment to Soviet occupation and gave a foretaste of the Stalinist regimes that were soon to be set up. In Hungary it was from 1948, once the hegemony of the Communist Party over the political apparatus was firmly established, that the Stalinisation of the country became an accomplished fact. Matyas Rakosi,[2] [341]  said to be Stalin’s best pupil, surrounded by his gang of assassins and torturers (like the sinister Gerö[3] [342]), became the very personification of the whole Stalinist edifice in Hungary. Its main pillars were (according to the well-known recipe): political terror and the limitless exploitation of the working class.

The Soviet Union, as victor and occupier of Eastern Europe, demanded that the vanquished and occupied countries, particularly those such as Hungary who had collaborated with the axis powers, pay huge reparations. In fact this was no more than an excuse to annex the productive apparatus of the countries that had just become its satellites and to make them work at full power for the exclusive economic and imperialist interests of the USSR. A veritable blood-sucking system was set up from 1945-1946 with, for example, the dismantling of factories and their transfer (workers included) to Russian soil.

In the same vein, COMECON was established in 1949. This was a market “for privileged exchange”, in which the privileges were decidedly one-way. The Russian state could dispose of its production by selling it at a price much higher than that offered on the world market. On the other hand, from its satellites it got goods at ridiculously low prices.

So it was that the entire Hungarian economy had to bend to the whims and the production plans of the Russian head office. This was demonstrated very eloquently in 1953 when the Korean war broke out and the USSR forced Hungary to convert the majority of its factories to arms production. From then on it became the Soviet Union’s main arms supplier.

In order to satisfy Russian economic desires and military imperatives, Hungarian industrialisation policy had to proceed at high speed and under great pressure. The five year plans, especially that of 1950, give rise to an unprecedented leap in production and productivity. However, as miracles do not fall from the sky, on the tracks and under the wheels of this galloping industrialisation we find, unsurprisingly, the frantic exploitation of the working class. Every ounce of its energy was to be sacrificed to the realisation of the 1950-1954 plan, priority being given to heavy industry associated with armaments production. This would be quintupled at the end of the plan. Everything was set-up to bleed the Hungarian proletariat dry. In this spirit, piece work was introduced and regulated and was accompanied by production quotas that were raised periodically. The Rumanian CP said with a good dose of cynicism that “piece work is a revolutionary system which eliminates inertia…everyone has the possibility to work harder…”. In fact the system “eliminates” above all those who refuse this “possibility”. The workers can choose between dying of starvation or dying at their post for a wretched salary.

Rather like the mythical Sisyphus, who was condemned in Hades to forever push a rock to the top of a mountain, the Hungarian Sisyphuses were condemned to infernal and relentless rhythms of work.

In most factories the administration realised at the end of each month that they were seriously late in relation to the inhuman expectations of the plan. So the signal was given for the ‘great rush’, an explosion of speed-ups equivalent to the “Stourmovtchina”[4] [343] regularly experienced by the Russian workers. These “Stourmovtchina” took place not only at the end of each month but, increasingly, at the end of each week. The number of hours overtime increased dramatically, as did the number of work accidents. Men and machines were pushed to the ultimate limit.

To crown it all, it was not unusual for the workers to have the lovely surprise of discovering, when they arrived at the factory, a “letter of commitment” signed and sent in their name by...the union. Already exhausted, they found in their hands , “the solemn commitment” to increase production (once again) in honour of this or that anniversary or celebration. In fact, any occasion would do for launching this sort of “voluntary” day of work, which was also (it goes without saying) unpaid. From March 1950 to February 1951, there were up to eleven such days: “liberation” day, 1st May, week for Korea, Rakosi’s birthday and other events worthy of rejoicing and unpaid overtime.

During the period of the first five year plan, although production was doubled and productivity increased by 63%, the living conditions of the workers plummeted inexorably. In five years, from 1949 to 1954, take-home pay was reduced by 20%, and in the year 1956 only 15% of families lived above the subsistence level defined by the regime’s own experts!

The era of Stakhanovism was obviously not introduced into Hungary on a voluntary basis and because of love of the “socialist fatherland”. It is clear that the ruling class enforced it by means of terror,  threats of violent reprisals and very heavy sanctions if production norms were not met (moreover, these continually reached new heights).

Stalinist terror took a grip in the factories. So, on 9th January 1950, the government passed a law forbidding the workers to leave the workplace without permission. Discipline was strict and “infractions” were punished by heavy fines.

Such daily terror made it necessary to have an omnipresent police infrastructure. The police and unions had to be everywhere, to the point that in certain places the situation became ridiculous.  The MOFAR factory in Magyarovar, whose workforce had tripled between 1950 and 1956, had to recruit, in order to ensure the repression of the workers, not three but ten times more surveillance personnel: officials of the union, the party and the factory police.

The statutes given by the regime to the unions in 1950 are unequivocal on this point: “...organise and extend socialist emulation on the part of the workers, fight for better organisation of work, for the reinforcement of discipline...and the increase of productivity”.

But fines and bullying were not the only sanctions against those who were “recalcitrant”.

On 6th December 1948, while on a visit to the town of Debrecen, the minister for industry, Istvan Kossa gave out against “…workers [who] have a terrorist attitude towards the managers of nationalised industries…”. In other words, those who  did not bow “whole heartedly” to the Stakhanovist norms or else who  simply could not attain the improbable production quotas demanded. From then on, workers who did not look sufficiently “enamoured” of their work were regularly denounced as “agents of western capitalism”, “fascists” or “crooks”. In his discourse Kossa added that if they did not change their “attitude”, a period of forced labour might help them. This was not an empty threat, as is illustrated by the following case, among many, of a worker at the Györ car factory. He was accused of “wage fraud” and condemned to imprisonment in an internment camp. The statement of Sandor Kopacsi, internment manager in 1949 and prefect of police for Budapest in 1956, is also informative: “I would say that the camps contained workers, unfortunate farmers, some people from classes hostile to the regime. The job [of the director] was simple: he had to extend the detainees period of internment, generally by six months. […] Six months detention and six months extension. Of course it was not the ‘ten years’ and ‘fifteen years’ extra hard labour time in the Siberian wastes…Nevertheless the detainees did not go back to civil life from this internment – and it was internment, with the system of prolonging it ‘from six months by another six months –  any more than did those who had served fifteen to twenty-five years in the great Siberian north.”[5] [344]  In 1955 the number of prisoners increased dramatically and the majority of them, strangely enough, were “recalcitrant” workers.

Under the Rakosi regime tens of thousands of people disappeared without trace…they were in fact arrested and interned. At the time it was said that a profound evil afflicted Hungary: “the doorbell evil”. That meant that when the doorbell rang in the morning at someone’s home, they never knew whether it was the milkman or an agent of the political police (AVH).

The genuine proletarian insurrection of October 1956

However, the reign of terror, the presence of the Red Army and the torturers of the AVH did not have the desired effect: the anger within the proletariat became more and more palpable from 1948 onwards. The workers’ resentment was very close to exploding onto the streets. They felt the growing and irrepressible need to get rid of the whole hierarchical apparatus of soviet bureaucracy from those at the top, who took the key decisions about the level and norms of production, down to the foreman and other supervisors who, watch in hand, pushed them to transform these plans into finished products.

The exhausted workers were at the end of their tether. The conditions of exploitation were no longer bearable, the insurrection was incubating.

The situation that the USSR had created in Hungary was identical to what was happening in the other Stalinist states of the Eastern bloc. That is why the discontent of the workers was constant. From the beginning of June 1953 the Czech workers in Pilsen were confronted by the Stalinist state apparatus because they refused to go on being paid in the form of the famous piece work wages. A couple of weeks later, the 17th June 1953,  a big strike of workers in the building industry broke out in East Berlin following the general rise in production norms by 10% and wage reductions of 30%. The workers marched down the Stalin Allee to the cry of “Down with the tyranny of the norms” , “we are workers, not slaves”. Strike committees arose spontaneously to extend the struggle and they marched towards the other part of the city to call on the western workers to join them. As the famous wall had not yet been built, the western allies decided to hurriedly close their sector.  It was the Russian tanks stationed in the GDR (East Germany) which put an end to this strike. In this way the bourgeoisie in the East and that in the West joined forces in perfect agreement to confront the proletarian response. At the same time demonstrations and workers' revolts occurred in seven Polish cities. Martial law was proclaimed in Warsaw, Krakow, and in Silesia: there too the Russian tanks had to intervene to suppress workers' agitation. Hungary was also in motion. Strikes broke out initially in the working class district of the big centre for iron and steel production at Csepel in Budapest. It then spread to other industrial cities such as Ozd and Diösgyör.

The wind of revolt against Stalinism, which blew across the Eastern countries, was to find its high point in the Hungarian insurrection of October 1956.

The climate of agitation that spread over Hungary obviously worried the Kremlin exceedingly. In an attempt to let off the steam in this overheated cauldron, Moscow  decided to remove from power the man who personified the terror of the regime. Matyas Rakosi was relieved of his post as first minister in June 1953, returned to power in 1955, followed by another reshuffle  in July 1956,  But  this made no difference as the tension that had built up was too great and living conditions did not improve. The cauldron was ready to explode.

In this pre-insurrectional atmosphere, which could have brought down the regime in power, the nationalist faction of the Hungarian bourgeoisie quickly understood that they had a card in hand to change their position as vassal of Moscow. Or else they could at least loosen the dog collar and  lengthen the leash. The rapid and forced sovietization of the Hungarian state, the total and undivided control of power by the Kremlin’s men supported by Red Army tanks, industry placed entirely at the service of the economic and imperialist interests of the USSR…this was too much for the national bourgeoisie. They were awaiting their moment to get rid of the occupier. Aspirations for national independence were very much present, even among some Hungarian Stalinists, the “national communists”, who called for a “Hungarian path to socialism” as propounded by a good number of intellectuals. They made Imre Nagy[6] [345] their champion, the “hero” of the October insurrection. Likewise, the army could not have been sovietized without making concessions to the nationalism of the old officers. For them, the alliance with the USSR was not in the national interest, which was traditionally oriented towards the West. When the October uprising took place, the army too glimpsed the possibility of freeing itself from Stalinist fetters. This is why it participated in part in the street fighting. This patriotic resistance was personified by the general Pal Maleter and the troops from the Kilian barracks in Budapest. These factions of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie poisoned the atmosphere of the workers’ revolt with their nationalist propaganda. It is no accident that to this very day the dominant class tries to turn Nagy and Maleter into mythical characters in the events of 1956. By presenting only these bourgeois “icons”, it gives credence to the lie that it was a “revolution for democratic and national liberation”.

This is why, after the dismissal of Rakosi in July, the climate of agitation was maintained by pressure from petty bourgeois elements, the nationalist intellectuals of the Writers’ Union and the students of the Petofi Circle. On 23rd October the latter organised a peaceful demonstration in Budapest which numerous workers attended. When they got to the foot of the statue of General Bem a resolution of the Writers’ Union was read out, which expressed the so-called aspirations for independence of the “Hungarian people”.

For the bourgeoisie this is the essence of the Hungarian insurrection …a collection of students and intellectuals fighting for national liberation from the Muscovite yoke. For the last fifty years the ruling class has thrown a veil over the main actor in the uprising, the working class, and its motivation, which far from being for national resistance and love of the fatherland, was above all attempting to resist the terrible living conditions imposed upon it.

When the workers came out of the factories, the masses of Budapest workers joined the demonstration. Although the gathering was officially over, the workers did not disperse, quite the contrary. Instead, they converged on parliament square and Stalin’s statue, which they began to destroy with sledgehammers and  blowlamps. Then the human tide moved towards the Radio building to protest against a statement made by the Prime minister, Gerö, which accused the demonstrators of being no more that a “band of nationalist adventurers trying to break the power of the working class”. That was when the political police (AVH) opened fire on the crowd and the protest movement became on armed insurrection. The nationalist intellectuals, who had initiated the demonstration, were overtaken at this point by the turn of events and, at the admission of the secretary of the Petofi circle himself, Balazs Nagy, they “were braking the movement rather than driving it forward”.

Within 24 hours the general strike, involving four million workers, spread throughout Hungary. In the large industrial centres workers' councils arose spontaneously. This was how the working class organised and controlled the insurrection.

The workers undoubtedly formed the backbone of the movement and they showed it by their unfailing combativity and determination. They armed themselves and built barricades everywhere. On every street corner of the capital they fought the AVH and the Russian tanks, against overwhelming odds. In fact, the AVH was very soon overtaken by events and a new government, formed urgently and led by the “progressive” Imre Nagy, called without hesitation for the intervention of soviet tanks to protect the regime from the anger of the workers. Nagy called ceaselessly for the restoration of order and the “surrender of the insurgents”. Later on this champion of democracy was to declare that the intervention of Soviet forces “was necessary in the interests of socialist discipline”.

The tanks entered Budapest on 24th October at about 2 o’clock in the morning and the armoured vehicles came up against the first barricades in the workers’ districts on the outskirts of the town. The Csepel factory with its thousands of engineering workers put up the most stubborn resistance; obsolete guns and Molotov cocktails against divisions of Russian armoured vehicles.

Nagy, the legitimate candidate of all nationalist aspirations, was unable to impose calm. He never got the confidence and disarmament of the workers because, unlike the intellectuals and part of the Hungarian army, the workers were not fighting for “national deliverance”. Although they may have been contaminated by patriotic propaganda, they were basically fighting against terror and exploitation. On 4th November, coinciding with Moscow’s replacement of Nagy by Janos Kadar, 6,000 soviet tanks entered the capital for a second round in order to definitively end the uprising. The bulk of the attack was against the workers’ districts on the outskirts: red Csepel, Ujpest, Kobanya, Dunapentele. Although the enemy was a hundred times stronger in terms of men and weapons, the workers continued to resist and fought like lions. “At Csepel, the workers were determined to fight. On 7th November an artillery barrage was unleashed, backed up by aerial bombardment. The next day a Soviet emissary came to ask the workers to surrender. They refused and the battle continued. The following day another officer gave a last ultimatum: if they did not give up their arms they would have no district. Again the insurgents refused to submit. Artillery fire became more and more intense. The soviet forces used mortars with rocket launchers, which caused a lot of damage to the factories and buildings nearby. The workers ceased fighting only when the ammunition ran out". (Budapest, the insurrection by Francois Fejtö)

Only hunger and lack of ammunition seemed able to end the fighting and the workers’ resistance.

The workers’ districts were razed to the ground and some estimates put the number of deaths at tens of thousands. However, in spite of the massacres, the strike went on for several weeks. Even when it was finished, resistance continued to appear sporadically up until January 1957.

Organisation in workers’ councils reappears

Courage, the struggle against poverty, exasperation at the conditions of exploitation and Stalinist terror are the elements that explain the tenacious resistance of the Hungarian workers but another aspect must be taken into account; the fact that this revolt was organised by means of workers’ councils.

In Budapest, as in the provinces, the insurrection was immediately accompanied by the constitution of councils. For the first time in 40 years their struggle against Stalinist bureaucracy led the Hungarian workers to spontaneously discover this form of organisation and proletarian power. The council form had first been created by their fathers in Russia during the 1905 revolution and then in the revolutionary wave beginning in Petrograd in 1917 and spreading to Budapest in 1919 with its brief Republic of Councils. From 25th October 1956, the towns of Dunapentele, Szolnok (a large rail centre), Pecs (the mines in the south-west), Debrecen, Szeged, Miscolk, Györ were directed by workers’ councils, which organised the armament of the insurgents, the provisioning and presenting of economic and political demands.

This was also how the strike was controlled in the main industrial centres in Hungary. Sectors that were fundamental for the mobility of the proletariat, such as transport, or those that were vital, such as hospitals or electricity, continued to function in many cases on the order of the councils. It was the same for the insurrection:  the councils formed and controlled the workers’ militias, distributed arms (under the control of the workers in the arsenals) and demanded the dissolution of certain state organisms.

Very early, on the 25th October, the council of Miscolk called upon the workers councils of all towns to “coordinate their efforts in order to create a single and unique movement”. The concretisation was to be very slow and chaotic. After 4th November an attempt was made to coordinate at a district level the activity of the Csepel councils. In the 13th and 14th zone the first district workers’ council was set up. Later, 13th November, the council of Ujpest was behind the creation of a powerful council for the whole of the capital. So was born the Central Council of Greater Budapest. This was the first, though belated, step towards a unified authority of the working class.

However, for the Hungarian workers, the political role of the councils, although at the very heart of this organ aimed at taking power, was no more than a stopgap, a role that the situation imposed for want of a better one In the meantime they waited for the “specialists”, the “political experts” to take over the reigns of power again:  “No-one is suggesting that the workers councils themselves could be the political representation of the workers. Certainly…the workers’ council must carry out certain political functions because it is opposed to a regime and the workers have no other representation but this is provisional.” (Statement made by Ferenc Töke, vice president of the Central Council of Greater Budapest.)

The limits of the movement and of the councils

This reveals one of the most serious limitations of the uprising: the low level of consciousness of the Hungarian proletariat, who could go no further given the lack of revolutionary perspective and without the support of the international proletariat. In fact the events in Hungary were against the general trend, they took place in a sinister  period, that of the counter revolution, which weighed on  the working class in the East as well as the West.

The workers were indeed the motive force of the insurrection against a government that was supported by Russian tanks. But although the movement was motivated by the bitter proletarian resistance against exploitation, the enormous combativeness of the Hungarian workers should not be confused with a clear demonstration of revolutionary consciousness. The workers’ insurrection of 1956 marked an inevitable reflux in the level of consciousness of workers in relation to that in 1917-23, at the time of the revolutionary wave. Although the workers’ councils at the end of the First World War appeared as political organs of the working class, the expression of its dictatorship; the 1956 councils on the other hand never threatened the state. Although on 29th October, the Miscolk workers’ council announced “the suppression of the AVH” (which was easier to connect with the terror of the regime), in the confusion it also added: “The government should depend only on two armed forces: the national army and the regular police.” Not only was the existence of the capitalist state not threatened but also its two main instruments for armed defence went unmolested.

By contrast, the councils of 1919, that had a clear understanding of the historic goal of their struggle, raised the need to dissolve the army. In the same period, when the Csepel factories created their councils, it was with the slogans:

“* down with the bourgeoisie and its institutions

 * long live the dictatorship of the proletariat

 * mobilise for the defence of the gains of the revolution by arming the people.”

Moreover, in 1956 the councils went so far as to undermine themselves by considering themselves to be no more than organs for the economic management of the factories:  “We do not claim to have an economic role. On the whole we think that, just as specialists are needed to manage the economy, so too political leadership must be taken by experts.” (Ferenc Töke).

Sometimes they went as far as to see themselves as a sort of committee for the workplace. “The factory belongs to the workers, the latter pay the state a tax calculated on the basis of production of dividends fixed according to the profits…the workers' council decides if there is conflict at the level of hiring and firing of workers” (resolution of the Council of Greater Budapest).

During the dark days of the 1950s, the international proletariat was bled dry. The appeals of the Budapest councils to “the workers of the rest of the world” to “strike in solidarity” remained a dead letter. Moreover, like their class brothers in other countries, the consciousness of the Hungarian workers was very low in spite of their courage. In this situation, the councils arose instinctively but their role, the seizure of power, was inevitably absent. The councils of 1956 were “the form without content” and so can only be viewed as “incomplete” councils or at best a rough sketch of councils.

This made it all the easier for the Hungarian officers and intellectuals to imprison the workers in the prison of nationalist ideas and for the Russian tanks to massacre them.

Although the workers did not see the councils as political organs, Kadar, the Russian high command, and the great Western democracies considered them, on the basis of their experience, to be extremely political organs. In fact, in spite of the great weakness of the working class because of the period, the crushing of the Hungarian proletariat shows just how much the bourgeoisie fears any expression of the proletarian struggle at any time.

From the beginning, when Nagy talked about disarming the working class, he was thinking of the sub machine guns of course but also and, above all, of the councils. In addition, when Janos Kadar regained power in November, he expressed the same preoccupation: the councils must “be taken in hand and purged of the demagogues who have no place in them.”

From the moment that the councils appeared, the unions in the pay of the regime threw themselves into the work that they know best: sabotage. When the National Council of Unions (NCU) “proposed to the workers and employees to start…electing workers councils in the workshops, factories, mines and in all workplaces…” it was to better get control of them, to reinforce  their tendency to confine themselves to economic tasks, prevent them from raising the question of the seizure of power and to integrate them into the state apparatus. “The workers’ council will be responsible for its management before all the workers and before the state…[the councils] have the immediate and essential task of ensuring the return to work, to establish and guarantee order and discipline.” (Declaration of the NCU presidium, 27th October).

Fortunately the unions, which had been formed under the Rakosi government, had very little credibility with the workers, as is testified by this rectification made by the council of Greater Budapest on 27th November: “The unions are at present trying to give the impression that the workers’ councils are constituted by the unions. It is superfluous to say that this is a gratuitous assertion. The workers alone fought for the creation of the workers councils and the struggle of the councils in many cases was obstructed by the unions, which made sure they did no tgive them any help.”

The democratic bourgeoisie's complicity with Stalinist repression

On 6th December the arrest of members of the councils began (they were a prelude to more massive and bloody ones). Several factories were surrounded by Russian troops and the AVH. On the island of Csepel, hundreds of workers gathered the little force that remained to them and made a last stand to stop the police from entering the factories and making arrests. On 15th December, the death penalty for striking was enforced by special tribunals authorised to execute on the spot any worker found “guilty”…lines of bodies that had been strung up adorned the bridges of the Danube.

On 26th December, Gyorgy Marosan, social democrat and minister of the Kadar, declared that, if necessary, the government would put to death 10,000 people to prove that it and not the workers’ councils were the real government.

Together with the Kadarist repression, it was the relentlessness of the Kremlin that crushed the working class. For Moscow, it was certainly necessary to pull into line its satellites and their aspirations for independence. However, more important still, they had to eradicate the spectre of the proletarian threat and its symbol, the workers’ councils. This is why the Titos, Maos and the Stalinists of the whole world gave their unconditional support to the Kremlin’s line.

The bloc of the great democracies also gave their full agreement to the repression. The American ambassador in Moscow, Charles Bohlen, tells in his memoirs that on 29th October 1956, the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, delivered him an urgent message for the Soviet leaders, Krushchev, Zhukov and Bulganin, Dulles was to tell the leaders of the USSR that the United States did not consider Hungary or any other satellite to be a possible military ally. In other words, “Gentlemen you are the masters in your own house, it is up to you to clean up.”

Contrary to all the lies that the bourgeoisie has continued to heap on the memory of the 1956 insurrection in Hungary, what took place was a workers’ struggle against capitalist exploitation. Certainly the period was not a propitious one. The whole working class was no longer directed towards the perspective of an international revolutionary wave as in 1917-23, which had produced the shortlived Hungarian Republic of Councils in March 1919. For this reason the Hungarian workers could not clearly raise the need to destroy capitalism and to take power. This explains their failure to understand the highly political and subversive nature of the councils that they had produced in their struggle. Nevertheless, what was so courageously demonstrated by the revolt of the Hungarian workers and their organising themselves into councils, was the revolutionary nature of the proletariat. They reaffirmed the historic role of the proletariat as Tibor Szamuelly[7] [346] formulated it in 1919: “Our aim and our task is the destruction of capitalism”.

Jude

Our organisation has undertaken a series of articles on the marxist concept of the decadence of a mode of production, and more particularly of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production. This series is demanded by the need to reaffirm and develop the basic marxist analysis of the evolution of human societies, which is the basis for understanding the possibility and necessity of communism. This is the only analysis which makes it possible to offer a framework which can integrate into a coherent whole all the phenomena in the life of capitalism since the First World War. This series was also made necessary by the criticisms, evasions, and even open abandonment of this analytical framework by different revolutionary groups and elements.

The series began in International Review nº118 with an initial article showing the central place accorded to the theory of decadence in the work of the founders of marxism. After that, given that the confrontation of divergences within the revolutionary milieu – with a view to clarifying them – is a priority for us, we wrote two polemical articles (International Review nº119 and nº 120) which reacted vigorously against the thinly-veiled abandonment of this fundamental Marxist concept by the IBRP.[1] [356] Finally, we continued our series by examining the central place this concept occupied in the organisations of the workers’ movement from Marx’s day to the Third International (IR nº121) as well as in the political positions of the latter at its first two Congresses (IR nº123). Before continuing in a future issue with the discussion on the decadence of capitalism that was held at the Third Congress of the Communist International, we are again undertaking a polemic with the IBRP on the article "The economic role of war in the decadent phase of capitalism" written by the CWO and published in Revolutionary Perspectives nº 37 (November 2005).[2] [357]

In this article the CWO tries to show that there is an economic rationality to war in the sense that the prosperity which follows it is “the economic effect of war is to [devalue capital and] increase profit rates”   and that “world wars have become essential for capitalism’s survival since the start of the 20th century and that they have replaced decennial crises of the 19th century”. In order to do this, it bases its analysis of the crisis of capitalism solely on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall which Marx uncovered. In the same article the CWO accuses us of abandoning the materialist method by invoking our refusal to attribute an economic rationality to wars in the decadence of capitalism as well as in our analysis of the present phase of capitalist decomposition.

In our response we propose to consider the following five themes:

1.        We will show that the IBRP has a very partial understanding of Marx’s analysis of the dynamic and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. We have already amply criticised this approach inherited from Paul Mattick (1904-81),[3] [358] an approach which makes the CWO incapable of going to the roots of the decadence of capitalism, its crises, and in particular the numerous wars which are one of the most significant expressions of the bankruptcy of the system. We intend to deepen this question by showing the basic divergence between the CWO’s analysis and that of Marx, and by bringing out the latter’s views more explicitly.

2.        We will show that there is no mechanical causal link between the economic crisis and war even if the latter is indeed in the last instance an expression of the bankruptcy and of the aggravation of the system’s economic contradictions. We will see that the prosperity that followed the Second World War was not the result of the destruction which took place during the war. We will explain why it is quite false to assimilate the wars of decadence with the ten-year cycle of crises in the 19th century and finally show how the real economic mechanism of war is 180° removed from the speculative meanderings of the CWO

3.        We will examine how this theory of the economic function of  war for the survival of capitalism – as presented by the CWO – has no tradition in the workers’ movement. It actually has its roots in the economistic analyses of the councilist Paul Mattick in his book Marx and Keynes (1969). Even if it’s true that a part of the Italian left was not devoid of ambiguities on this question, it never analysed the role of war in the way the CWO does, i.e. as a veritable fountain of youth that allows the rate of profit to regenerate itself thanks to the destruction of war![4] [359]   

4.        We will theoretically and empirically refute any idea of the rationality of war in the period of the decadence of capitalism. Here it is clear that, since the beginning of the 80s we have re-forged the link with the whole tradition of the workers’ movement which, as we shall see, has always refused to attribute an economic function to wars in the decadence of capitalism.

5.        Finally, we will show that the method of analysis which is at the basis of the idea of the economic necessity of war for the survival of capitalism derives from a vulgar materialism which completely evacuates the dimension of class struggle from any understanding of social evolution. This bastardised version of historical materialism prevents the CWO from understanding the origins of the phase of decomposition of a mode of production as Marx developed the idea.

In conclusion, it will appear clearly that while inter-imperialist war has occupied a central place in the workers’ movement, it is not because of any “economic role in the survival of capitalism” as the IBRP claims but because it marked the opening of the period of decadence for the capitalist mode of production; because it issued a challenge to the workers’ movement, posing a question which has always been at the root of its most important splits – the question of proletarian internationalism; because, owing to the misery it engendered, it led to the outbreak of the first world wide revolutionary wave (1917-23); because it marked a political test for all the communist groups who rejected Stalinism at the time of the Second World War; because imperialist wars represent an immense destruction of the whole patrimony of humanity (its productive forces, its historical and cultural wealth, etc), and notably of its main component: the working class and its avant-garde. In short, if war has been such an important question for the workers’ movement, it was not essentially for any economic reason but above all for social, political and imperialist reasons.

 

 

 

The essential divergence between Marx’s analysis and the CWO’s

Inspired by the theories developed by the councilist Paul Mattick, the CWO[1] [366] defends a very mono-causal and partial view of the dynamic of capitalism, basing itself exclusively on the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit as developed by Marx in Capital. In their view, this law is at the root both of economic crises, the advent of decadence and the numerous wars seen throughout the world. Following Marx, we also consider that this law plays an essential role in the dynamic of capitalism, but as he himself underlined, it only intervenes as one of the “two acts of the capitalist process of production”. Marx always showed very clearly that, to complete the cycle of accumulation, capitalism must not only be able to produce sufficient profit – this is “ but the first act of the capitalist process of production” (and it is at this stage that the falling rate of profit reveals its full importance) – it also has to sell all the commodities it produces. This sale constitutes what Marx calls “the second act of the process”. This is fundamental in that this sale on the market is the indispensable condition for realizing, in the form of surplus-value to be re-invested, the entirety of the labour crystallized in the commodity during the course of production. Not only did Marx constantly stress the imperious necessity to pass through these two acts since, as he put it, if one of the two was not present, the whole cycle of accumulation remains incomplete; he also gives us the key to the relations between these two acts. Marx always insisted on the fact that, though closely linked, the act of production is “independent” of the act of selling. He even pointed out that these two acts “are not identical”, not only in time and place, but also “logically”. In other words, Marx taught us that production does not automatically create its own market, contrary to the fables of bourgeois political economy; or, again, that “the extension of production does not necessarily correspond to the growth of the market”. Why? Simply because production and the market are determined differently: the extraction of surplus labour (the first act of production) “is only limited by the productive power of society” (Marx), whereas the realization of this surplus labour on the market (the second act, selling) is essentially limited by “the consumer power of society. But this last-named is not determined either by the absolute productive power, or by the absolute consumer power, but by the consumer power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum”. As a result , Marx argues, “The market must, therefore, be continually extended”. He even goes on to say that that this “internal contradiction”, resulting from the immediate process of production, “ seeks to resolve itself through expansion of the outlying field of production”.

Thus, when Marx in his conclusion to his chapter on the law of the falling rate of profit summarises his overall understanding of the movement and contradiction of the capitalist process of production, he talks of a play in two acts[2] [367].

The first act represents the movement of “acquiring surplus value”: “With the development of the process, which expresses itself in a drop in the rate of profit, the mass of surplus-value thus produced swells to immense dimensions”. In the  second act “The entire mass of commodities, i.e. , the total product, including the portion which replaces the constant and variable capital, and that representing surplus-value, must be sold. If this is not done, or done only in part, or only at prices below the prices of production, the labourer has been indeed exploited, but his exploitation is not realised as such for the capitalist”. Marx also makes a precision about the relations between these two acts of production and sale: “The conditions of direct exploitation, and those of realising it, are not identical”.

The conception of the CWO/IBRP is very different. It reduces the capitalist process of production to the first act (“With the development of the process, which expresses itself in a drop in the rate of profit, the mass of surplus-value thus produced swells to immense dimensions”). Nowhere in its article does the CWO invoke the necessity for the second act, the need for the entire mass of commodities to be sold. And for good reason: in line with Paul Mattick, the IBRP claims that production itself engenders its own market[3] [368]. For the IBRP, this second act only poses a problem if there is an insufficient amount of surplus value to be accumulated as a result of the fall in the rate of profit. The crisis of overproduction is determined exclusively by difficulties encountered in the first act of production. But we have already seen that, for Marx, these two acts of production are not identical, that they are logically separate “Since market and production are two independent factors- that the expansion of ones does not  correspond with the expansion of the other” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value,  Chapter headed "Ricardo’s theory of accumulation and a critique of it", Sub-section13, p 524).  This means that production does not automatically create its own market or, to put it another way, that the market is not fundamentally determined by the conditions of production but by “the consumer power of society. But this last-named is not determined either by the absolute productive power, or by the absolute consumer power, but by the consumer power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum varying within more or less narrow limits” (See footnote 6 for reference).

A position already refuted by Marx over a century ago

This position of the CWO/IBRP is more than a century and half old. It’s the vision developed by bourgeois economists like Ricardo, Mill and Say, to whom Marx replied quite clearly on a number of occasions: “Those economists who, like Ricardo, conceived production as directly identical with the self-realisation of capital -and hence were heedless of the barriers of consumption or of the existing barriers of circulation itself, to the extent that it must represent counter-values at all points, having in view only the development of the forces of production (...) Mill...(copied from the dull Say): supply and demand are allegedly identical, and should therefore necessarily correspond. Supply , namely, is allegedly a demand measured by its own amount. Here a great confusion...” (Karl Marx, Grundrisse, The Pelican Marx Library, 1973, p 410) . What is the basis of Marx’s response to this “great confusion” of bourgeois economics, repeated by the CWO/IBRP?

First of all, Marx fully agrees with these economists in saying that “Production indeed itself creates demand, in that it employs more workers in the same branch of business, and creates new branches of business, where new capitalists again employ new workers and at the same time alternatively become market for the old”; but he immediately added, approving a comment by Malthus,  “the demand created by the productive labourer himself can never be an adequate demand, because it does not go to the full extent of what he produces. If it did, there would be no profit, consequently no motive to employ him. The very existence of a profit upon any commodity presupposes a demand exterior to that of the labourer who has produced it” (Marx, Grundrisse, The Pelican Marx Library, 1973, p 410). Marx here is only expressing what he said earlier about the limits to society’s consumer power being “based on antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum varying within more or less narrow limits”.

But how exactly does Marx explain this last point? Like all previous modes of production based on exploitation, capitalism revolves around a conflict between antagonistic classes over the appropriation of surplus labour. Consequently, the immanent tendency of capitalism consists, for the ruling class, of constantly trying to restrict the consumption of the producers in order to be able to appropriate the maximum of surplus value: “Every capitalist knows this about his worker that he does not relate to him as producer to consumer, and (he therefore) wishes to restrict his consumption, i.e. his ability to exchange, his wages, as much as possible” (Grundrisse, Section two: "The circulation of capital, demand by the workers themselves", p 420)

This immanent and permanent tendency for capitalism to try to restrict the consumer power of the exploited is just another illustration of the contradiction between the social and the private, i.e. the contradiction between the increasingly social dimension of production and its private appropriation. From the private point of view of each capitalist taken individually, wages appear as a cost to be minimised just like the other costs of production; but from the social point of view of the functioning of capitalism taken as a whole, the mass of wages appears as a market in which each capitalist finds an outlet for his production. Marx continues his explanation for this in the same passage (the emphases are his)  “ Of course he (the capitalist) would like the workers of other capitalist to be the greatest consumers possible of his own commodity” (...) But this is just how the illusion arises -- true for the individual capitalist as distinct from all the others -- that apart from his workers the whole remaining working class confronts him as consumer and participant in exchange, as money-spender, and not as worker. It is forgotten that, as Malthus says, ‘the very existence of a profit upon any commodity pre-supposes a demand exterior to that of the labourer who has produced it’, and hence the demand of the labourer himself can never be an adequate demand. Since one production sets the other into motion and hence creates consumers for itself in the alien capital’s workers, it seems to each individual capital that the demand of the working class posited by production itself is an ‘adequate demand’. On one side, this demand which production itself posits drives it forward, and must drive it forward beyond the proportion in which it would have to produce with regard to the workers; on the other side, if the demand exterior to the demand of the labourer himself disappears or shrinks up, then the collapse occurs”(Grundrisse, Section two: "The circulation of capital, demand by the workers themselves" p 420).

It is therefore the pursuit of the private interests of each capitalist – spurred on by the class conflict for the appropriation of a maximum of surplus labour – that pushes each one to minimise the wages of his own workers in order to appropriate a maximum of surplus value; but in doing so, this immanent tendency of the system to compress wages gives rise to the social basis for the limits of capitalism since its result is to restrict society’s capacity to consume. This ‘social/private’ contradiction for reducing the consuming power of the mass of society to a  minimum is what Marx calls “antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum varying within more or less narrow limits”. Or, in other words, “the more productiveness develops, the more it finds itself at variance with the narrow basis on which the conditions of consumption rest”.

The marxist analysis of capitalism's economic contradictions

Having examined the essential difference between Marx’s analysis and the CWO’s, and having seen how Marx already replied to similar arguments well over a century ago, we now have to examine how Marx really analysed the dynamic and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production.

Each mode of production in the history of humanity – such as the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and capitalist – has been characterized by a specific social relation of production: tribute, slavery, serfdom, wage labour. It is this social relation of production which determines the specific link between those who own the means of production and the producers, around a class conflict whose substance is the appropriation of surplus labour. It is these social relations which are at the heart of the dynamic and the contradictions of each mode of production.[4] [369] In capitalism, the specific relation which links the workers to the means of production is wage labour: “Thus capital presupposes wage labour; wage labour presupposes capital. They reciprocally condition the existence of each other; they reciprocally bring forth each other” (Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, 1991, page 80). It is this social relation of production which both imprints the dynamic of capitalism, since it constitutes the sphere for the extraction of surplus value (the first act of the capitalist process of production) and at the same time contains insurmountable contradictions, since the conflict for the appropriation of this surplus value tends to restrict society’s capacity to consume (this is the second act of capitalist production, sale): “The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses, in the face of the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute consumption capacity of society set a limit to them” (Marx, Capital, Vol 3,  Chapter 30: "Money capital and real capital: 1", p 615) . It is from these difficulties both within and between the two acts of the capitalist process of production which engenders “an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -the epidemic of overproduction (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, "Bourgeois and proletarians", Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol.6, page 490). This is why Marx constantly repeated that  “In the crises of the world market, the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, "Ricardo’s theory of accumulation and a critique of it", sub-section 8, p 500).

Wage labour is a dynamic relation in the sense that, in order to survive, the system, spurred on by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and by competition, must constantly push the exploitation of wage labour to its limits, extend the field of application of the law of value, constantly accumulate and extend its solvent markets:

 “With the development of capitalist production and the resultant reduction in prices, there must be an increase in the quantity of goods, in the number of articles that must be sold. That is to say a constant expansion of the market becomes a necessity for capitalist production” (Marx, Capital Vol 3, "The Results of the immediate process of production,  Penguin books", page 967)

“In world market crises, all the contradictions of bourgeois production erupt collectively; in particular crises (particular in their content and in extent) the eruptions are only sporadical, isolated and one-sided.

Over-production is specifically conditioned by the general law of the production of capital: to produce to the limit set by the productive forces, that is to say, to exploit the maximum amount of labour with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay; and this is carried out through continuous expansion of reproduction and accumulation, and therefore constant reconversion of revenue into capital, while on the other hand, the mass of the producers remain tied to the average level of needs, and must remain tied to it according to the nature of capitalist production” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Book 2, "Ricardo’s theory of accumulation and a critique of it", sub-section  14, page 534-35).    And, within this dynamic, the law of the falling rate of profit occupies a central place in that it pushes each capitalist to compensate for the fall in the rate of profit in each of its commodities through mass production in order to compensate and even increase its total quantity of profit. Each capitalist thus faces the necessity to realize an ever-growing quantity of commodities: “This phenomenon arising from the nature of the capitalist mode of production, that the price of an individual commoditiy or a given portion of commodities falls with the growing productivity of labour, while the number of commodities rises; that the amount of profit on the individual commodity  and the rate of profit on the sum of commodities falls, but the mass of profit on the total sum of commodities rises (...) In actual fact, the fall in commodity prices and the rise in the mass of profit on the increased mass of cheapened commodities is simply another expression of the law of the falling profit rate in the context of a simultaneously rising mass of profit” (Marx, Capital, Vol 3, Part 3, Chapter 13, p 338).

But wage labour is also a contradictory relation in that, while production on this basis assumes an increasingly social character and spreads across the whole world, the surplus product is still privately appropriated. By basing himself on this "social-private" ontradiction Marx demonstrates that in a context where "Over-production arises precisely from the fact that the mass of the people can never consume more than the average quantity of necessaries, that their consumption therefore does not grow correspondingly with the productivity of labour"

"He (Ricardo) overlooks the fact that the commodity has to be converted into money.  The demand of the workers does not suffice, since profit arises precisely from the fact that the demand of the workers is smaller than the value of their product, and that it [profit] is all the greater the smaller, relatively, is this demand.  The demand of the capitalists among themselves is equally insufficient" (Theories of Surplus Value, Book 2, chapter 16, "Ricardo’s Explanation for the Fall in the Rate of Profit and Its Connection with His Theory of Rent").

 “If it is said, finally, that the capitalists only have to exchange their commodities among themselves and consume them, then the whole character of capitalist production is forgotten, and it is forgotten that that what is involved is the valorization of capital, not its consumption” (Marx, Capital, Vol 3, Part 3, chapter 15, 3  ‘Surplus capital alongside surplus population’, p 366).

In the ascendant phase of capitalism, in a context where, as Marx said, the gains in productivity, although spectacular for the time, still remained limited and where private appropriation confiscated the essential of the latter since “consumption... does not grow correspondingly with the productivity of labour", the generalisation of wage labour, on the “narrow basis on which the conditions of consumption rest”, inevitably restricted the outlets with regard to the relatively huge needs of the enlarged reproduction of capital, obliging the system to constantly find buyers not only within but, more and more, outside the sphere of capital and labour. “.. the more capitalist production develops the more it is forced to produce on a scale which has nothing to do with immediate demand but depends on a constant expansion of the world market” (...) The mere  relationship of wage-labourer and capitalist implies;

1.        that the majority of the producers (the workers) are non-consumers (non-buyers) of a very large part of their product, namely, of the means of production and the raw material.

2.        that the majority of the producers, the workers, can consume an equivalent for their product only so long as they produce more than this equivalent, that is, so long as they produce surplus-value or surplus product. They must always be overproducers, produce over and above their needs, in order to be able to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs (...)

Over-production is specifically conditioned by the general law of the production of capital: to produce to the limit set by the productive forces, that is to say, to exploit the maximum amount of labour with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Vol 2,  Lawrence & Wishart, 1969, pages 468, 520, 534)  

  In this context, Marx clearly demonstrated the inevitability of crises of overproduction through the relative restriction of demand - the consequence, on the one hand, of the necessity for each capitalist to increase production in order to increase the mass of surplus value to compensate for the fall in the rate of profit, and, on the other hand, of the recurrent obstacle encountered by capital: the outbreak of the crisis through the relative shrinking of the market needed as an outlet for this production, which takes place long before any insufficiency of surplus value engendered by the tendency for the rate of profit to fall: “in the course of reproduction and accumulation, small improvements are continuously building up, which eventually alter the whole level of production.  There is a piling up of improvements, a cumulative development of productive powers.> requires a constantly expanding market and that production expands more rapidly than the market, then one would merely have used different terms to express the phenomenon which has to be explained—concrete terms instead of abstract terms.  The market expands more slowly than production; or in the cycle through which capital passes during its reproduction—a cycle in which it is not simply reproduced but reproduced on an extended scale, in which it describes not a circle but a spiral—there comes a moment at which the market manifests itself as too narrow for production.  This occurs at the end of the cycle.  But it merely means: the market is glutted.  Over-production is manifest.  If the expansion of the market had kept pace with the expansion of production there would be no glut of the market, no over-production.

However, the mere admission that the market must expand with production, is, on the other hand, again an admission of the possibility of over-production, for the market is limited externally in the geographical sense, the internal market is limited as compared with a market that is both internal and external, the latter in turn is limited as compared with the world market, which however is, in turn, limited at each moment of time, [though] in itself capable of expansion.  The admission that the market must expand if there is to be no over-production, is therefore also an admission that there can be over-production.  For it is then possible—since market and production are two independent factors—that the expansion of one does not correspond with the expansion of the other; that the limits of the market are not extended rapidly enough for production, or that new markets— new extensions of the market—may be rapidly outpaced by production, so that the expanded market becomes just as much a barrier as the narrower market was formerly” (ibid, p 524-525)

The CWO still disagrees with Marx

Although it is central in explaining the development of the recurring crises of overproduction throughout the life of capitalism, the contradictory dimension of wage labour, which tends to constantly reduce the solvent market in relation to the growing needs of accumulation, is obviously not the only factor analysed by Marx in the appearance of these crises.[5] [370] There is also the imbalance in the rhythm of accumulation between the two main sectors of production (means of consumption and means of production), the different speed of turnover in the various branches of production, the falling rate of profit, etc. Marx wrote a lot about these elements but we can’t go into his arguments in the framework of this article. Nevertheless we need to point out that, among all these other factors contributing to the outbreak of crises of overproduction, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall indeed occupies a central place – Marx in fact saw it as key o understanding the decennial cycles of the first two thirds of the 19th century:[6] [371] when the dynamic towards rising profits is inversed, it engenders a depressive spiral which slows down accumulation and the reciprocal demand between the different branches of production; consequently it leads to the laying-off of workers and the compression of wages etc. All these phenomena come together to create a general glut of commodities.  

The crisis of overproduction thus often appears both as a crisis in the profitability of capital (the falling rate of profit) and of distribution (the lack of solvent markets). This dual nature of the crisis is connected to the fact that each capitalist taken individually searches to reduce wages as much as he can (without any social concern for global outlets) and, at the same time, tries to increase productivity to the maximum in the face of competition (which eventually affects the rate of profit: the crisis of valorisation). The private and conflict-ridden nature of capitalism prevents any medium or long-term regulation that would allow it to balance out its contradictory tendencies: overinvestment (over-accumulation) and the relative lack of outlets return to periodically block the accumulation of capital and reduce its rate of growth.

However, Marx demonstrated that the tendency for the rate of profit to fall was not at all the result of a repetitive schema, determined in some atemporal and algebraic way. It had to be analysed and understood in its specificities each time it manifested itself since, with the three factors that determined it (wages, productivity of labour and productivity of capital) several scenarios are possible, above all when the combination of these three factors can, in turn, be reduced by counter-tendencies which vary noticeably in the course of time: availability of a large domestic market; colonialism; investment in countries or sectors with a lower organic composition of capital[7] [372]; increase in female labour or immigrant labour etc. 

In order to function properly, capitalism has to both produce at a profit and sell the commodities so produced. According to Marx these two requirements, in the real conditions of capitalism, are eminently contradictory. They cannot be made compatible in the medium and long term because competition, private appropriation and the conflict over the appropriation of surplus labour are a social barrier to capitalism being able to regulate these contradictions in any durable way. It is the fundamental social relation of production under capitalism – wage labour – which determines this.

Why do we think it necessary to make this precision, which could appear somewhat technical and complicated to someone who is not used to handling these economic concepts and their reciprocal relations? Because it enables us to demonstrate the fundamental divergences between Marx’s view and that of the CWO, while at the same time preventing any potential for false polemics.

Yes, with Marx, we do consider that the dynamic towards the fall in the rate of profit also serves to engender crises of overproduction, but here again the CWO’s approach is very different from Marx’s:

1.        When it completely ignores the contradictory dimension of wage labour – something which Marx underlined again and again – which is the first and main basis of the crises of overproduction, since it results in the permanent tendency to restrict the consumer power of the wage labourers and thus the solvent markets needed for the realisation of a growing mass of commodities.

2.        When instead of seeing this social contradiction which resides in the wage labour relation, it makes the fall in the rate of profit the exclusive mechanism of the crises of overproduction and even the alpha and omega of all the economic contradictions of capitalism, including its decadence and all imperialist wars.

3.        Finally, when it makes the dimension of solvent markets strictly dependent on the expansion or contraction of production, which in turn is determined solely by the evolution of the rate of profit; whereas, to use Marx’s own terms, the two acts of the process of production, production and sale, are not identical, are independent, and are not logically connected. The best proof of the profoundly erroneous nature of the CWO’s vision, which we will explain at greater length in another article, is the fact that for more than a quarter of a century the rate of profit has been clearly on the rise, and is equivalent to the levels it reached during the "thirty glorious years" that followed the Second World War…whereas the rates of growth in productivity, of investment, of accumulation and thus of growth have been declining or stagnating![8] [373] This paradox is only comprehensible when you understand that the crisis is the consequence of the relative insufficiency of solvent markets, resulting from the massive contraction of the mass of wages – a contraction which in turn results from the drive to re-establish the rate of profit.

Marx and Luxemburg: an identical analysis of the economic contradictions of capitalism

How does capitalism overcome its immanent tendency to restrict its solvent markets? How does it seek to resolve this contradiction, which is internal to its mode of operation? Marx’s response is very clear and it is identical throughout his work:  

“The market must, therefore, be continually extended, so that its interrelations and the conditions regulating them assume more and more the form of a natural law working independently of the producer, and become ever more uncontrollable. This internal contradiction seeks to resolve itself through expansion of the outlying field of production”( Capital, quoted above)

“this demand which production itself posits drives it forward, and must drive it forward beyond the proportion in which it would have to produce with regard to the workers; on the other side, if the demand exterior to the demand of the labourer himself disappears or shrinks up, then the collapse occurs” (Grundrisse, quoted above).

This understanding of Marx is precisely what Rosa Luxemburg took up in her book The Accumulation of Capital. In a way, this great revolutionary prolonged Marx’s developments by writing the chapter on the world market which is one of those that Marx was unable to complete.[9] [374] The entirety of Rosa’s work is traversed by this notion of Marx that “this demand which production itself posits drives it forward, and must drive it forward beyond the proportion in which it would have to produce with regard to the workers; on the other side, if the demand exterior to the demand of the labourer himself disappears or shrinks up, then the collapse occurs”. She drew out this idea by showing that, since the totality of the surplus value of global social capital needs, if it is to be realised, a constant extension of markets both internal and external, capitalism was dependent on the continual conquest of solvent markets both at national and international level: “By this process capital prepares its own destruction in two ways. As it approaches the point where humanity only consists of capitalists and proletarians, further accumulation will become impossible. At the same time the absolute and undivided rule of capital aggravates class struggle throughout the world and the international economic and political anarchy to such an extent that, long before the last consequences of economic development, it must lead to the rebellion of the international proletariat against the existence of the rule of capital…Modern imperialism.. is only the last chapter of its historical process of expansion: it is the period of universally sharpened world competition between the capitalist states for the last remaining non-capitalist areas on earth” (Luxemburg, Anti-Critique).

Rosa concretised this idea and contextualised it in the living reality of capitalism’s historical pathway, and this in three areas:

1.        She masterfully describes the concrete progression of capitalism through its permanent tendency to “expand the outlying field of production”, explaining the birth and development of capitalism within the commodity economy that came from the ruins of feudalism up until its domination of the whole world market.

2.        She grasped the contradictions characteristic of the imperialist epoch, this “international phenomenon which Marx did not see: the imperialist development of these past 25 years…this upsurge inaugurated, as we know, a new period of effervescence for the European states: their unprecedented expansion towards the remaining non-capitalist areas and countries of the world. From the 1880s onwards, we witnessed a new and particularly violent impetus towards colonial conquest” (Junius Pamphlet).

3.        Finally, as well as analysing the inseparable historic link between capitalist relations of production and imperialism, showing that the system could not live without expanding, without being imperialist in essence, Rosa Luxemburg also demonstrated at what moment and in what manner the capitalist system entered its phase of decadence.

Once again, Rosa Luxemburg merely took up and developed an idea repeated many times by Marx since the Communist Manifesto: “The proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market” (Marx to Engels, 8 October 1858). Taking up Marx’s intuition about the moment capitalism would enter into decline, and virtually in the same terms, Luxemburg clearly drew out the dynamic and the moment:    “we now have behind us the, so to speak, previous youthful crises which followed these periodic developments. On the other hand, we still have not progressed to that degree of development and exhaustion of the world market which would produce the fatal, periodic collision of the forces of production with the limits of the market, which is the actual capitalist crisis of old age…if the world market has now more or less filled out, and can no longer be enlarged by sudden extensions; and if, at the same time, the productivity of labour strides relentlessly forward, then in more or less time the periodic conflict of the forces of production with the limits of exchange will begin, and will repeat itself more sharply and more stormily”. Social Reform or Revolution.

Since that point, the relative exhaustion – that is, in relation to the needs of accumulation – of these markets would precipitate the system into its decadent phase. Rosa responded to this question from the very start of the 1914-18 war, considering that the world inter-imperialist conflict had opened an era in which capitalism would be a permanent barrier to the development of the productive forces: “the necessity for socialism is fully justified as soon as the rule of the bourgeois class ceases to bear with it any historic progress and becomes a barrier and a danger to the further evolution of society. This is precisely what the present war has revealed with regard to the capitalist order” (Junius Pamphlet). The system’s entry into decadence was thus characterised not by the disappearance of the extra-capitalist markets (Marx’s “demand exterior to the labourer”) but by their insufficiency with regard to the needs for enlarged accumulation. In other words, the mass of surplus value realised in the extra-capitalist markets had become insufficient to recuperate the necessary fraction of the surplus value produced by capitalism and destined to be re-invested. A fraction of total capital could find no outlet on the world market, signaling that overproduction, which had been episodic in the ascendant phase, was now becoming a permanent obstacle to capitalism in its decadent phase. This idea of Luxemburg’s had already been put forward in an explicit manner by Engels in a letter he wrote to FK Wischnewtsky in February 1886: “For if there are three countries (say England, America and Germany) competing on comparatively equal terms for the possession of the Weltmarkt, there is no chance but chronic overproduction, one of the three being capable of supplying the whole quantity required”.

Enlarged accumulation has thus slowed down but not stopped. The economic history of capitalism since 1914 is the history of the development of palliatives to this process of strangulation; and the inefficacity of these palliatives has been shown, among other things, by the great crisis of the 1930s, the Second World War and these last 35 years of crisis.

This total identity between Marx and Rosa Luxemburg in their analysis of the contradictions of capitalism render completely absurd the unfounded accusations – propagated by Stalinism and leftism and unfortunately taken up by the IBRP – which tries to oppose the two and claim that (a) Marx’s explanation for the crises resides in the falling rate of profit whereas Rosa’s resided in the saturation of markets (b) that Marx identified the contradictions of capitalism within production whereas Luxemburg situated them in the sphere of realization; or (c) that for Marx the contradiction was "internal" to capitalism (production) whereas for Luxemburg it was "external" (the market). None of this makes any sense once you understand that it is capitalism’s own internal and contradictory laws which tend to restrict the ultimate social demand and engender the recurring crises of overproduction. This is precisely what Marx and Luxemburg were saying.

Conclusion to the first part

Pushed by the necessity to extort a maximum of surplus labour, capitalism subjects the whole world to the dictatorship of wage labour. In doing so, it sets up a formidable contradiction which, by restricting the consumer power of society in relation to en ever-growing production of commodities, engenders a phenomenon unknown in all previous human history, the crises of overproduction: “In the crises of the world market, the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed”.

Marx linked the crises of overproduction to the barriers imposed by the wage relation to the growth of the ultimate consuming power of society, and more specifically of the wage labourers. More precisely, Marx located this contradiction between, on the one hand, the tendency towards “the absolute development of the productive forces”, and thus to the unlimited growth of the social production in value and in volume; and, on the other hand, the limits to ultimate growth of society’s consumer power. It is this contradiction which he refers to in Theories of Surplus Value as the contradiction between production and consumption[10] [375]: “In world market crises, all the contradictions of bourgeois production erupt collectively; in particular crises (particular in their content and in extent) the eruptions are only sporadical, isolated and one-sided.

Over-production is specifically conditioned by the general law of the production of capital: to produce to the limit set by the productive forces, that is to say, to exploit the maximum amount of labour with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay” (Vol.2, p 534-535)

In this article we have seen that, while the falling rate of profit indeed plays a role in the emergence of crises of overproduction, it is neither their exclusive nor even their main cause. We will see in another article that its is also not sufficient for explaining the great stages in the evolution of the capitalist system, nor its entry into decadence, nor its tendency to engender increasingly widespread and murderous wars that have put the very existence of humanity in danger.

Engels, who was very well acquainted with the economic analyses of Marx, not least because he spent years working on the manuscripts of Volumes II and III, was quite clear about this. When in the preface to the English edition of Volume I of Capital (1886) he underlined the historic impasse of capitalism, he referred not to the fall in the rate of profit but to the contradiction which Marx continually referred to: the contradiction between the “absolute development of the productive forces” and the “limits to the ultimate consumer power of society”: “While the productive power increases in a geometric, the extension of markets proceeds at best in an arithmetic ratio. The decennial cycle of stagnation, prosperity, over-production and crisis, ever recurrent from 1825 to 1867, seems indeed to have run its course; but only to land us in the slough of despond of a permanent and chronic depression” And this “slough of despond of a permanent and chronic depression” to which he referred was none other than the warning signal of the system’s entry into decadence, an entry into decadence which would be marked by “chronic overproduction” as Engels said in the same year in the letter to Wischnewtsky. We can now understand why it was indeed the analyses of Rosa Luxemburg which were in line with those of Marx and Engels and not those of the IBRP.

C Mcl