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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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:
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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:
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.
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 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:
This new power provided the organised framework:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
In the pamphlet containing the proceedings of the conference we learn that the groups initially invited were the following:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
[1] [26] 4th International Conference of Groups of the Communist Left – Proceedings, Texts, Correspondence
[2] [27] This does not mean that we underestimate the party’s role in preparing and carrying out the revolution. It plays a vital part in the development of class consciousness, and in giving a political orientation to the class’ struggle, including on the question of its self-organisation. But this does not mean that it “organises” the class struggle, or that it takes power: that is the task of the organisation of the class as a whole, the workers’ councils.
[3] [28]. We need to make things very clear to the reader: the ICC has never “claimed” such a right. From the moment when, at the 3rd Conference, the PCInt and the CWO explicitly declared that they wanted to continue the conferences without the ICC, we never had the idea of “forcing the hand” of these organisations (as we could have done, for example, if we had abstained at the time of the vote on the supplementary criterion, since L’Eveil Internationaliste, which had abstained, was invited to the 4th). This did not prevent us, as a number of articles in this Review will attest, from making proposals to these groups for joint work when we considered it necessary, notably to take position on imperialist war.
[4] [29]. We encourage our readers to ask the IBRP for copies of this pamphlet so that they can read the whole thing
[5] [30] We should note that the PCInt accepted at the “4th Conference” something which it had obstinately rejected at the previous conferences: that there should be a statement of position summing up the points of agreement and disagreement. The reason it gave was that it didn’t want to adopt any documents in common with other groups because of the divergences it had with them. From this it would follow that for the PCInt the divergences that exist between the groups of the Communist Left are more important than those which separate communist groups from bourgeois groups.
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.
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.
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
[1] According to the official IWW history, “The origin of the expression ‘Wobbly’ is uncertain. Legend assigns it to the lingual difficulties of a Chinese restaurant keeper with whom arrangements had been made during this strike to feed members passing through his town. When he tried to ask ‘Are you IWW?’ it is said to have come out: ‘All loo eye wobble wobble?’ The same situation, but in Vancouver is given as the 1911 origin of the term by Mortimer Downing in a letter quoted in Nation, Sept. 5, 1923” (see https://www.iww.org/culture/myths/wobbly.shtml [35])
[2]. See International Review n°118 and 120.
[3]. Lenin’s preface to a pamphlet by Voinov (Lunacharsky) on the party’s attitude towards the unions (1907).
[4]. For example, Vincent St. John, one of the most important IWW leaders, who had been a miner before devoting himself to organizational work, grew disenchanted with his Wobbly activity, resigned from the organization in 1914 and headed to the New Mexico desert seeking his fortune as a prospector. Of course he never struck it rich, and even though he left the organization well before the US entered the war in April 1917, when the bourgeoisie rounded up IWW leaders on trumped up charges of disrupting the war effort in 1917, they arrested the hapless St. John in the desert.
[5]. Engels, Friedrich, “Why There Is No Large Socialist Party in America”: Engels to Sorge, December 2, 1893 in Marx and Engels: Basic writings on politics and philosophy ed. By Lewis Feuer, 1959, pp.457-458. In this letter Engels answered a question from Friedrich Adolf Sorge as to why there was no significant socialist party in the US by explaining that “American conditions involve very great and peculiar difficulties for a steady development of a workers’ party.” Among these difficulties, one of the most important was “immigration, which divides the workers into two groups: the native-born and the foreigners, and the latter into 1) the Irish, 2) the Germans, 3) the many small groups, each of which understands only itself: Czechs, Poles, Italians, Scandinavians, etc. And then the Negroes. To form a single party out of these requires quite unusually powerful incentives. Often there is a sudden violent élan, but the bourgeois need only wait passively and the dissimilar elements of the working class fall apart again.”
[6].The development of industrial capitalism, especially at the beginning of the 19th century, was accompanied by a continual decline in wages, plunging vast sectors of the working class into a condition worse than slavery. The idea that this situation could not be modified because of the competition between capitalists even affected certain socialist thinkers, who advised the workers to avoid struggling against their exploiters: Proudhon, for example, came out against workers’ strikes. Lassalle took up this idea that the laws of capitalism itself made it impossible to raise wages: he called this “the iron law of wages”. Marx always opposed these ideas, notably in the Poverty of Philosophy written against Proudhon’s theories in 1847, and again in Wages, prices, and profit, written in 1865: “the capitalist constantly [tends] to reduce wages to their physical minimum, and to extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction. The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective powers of the combatants”. This is why Marx welcomed workers’ strikes, not just as a struggle against “the encroachments of capital”, but above all as a preparation for capitalism’s overthrow: “is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation (…) By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement” (From the chapter “The struggle between capital and labour and its results”).
[7]. See our series, “The Legacy of De Leonism in Internationalism n°114, 115, 117, and 118.
[8]. The Socialist Party of America was a mass membership socialist party in the US, which rose to prominence in the early years of the 20th century, founded by regrouping a number of tendencies, including militants who had broken with the DeLeonist Socialist Labor Party. Its most famous personality was Eugene Debs. Debs was imprisoned for his opposition to World War I and ran for president on the SPA ticket from his jail cell in 1920, receiving 1 million votes.
[9]. In 2002, there were a reported 192 million firearms owned by individuals in the US. Firearms killed more than 29,700 Americans in 2002 — more than the number of US soldiers killed during the bloodiest year of the Vietnam War. Guns are the second-leading cause of death (after motor vehicle accidents) among Americans under 20 and the leading cause of death among African-American men aged 15 to 24. Physicians for Social Responsibility estimates that gun violence costs the United States $100 billion a year. In 1999 the rate of gun homicides per 100,000 population in the US was 4.08. By comparison, the same statistic for Canada was 0.54; for Switzerland 0.50; for Great Britain 0.12; for Japan 0.04.
[10]. Dubofsky, Melvyn, We shall be all: a history of the Industrial Workers of the World, Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2nd edition, 1988, p.95, p. 12.
[11]. The Haymarket affair arose out of a bomb attack – supposedly the work of an unknown anarchist – on a crowd that had gathered during a meeting held in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on 4th May 1886 as part of a campaign for the 8-hour working day.
[12]. Frederick Winslow Taylor set forward a series of principles in his 1911 monograph The Principles of Scientific Management, which essentially aimed at increasing workforce productivity by reducing industrial production to a series of easily-learned tasks which demanded no skill on the workers’ part, and would make it easier for management to impose more intensive labour on the workers.
[13]. The debate was also important in Britain, as we shall see when we come to examine the history of syndicalism in the shop-stewards’ movement.
[14]. Foster went on to become a Stalinist leader of the American Communist Party after the failure of the Russian Revolution.
[15]. Proceedings of the 1902 WFM Convention, p. 8, cited in Dubofsky, p.69.
[16]. ALU Journal, January 7, 1904, p. 2 cited in Dubofsky, p.72.
[17]. Official version of the January 1905 conference and manifesto by Clarence Smith in IWW, Proceedings of the First Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, New York: 1905, pp. 83-84.
[18]. Albert Parsons was one of the militants arrested after the Haymarket massacre, convicted on the basis of trumped-up evidence, and executed.
[19]. Dubofsky, p.95.
[20]. Conlin, Joseph Robert, Bread and roses too: studies of the Wobblies, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1969, p. 9, quoting from William E. Walling, “Industrial or Revolutionary Unionist,” New Review n°1 (Jan. 11, 1913, p.46, and Walling, “Industrialism versus Syndicalism,” International Socialist Review n°14 (August 1913), p. 666.
[21]. Canon, James, The IWW p.20-21 cited Dubofsky p. 143
[22]. Available online at Jim Crutchfield’s IWW page https://www.workerseducation.org/crutch/constitution/constitutions.html [36]
[23]. Conlin, Bread and roses too… p. 3.
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 was born from a split from the ICC in 1979, and since then has lost no opportunity to support every bourgeois cause:
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.
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]
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 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.
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).
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
[1] [60]. See International Review n° 119 "Resolution on the class struggle [61]".
[2] [62]. An assessment of the maturation of minorities within the international proletariat and of our activity in relation to them can be found in the balance sheet of the ICC's16th Congress [63], published in the International Review n°122.
[3] [64]. See "Lutte de classe au Salvador", Communisme no.12, February 1981. The basic argument is hardly any different from that of the Trotskyists. The latter too justify their support for bourgeois struggles by talking of "revolutionary mass movements" hidden behind the "facade" of "bourgeois leaders".
[4] [65] Sendero Luminoso, a Peruvian guerrilla organisation of the Maoist variety, which aimed to conquer the towns by encircling them from the countryside, where they recruited their guerrilla fighters. In fact it was the population, of the countryside in particular, who paid the price of the regime of terror inflicted on them by the two bourgeois camps, both the government and the Shining Path.
[5] [66] See "Solidarité internationale avec le prolétariat et ses prisonniers au Pérou" in Communisme n° 25, November 1986 and "L'éternel pacifisme euroraciste de la social-démocratie (le CCI dans sa version mexicaine)" in Communisme n° 43, May 1996. In its publications, the GCI tries to justify its defence of political prisoners in Peru: "Situating yourself clearly on the side of the proletariat by confronting and denouncing the terrorism of the state has nothing to do with critical support for this or that formal organisation". Apart from the subterfuge involved in referring to the "formal organisation" (an unimportant covering) of a bourgeois force that has the means to realise its actions, this is an argument that has been used a thousand times by the "anti-fascists". In struggles between bourgeois factions, the one in opposition or clandestinity tends to use elements of proletarian origin as cannon fodder. When they fall into the hands of the rival faction, these elements are cruelly tortured by the police. However this is no reason to defend the cause in whose service they were recruited, which is foreign to the proletariat, under the pretext of "solidarity" with political prisoners. In imperialist wars the soldiers serve as cannon fodder for similar gangs. This does not mean that the struggle against the war consists in supporting one of the gangs in the name of "defending the soldiers". It rather consists in defending proletarian internationalism against each and every gang.
[6] [67]. A quotation from a newspaper reproduced by the GCI: "By tracing the blood lines that constitute the Arch, it is possible to regroup the hamlets belonging to the same line but dispersed over different municipalities and administrative zones". The programme for the Co-ordination of the KabilyianArch (2,000 delegates) is national and democratic although spiced up with a few demands to attract workers: "In the midst of the confusion they demand the immediate withdrawal of the police, that the state take charge of the victims of repression, that the charges against the demonstrators be dropped, the recognition of Tamazight as the official language, as well as freedom and justice, the adoption of an emergency plan for Kabilia and an indemnity payment to all the unemployed ." ("Prolétaires de tous les pays, La lutte des classes en Algérie est la nôtre!" Communisme n°52).
[7] [68] See the series of articles on this movement of our class beginning in International Review n°120.
[8] [69] As was to be shown by the electoral victory of the new president Evo Morales, who enlarged the ranks of the "Latin left" (Castro, Lula, Chavez). These left-wing presidents in Latin America not only continue the attacks against the working class like any right-wing government but are also able to "sell" it illusions.
[9] [70] This is corroborated by the affirmation of the GCI in an article on "proletarian autonomy in Argentina" which says that the organisations of the May Mothers contributed to the self-organisation of the proletariat!
[10] [71] See our article in International Review n° 109 on the social revolt of 2001 in [72]Argentina [72].
[11] [73]. See the article "The mystification of the piqueteros [74]" written by an Argentine group, the NCI, that we published in International Review n° 119.
[12] [75]. The affirmation that "transportation is capital's Achilles heel" is no more than an ingenious sociological analysis that serves to hide the GCI's wish to trap the proletariat in a syndicalist vision of the struggle. In capitalism's ascendant period (19th century), the proletariat's strength, organised in its unions, lay in its capacity to paralyse a part of capitalist production. Such conditions no longer exist today as decadent capitalism is characterised by a firm solidarity of the whole capitalist class, behind the state, against the proletariat. Economic pressure on a particular capitalist or even on a group of them can have no more than a very limited effect. This is why this kind of struggle, impregnated with the unionist methods of the 19th century today plays a role for the capitalist class. But this in no way means that the workers are no longer able to constitute a force against capital. Using different methods of struggle, they still can do so, as the history of this century has shown. This means uniting by developing a firm solidarity between all sectors of the proletariat, breaking down divisions, be they sectoral, of the work place, regional, ethnic or national. It means organising as an autonomous class in society for the defence of its own demands against capitalist exploitation and consciously taking on the confrontation with the capitalist state. It is only in this way that the proletariat can really develop its strength and can build a balance of forces against the state.
[13] [76] . In ancient Rome, the slogan of the proletarians that was popularised by the Christians was the sharing out of wealth. But they posed the problem in this way, because they played no part in the production of wealth which was entirely the fruit of slave labour: "the Roman proletarians did not live by working, but from the alms which the government doled out. So the demand of the Christians for collective property did not relate to the means of production, but the means of consumption. They did not demand that the land, the workshops and the instruments of work should become collective property, but only that everything should be divided up among them, houses, clothing, food and finished products most necessary to life. The Christian communists took good care not to enquire into the origin of these riches. The work of production always fell upon the slaves" (Rosa Luxemburg, Socialism and the churches [77], 1905)
[14] [78] The prime reason for the split was thus not the divergences we have mentioned – which were real enough – but the inability to defend them responsibly. Disagreement is normal enough in a revolutionary organisation, and if they are debated with rigour and patience they are a source of strength and clarification. But the main protagonists of the Tendency at the time adopted a whole series of anti-organisational attitudes and behaviour (personal ambition, beefing about the elected central organs, slandering comrades, resentments, etc...), which were in part the fruit of leftist conceptions that they had not entirely overcome, and this got in the way of the discussion. For more information, see the text published in International Review n°109 on "The question of organisational functioning in the ICC".
[15] [79]. Which gave rise to two new groups, "Mouvement communiste" and the "Fraction communiste internationale"; the latter’s existence proved ephemeral.
[16] [80]. The ICC has already criticised the GCI’s anarchist version of historical materialism in the series "Understanding capitalism’s decadence", in International Review n°48-50.
[17] [81]. See, in particular, the GCI’s article "Une fois de plus... le CCI du côté des flics contre les révolutionnaires!" in Communisme n°26, February 1988, and our reply "Les délires paranoïaques de l’anarcho-bordiguisme punk", in Révolution Internationale n°168, May 1988.
[18] [82]. See our article "The parasites of the GCI call for the death of our comrades in Mexico", published in all the ICC’s territorial press and notably in World Revolution n°200, December 1996/January 1997 The call in question can be found in the GCI’s article "L’éternel pacifisme euroraciste de la social-démocratie (le CCI dans sa version mexicaine)" in Communisme n°43, May 1996.
[19] [83]. See "Solidarity with our threatened militants [84]", published in the ICC’s territorial press and notably in World Revolution n°282, March 2005.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/france
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/argentina
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/199311/1570/study-capital-and-foundations-communism
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/199411/1327/anarchism-or-communism
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/395/communism-agenda-history
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1406/socialism
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1407/marxism
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1420/capitalism
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1421/karl-marx
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1427/communism
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1429/marx
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1433/class
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1444/international-review
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1448/society
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1450/proletariat
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1463/revolution
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/utopians
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/communist-league
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/first-international
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_conference_communist_left#_ftn1
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_conference_communist_left#_ftn2
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_conference_communist_left#_ftn3
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_conference_communist_left#_ftn4
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_conference_communist_left#_ftn5
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_conference_communist_left#_ftnref1
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_conference_communist_left#_ftnref2
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_conference_communist_left#_ftnref3
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_conference_communist_left#_ftnref4
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_conference_communist_left#_ftnref5
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/315/1970s-and-international-conferences-communist-left
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/battaglia-comunista
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-workers-organisation
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/maoism
[35] https://www.iww.org/culture/myths/wobbly.shtml
[36] https://www.workerseducation.org/crutch/constitution/constitutions.html
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/1848/mexico
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/271/revolutionary-syndicalism
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/19/union-question
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn1
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn2
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn3
[44] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn4
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn5
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn6
[47] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn7
[48] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn8
[49] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn9
[50] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn10
[51] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn11
[52] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn12
[53] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn13
[54] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn14
[55] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn15
[56] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn16
[57] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn17
[58] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn18
[59] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftn19
[60] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref1
[61] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_turnpoint.html
[62] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref2
[63] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/122_16congress
[64] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref3
[65] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref4
[66] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref5
[67] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref6
[68] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref7
[69] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref8
[70] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref9
[71] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref10
[72] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/109_argentina.html
[73] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref11
[74] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_piqueteros.html
[75] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref12
[76] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref13
[77] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1905/misc/socialism-churches.htm
[78] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref14
[79] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref15
[80] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref16
[81] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref17
[82] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref18
[83] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/124_gci_icg#_ftnref19
[84] https://en.internationalism.org/worldrevolution/200503/1180/solidarity-our-threatened-militants
[85] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/internationalist-communist-group-icggci