"1967 left us with the collapse of the pound sterling, and 1968 brings us Johnson's measures (...) the decomposition of the capitalist system, which for a few years, was hidden under the orgy of "progress" that followed the Second World War, now stands revealed (...)
We are not prophets, and we do not claim to know when or how events will unfold in the future. But as far as the process that capitalism is today engaged in is concerned, we are convinced that it cannot be stopped by reforms, devaluations, or any other kind of capitalist economic measures, and that it is heading straight for a crisis." (Internacionalismo, Venezuela, January 1968)
Twenty years ago, we had to convince people that existed. Today, we only have to explain it, and to demonstrate its historic implications.
"The first symptoms appeared clearly in 1967: the annual growth in world production fell to its lowest level in 10 years. In the OECD countries, unemployment and inflation underwent a slow but definite acceleration. The growth in investment slowed down constantly between 1965 and 1967. In 1967, there were officially 7 million unemployed in the OECD countries, and GNP has growing at the rate of 3.5%. These figures seem negligible compared to the level of the crisis today, but they mark nonetheless the end of post-war "prosperity” (…). At its deepest in 1970, the second recession was much worse than that of 1967.It has deeper in the countries of the OECD, and in the rest of the world economy, it lasted longer. It confirmed that the 1967 recession was not a "German" accident, but heralded a new period of economic instability." (see our pamphlet, The Decadence of Capitalism)
It took twenty years -- a generation -- for the first signs of the crisis begun after the period of reconstruction following World War II, to appear openly as the expression of a general and insurmountable crisis of a mode of production spurred on by the quest for profit and the never-slaked thirst for markets, and based on the exploitation of man by man.
From a worldwide, historical standpoint, whether it be in the so-called "communist" countries, in the Eastern bloc or China, in the "developed" countries or those latterly described as "developing", the balance-sheet of these twenty years of crisis is catastrophic, and the perspective for the years to come is still more so.
First of all, catastrophic in the absolute. Through the misery that throughout the planet has become the daily lot of the immense majority of the world's population. A situation where the future will not be the development of the hardly or non-industrialised countries catching up with the developed ones, but rather the appearance of the characteristics of under-development in the very heart of the industrialised metropoles what the sociologists call the "4th world".
Catastrophic again in relative terms, when we consider the gigantic waste of the present level of scientific and technical knowledge, and of all the material wealth produced by labour; all that which could provide a powerful lever for humanity's emancipation, but which in the straitjacket of the world crisis is systematically orientated towards and transformed into a force of destruction.
The extreme depth and gravity of this crisis are all the more obvious, in that all the economic policies, over the last twenty years, intended to confront it, have without exception been lamentable failures, and that the possibility of escaping the swamp into which the world economy, East and West, is sinking ever deeper, appears today as completely illusory.
In fact this crisis raises fundamental questions which go to the heart of society's organisation and structure, of the relationships within it that condition the future of world society.
On the eve of a new, massive, and inevitable worldwide recession, the anniversary of these twenty years of crisis gives us the opportunity to take an overall look at the world economy's fundamental tendencies and its lack of any perspective other than a still faster degeneration within the framework of' the economic laws dominating the planet.
This retrospective of twenty years of crisis cannot but pass in review all the illusions and myths which at one moment or another over the years have been put out either through official governmental channels, or through left-wing contestation.
The last twenty years are both the history of the uneven progression of the crisis itself, and of the collapse of the illusions that have marked its passage. Not a stone has been left unturned in the search for a spell to exorcise the demon.
In the first half of the 70's, the "oil crisis", the "energy crisis", and the "scarcity" of raw materials in general were made responsible for the recession of 1974 and the never-surmounted financial crisis. If we are to believe all the experts and world leaders, the "scarcity" of raw materials "which caused their prices to rise" was responsible for the upheavals in the economy. The world economy was in a sense the victim of a "natural" problem, outside and independent of its own fundamental nature.
And yet, a few years later in 1978-79, when the world economy's upheavals had become convulsions, far from a scarcity of raw materials leading to an increase in their price, we saw a generalised over-production, especially of petrol, leading to a collapse in prices.
First of all, the crisis hit directly the raw materials sector (in which we include farm produce), then it was the turn of semi-finished products like steel, textiles, oil derivatives and petro-chemicals, until it struck at the very heart of industrial production: the car industry: shipbuilding, aerospace, as well as the manufacture of day-ta-day consumer goods.
This progression illustrates the stage reached today by world capitalism's overall crisis. But the real nature of the crisis is flagrantly, and caricaturally expressed in the production of raw materials and especially in agriculture: a clear case of crisis of over-production creating scarcity. At the same time as nations all over the world are waging an agricultural trade war of unprecedented bitterness, there is a staggering increase in famine and malnutrition. Thus:
“World agricultural production is adequate to ensure to each individual more than 1000 calories per day, ie 500 more than is required for the health of an average adult, while from 1969 to 1983 agricultural production has grown faster (40%) than the world population (35%).” (L'Insecurite Alimentaire dans le Monde, October 1987, p.4)
This, as the World Bank's latest report tells us, does not prevent malnutrition hitting 700 million people; this has nothing to do with productive capacity, since:
“Hunger persists even in those countries that have reached nutritional independence. In these countries, famine simply hits those who lack sufficient income to have access to the market.” (World Bank: Report on Poverty and Hunger, 1987).
Moreover, although the Western ruling classes complained loudly at the time about this increase in the cost of supplying raw materials and energy which was "strangling" them, they never said a word about the fate of these masses of dollars flowing into the coffers of the raw material producing countries. In fact, these dollars rapidly returned to the pockets of those who spent them, since they increased the raw material producers' importing power. Better still, what the raw material producing countries bought in the 1970's was for the most part neither means of consumption, nor means of production, but weapons.
"Between 1971 and 1985, the Third World bought $286 billion worth of armaments, equivalent to 30% of the debt accumulated by the countries of the Southern Hemisphere during the same period (…). The Middle East accounted for almost half of these exports (…). Between 1970 and 1977, the market grew on average by 13% p.a." (Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1988: "Le grand bazar aux canons dans le tiers monde")
The Middle East's advanced state of barbarism today, ravaged by war and crisis, is a perfect illustration of the close relationship between war and crisis; recent history shows us clearly how the crisis of overproduction is transformed into sheer destruction.
In every lie, there is an element of truth, in every illusion or myth an element of reality; otherwise, neither would be able to find an echo in living brains. This is equally true of the “explanations” of the crisis that have marked the last twenty years.
Firstly, the "oil crisis" had a semblance of reality. The abrupt rise in the price of energy, whose relatively low cost up till then had been one of the conditions of the reconstruction period, was, from 1974 onwards, a bad blow for the Western European economies. Unlike investment costs, which are amortised over a long period, raw material costs are reflected immediately in a commodity's price. The effects of the rise of energy and raw materials prices was thus immediate: greater weakness in relation to foreign competition, and a drop in the rate of profit. Contrary to what was said at the time, these increases were not due to any natural scarcity of raw materials; the only "scarcities" at the time were those organised with a view to speculating on the rise in prices. By contrast, the real reason for the abrupt rise in the cost of energy and raw materials in general was the brutal fall in the dollar since 1971. Given that all sales were measured in dollars, when the producing countries increased the price of oil, they were doing no more than pass on the fall in the value of the dollar.
Here, we are getting to the bottom of the question. The dollar's fall, as a direct result of the Americans' decision in 1973 to let the dollar float, so as to make the US economy more competitive, enshrined the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement signed in 1944.
"These agreements were designed, once peace was restored, to reconstruct the international monetary system which had fallen apart since the beginning of the 1930’s … They were aimed precisely at preventing a return to the disastrous experience of the "competitive” devaluations and “floating exchange rates" of the inter-war period". (Bilan economigue et social 1987, Le Monde)
In fact, the dollar's "competitive" fall return to the economic conditions of the pre-war crisis.
In a new period of acute, the world economy came face to face with the same that had caused the Second World War, but this time centupled.
This situation was prefaced, in 1967, by the appearance of the US trade deficit.
In itself, this deficit, though minor compared to today's, marked the end of the reconstruction period. It meant that the now rebuilt European and Asian economies were no longer simply markets, and would moreover be taking an increasingly large part in a world market correspondingly reduced.
Since then, the one aim of every economic policy has been to compensate for the collapse of the economic possibilities offered by the period of reconstruction.
From an economic point of view, the period from 1967 to 1981 is nothing other than the history of the massive and repeated use of Keynesian recipes of artificial support for the economy. Let us recapitulate briefly what these Keynesian recipes consist of:
“Keynes main contribution to bourgeois political economy can be summed up in his recognition, during the slough of the 1929 crisis, of the inanity of the great religious principle of bourgeois economic science invented by the French economist J.B. Say in the 19th century. According to this principle, capitalism can't really experience a markets crisis because “all production is at the same time a market". The Keynesian solution was for the state to create sufficient national demand to absorb its production, and if the markets were also saturated, Keynes proposed that should become the buyer of the mass of products, which it would pay for in paper money printed by itself. Since everyone needed this money, no one would protest that it represented nothing but paper.” (The Decadence of Capitalism, pV)
During this period:
“First, the US became the “locomotive” of the world economy by artificially providing a market for the rest of its bloc through enormous trade deficits. Between 1976-1980, the US bought commodities overseas to a value of $100 billion more than it sold. Only the US – because the dollar is the world's reserve currency -- could run up such a trade deficit without being forced into a massive currency devaluation. Second, the US flooded the world with dollars in an unprecedented credit expansion in the shape of loans to the backward countries and to the Russian bloc (…). This mass of paper values temporarily created an effective demand which allowed world trade to pick up." (International Review, no. 26)
Germany is another example from this period of illusion:
“Germany set itself to play the “locomotive”, yielding to the pressure, it must be said, of the other countries (…) The increase in government spending has nearly doubled, growing 1.7 times the growth in the national product, to the point where half of the latter is centralised by the public sector (…). Thus the growth in the public sector debt has been explosive. This indebtedness, stable at around 18% of GNP at the beginning of the 70's, passed abruptly to 25% in 1975, then to 35% this year [1981]; its share has thus doubled in 10 years. It has reached a level unheard of since the bankruptcy of the inter-war years (…) The German, who have long memories, are again haunted by the spectre of wheelbarrows filled with the banknotes of the Weimar Republic!” (International Review, no 31)
In 1979, the dollar crisis and the threat of general financial collapse gave the signal for a new change in world economic policy under cover of the ideology of "liberalisation", which in 1982 ended in the deepest economic recession since the years preceding World War II.
All those over-used explanations, in the 1970's, of the crisis' "natural" causes explained nothing at all. They were quickly forgotten, and nothing more was heard of them. The world crisis, on the other hand, inexorably advanced, growing deeper and more widespread, affecting the very heart of the industrial metropoles. It had to be explained; or at least, an ideological justification had to be found for the painful "therapies" that began to be applied to the working population from 1979 onwards. Unemployment abruptly doubled, wages were frozen, factories and offices were dominated by the prison-warden mentality. Everywhere, workers were expected to transform themselves into soldiers of "the Company" and "the Nation” for an economic war in which they had everything to lose and nothing to win. And where indeed, they lost plenty.
What a relief it was when the pernicious disease eating away economy were at last revealed, and cleared away.
“Society” was suffering from too much “state interference”. It was wasting languorously; away in its “welfare habits”, which had gone along with what were christened for the occasion the "golden 30 years", ie the whole period of post-war reconstruction (1945-75) (sic). This "excess of state intervention" had finally waken; the bounce out of production, destroyed the "spirit of enterprise", and created huge deficits in state treasuries, deficits which themselves were a burden on the productive apparatus.
Fundamentally -- if such simplistic conceptions have a foundation -- this state "interventionism" prevented the world economy's "natural laws" from working and playing their "self-regulating" role. All at once, the economists had put their finger on the causes of the crisis, and their joy was all the greater in that these revelations brought with them at the same time the remedies and solutions to be adopted. The euphoria was still greater, and the relief even more intense, in that the treatments to be administered in massive doses to the working class the world over during the 1980s had a flavour which the bourgeoisie found wholly to its taste: lay-offs, wage cuts, destruction of all kinds of social insurance, taking state employees as scapegoats, and finally strangling the third world and leaving it to die.
But just as the supposed scarcity of raw materials quickly revealed itself as being in fact their over-production, so this new "less state" rapidly appeared as being "more state". If only through its intervention in every aspect of social life, beginning with the repression of every expression of revolt provoked by this policy. Or again in orienting a growing share of productive, scientific, and technological effort towards arms production, and of productive investment towards the stock exchange.
Nonetheless, in 1984-85, the myth of a recovery in the American economy made a lot of noise. Reagan's recipes seemed to be having a good effect on the health of the economy. All the indices of inflation and production had regained their health. Throughout the world, financiers, industrialists, and statesmen were dazzled by this "revolution", and everyone henceforth wanted to "liberalise", even in .... Russia and China.
As we know, the adventure failed in the spectacular stock exchange crash of October 1987, the threat of a major recession and renewed inflation.
In a few years, budget and trade deficits, far from declining, reached new and giddy heights, especially in the soil where this ideology had first taken root:· the United States. This is the balance-sheet that we drew as early as 1986:
"American growth is built on credit. In 5 years, the USA, which has the principal creditor in the world, has become the principal debtor, the most indebted country in the world. The cumulative debt of the USA, internal and external has reached the prodigious sum of $8000 billion, when it was "only" $4600 billion in 1980, and $1600 billion in 1970. That means that in order to play its role as locomotive of the world economy, US capital, in the space of 5 years, has accumulated as much debt as in the previous 10 years." (International Review, no 48)
Instead of gaining a new lease on life, industrial production has never been so anaemic, only to end up by going into retreat, in the US once again. The "spirit of enterprise" and "creation", which was supposed to take to its wings once liberated from its constraints, has instead fled en masse from the sphere of industrial production, to take refuge in that of financial and stock market speculation -- the only aspect of capital whose activity in recent years has been feverish, and whose lamentable end is common knowledge.
This is true for all the great industrial powers, and especially for the most powerful of them, the United States. The fall in unemployment has been cited as one of the greatest gains of this "liberal revolution" in the US: in fact, one million jobs have disappeared definitively in the industrial sectors, more than 30 million people now live below the official "poverty level ", and the only jobs created have been part-time jobs in the service sector:
“Whereas in the 1970’s, one new job in five has paid at less than $7000 a year, from 1979 onwards this has the case for six new jobs in ten (… ). Between 1979 and 1984, the number of workers earning a wage equal to or above the national average fell by 1.8 million... The number of workers earning less rose by 9.9 million." (Le Monde Dossiers et Documents, Bilan Eronomigue et Social, 1987)
As for the nations of the so-called "third world" which were supposed to been stimulated by the "liberation" of the natural laws of the market and free competition, in the last few years they have reached the bottom of the abyss. Far from being "liberated" 'from the hegemony of the great industrial powers, they have never been so dependent on them, crushed by the weight of debts and interest payments that doubled with the value of the dollar, at the same time as raw material exports -- their main source of revenue and which the world productive apparatus could no longer absorb -- collapsed. In November 1987, Mexico, to take only one example, devalued its currency by 50%.
As in the case of the oil crisis, there is an element of truth in the "liberal critique" of "excessive state intervention". Not in the analysis -- far from it -- and still less in the solutions, but in the plain observation: state intervention in every domain of economic and social life, from being a vital support for economic activity pushed to bursting point by its own internal forces, has precipitated the crisis of over-production it has supposed to avoid.
.At the beginning of the 1980's, we analysed this changed situation, emphasizing its major characteristics which involved not merely a quantitative development of the crisis, but also a qualitative change in the historic conditions of its development.
Among these characteristics, we distinguished one essential aspect: contrary to the pre-war years of crisis, when Keynesian measures of the “new Deal" type were taken once the worst of the crisis held passed, this "kind of measure to support the economy is no longer before but irremediably behind us, while the worst of the crisis is still to come.
The facts of economic life since the beginning of the 1980's have amply confirmed this observation. Moreover, the accelerated concentration of the activity of different states in the military domain, and in the field of arms production, world strategy, increased military interventions and presence, whose "social" facade no longer fools anybody and tends to disappear altogether, only emphasizes the seriousness of the present historic situation.
Our too brief review of what has passed for analysis over the last twenty years would not be complete were we not to mention here the famous "third industrial revolution". In the watershed between two historic phases of development, these economic "hiccups" were supposedly nothing other than the inevitable and necessary crisis in the passage from one epoch to another. What has not been said -- and imposed -- in the name of this famous "technological revolution"? Redundancies for a start. The main point of this historical "analysis" was entirely contained in the idea that the capitalist crisis, which no one could deny any longer – embarrassing enough in itself -- was in fact only a crisis of growth. Beyond this difficult patch, blue skies were supposedly shining. But only on condition, of course, that we submitted to the painful, but necessary imperatives of the present birth. This "revolutionary" analysis also had the advantage of depicting all revolt against the measures involved in this "revolution" (redundancies, restructuring, etc), as "retrograde", or even "reactionary".
Unfortunately for the ideologues who defended these theses, the "third industrial revolution" explanation of the crisis has today disappeared without trace, going the same way as the "oil crisis" or the "liberal revolution": it has collapsed in the face of stubborn fact.
Quite apart from the social and industrial involution that has marked this period, contrary to all the "industrial revolutions" which have always been accompanied by great advances in production, it is necessary to emphasize here that all the advanced technological and scientific techniques of the last two decades have been spurred on by and applied in the military field of armaments production; the civilian spin-off has always remained extremely limited.
“The world devotes to military greater than the whole of world in 1900 (…) Moreover, the military field absorbs two thirds of world spending on research and development". (La Documentation Francaise, no 4456, p. 13, "Armement et desarmement a l’age nucleaire”)
If the economic crisis is difficult to understand it is because of its nature. This is the first time in its history that humanity has been subjected to a crisis of generalised over-production. All the crises of preceding modes of production -- slavery, feudalism, etc were expressed as widespread crises of under-production. This is expressed by Marx in the Communist Manifesto:
"In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity: the. epidemic of over-production". (Selected Works, Lawrence & Wishart, p.40)
And Karl Marx during his lifetime had never seen anything but crises of over-production limited in both time and space. Limited to particular sectors, and preceded by long periods of capitalist expansion throughout the world.
Not only is the crisis of over-production more incomprehensible a priori because of its apparent absurdity, the fact that the economic crisis is one of over-production has for years made possible all kinds of manipulation to push back the day of reckoning. In a crisis of under-production, there is no alternative: when there's not enough, there's not enough. The crisis of over-production, which is too much production in relation not to human needs, but to the world market's ability to absorb it, can be put off and hidden by a whole series of financial and commercial manipulations; recent economic history is nothing other than the history of these manipulations. But these manipulations, in which today's states are past masters, only feed the crisis of over-production still further, and finally make it even worse. Inevitably, the moment must arrive when the crisis must take its course, because the whole structure of society threatens to collapse under its weight.
Our own epoch is nothing less than the day of reckoning. And, leaving the last twenty years aside, the present crisis is nothing but the prolongations and the conclusion of a whole historic period that began at the turn of the century with the First World War. A period where:
“Between 1914 and 1980 lie 10 years of world war (without counting the permanent local wars), 39 years of depression (1918-22. 1929-39. 1945-50, 1967-87), ie a total of of 49 years of war and crisis as against only 24 years of reconstruction (1922-29 and 1950-67). And the cycle of the crisis is not yet finished! …" (International Review, no 48)
There are not any number of ways for the crisis to run its course. Either it must end in an immense destruction, as is the case in wars, or by a radical transformation in worldwide relations of production, there the aims, means, and conditions of productive activity will at last be freed from the straitjackets of the market, profit, exploitation and the division of labour between manual and intellectual work.
Nothing could be more useless in the face of the worldwide economic crisis than the injunctions of
all the national ruling classes, wanting to transform the working population into soldiers of the economy, to make them clash in an economic war where whole generations will be sacrificed, and which in the end -- as the tragic experience of two world wars proves can only lead to outright war.
Prenat
The 'official' commentators on history and the disappointed, nostalgic figureheads of the glory days of the student movement, in celebrating the 20th anniversary of May 68, are agreed on one point: the 'revolutionary dreams' of 68 were no more than dreams. The reality of the 20 years that separate us from the social explosion of May 68 have amply confirmed the utopian character of the idea of the communist revolution. Far from having ripened, the conditions for such a revolution have moved further and further away.
However, if you throw away the opaque glasses of ruling class ideology you can see that the real dynamic of these two decades expresses a maturation, unprecedented in history, of the conditions for a world communist revolution.
It is impossible here to deal in detail with these 20 years of class struggle, which are particularly rich in lessons. We will simply attempt to answer two questions: what was the significance of May? Have the conditions for a world communist revolution developed since then?
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Even though they took place in France, the events of Spring 68 had an international significance both in their roots and in their consequences. It was on a world scale that the relations between classes began to go through a profound change. These events simply concretised in an obvious manner a process that was unfolding on the scale of the planet, and it’s at this level that they have to be approached.
The mass strike in 68 in France, like nearly all the major workers’ strikes this century, was at the beginning totally spontaneous: it was not the unions which unleashed the movement, on the contrary. At the beginning they tried with all the means at their disposal to stop the growing mobilization.
On the immediate level, this mobilization was considerably amplified by the will to respond to the brutal repression with which the state dealt with the student demonstrations. Against this repression, on May 13, Paris saw one of the biggest demonstrations in its history. Then, in a few days, in hundreds of thousands, in all the towns in France, all sectors of the working class entered into struggle. The strike movement was the expression of the profound discontent accumulated throughout the working class. 10 million workers paralyzed the productive apparatus of French capital. The habitual arrogance of the ruling class give way to surprise and disarray in the face of this demonstration of strength by a proletariat which it believed had been definitively defeated and subjugated.
After having suffered the bloody defeat of the workers’ insurrections which took place at the end of the First World War; after living through the triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia; after being stricken, in the 30s, by the effects of an economic depression without having the means to respond to it; after having gone through a second world war whose horrors and barbarism had been greater than anything it could have foreseen; after being subjected to 20 years of economic reconstruction founded on the most frightful robotisation and atomization of social life; after having spent nearly 40 years under the quasi-military control of the Stalinist, fascist or democratic parties; after having heard for years that it was becoming ‘bourgeoisified’: in sum, after decades of defeat, submission and disorientation, in May 68 the working class returned by the front door onto the scene of history.
While the student agitation which had been developing in France since the beginning of the spring had already changed the social atmosphere in the country, with the repeated confrontations with the forces of the state at the barricades, behind which there were not just students; while the first strikes (Sud-Aviation, Renault-Clear) had already taken place, presaging the coming storm, the massive entry into the struggle by the working class changed everything. The exploited class raised its head and this shook the social order to its very foundations.
‘Action committees’ in factories and neighborhoods, struggle committees and workers’ groups were formed all over the place, bringing together the most combative elements, those who were seeking to understand what was happening and to regroup independently of the union structures. Real communist ideas were once again given the right of entry.
However, the working class, which was certainly the first to be surprised by its very strength, was not, as a whole, ready to play for keeps in a revolutionary attempt. Far from it. It was merely making its first new steps, without experience and full of illusions.
The bourgeoisie, getting over its surprise, didn’t stand around with its hands folded. Putting into effect an unwavering cooperation between all its political sectors, from the right to the extreme left, from the forces of police repression to the union structures, it manage to regain control of the situation. There were the much-vaunted economic concessions granted to the accompaniment of calls for a return to work after the ‘victory of the Grenelle accords.’ There was the announcement of elections with the hardly-concealed aim of diverting the struggle from the terrain of the streets to the terrain of the polling booths. But above all there was the habitual combination of police repression with the sabotage of the struggle from the inside by the unions and the left forces of capital. From the beginning the unions oriented the workers towards the occupation of the factories, but this quickly showed itself to be a way of imprisoning the workers and isolating them from each other, under the pretext of ‘protesting the tools of labour from the student provocateurs.’ Throughout the movement, the unions applied themselves to keeping up this fragmentation and imprisonment of the workers’ forces. There were many direct clashes between the workers and the representatives of the unions, but the latter were ready to do anything to avoid losing all credibility. After the signing of the ‘Grenelle accords’, George Seguy, the main union leader, went to Renault Billancourt to get them accepted and to win a vote for a return to work but found himself being disowned by the general assembly.
It took all the tricks in the union’s book to finally get a return to work. Two concrete examples summarise very well the union’s efforts to ‘restore order’: in the first, the unions called for a return to work in the different rail and transport depots, lying that other depots had already gone back; in the second, at Sochaux, the biggest car factory in France, relatively isolated in the east of the country, when there were violent confrontations provoked by police charges aimed at reclaiming the factories (two workers were killed by police), the CGT materially sabotaged the organization of resistance in the factory, once again so as ‘not to give in to provocation.’
Many workers went back with anger in their hearts. Many union cards were torn up. The ‘serious’ newspapers eulogized the unions’ sense of responsibility. The bourgeoisie had managed to re-established order. Its order.
But the events of 1968 had irreversibly transformed the historical situation. 10 million workers, at the heart of the most industrialised are of the world, d loudly slammed shut a door of history: the door of nearly 40 years of triumphant counter-revolution. A new historic period had begun.
Today the bourgeoisie no longer talks about 68 with the same hatred it inculcated into its police forces at the barricades or at Sochaux. The media today often talks in a kindly tone about the utopian hopes of the young people at that time. May 68 was a beautiful dream, but it wasn’t realizable. Because capitalism, of course, is eternal. It’s true that in May 68 the question of revolution once again became, for millions of people, an object of debate and reflection. It’s true that for some students, ‘the revolution’ was on the immediate agenda. They wanted everything, now. And that really was a utopia.
But the utopia wasn’t in the general idea of the necessity and possibility of the revolution – as the bourgeoisie claims – but in the illusion of believing, 20 years ago, that it was immediately realizable.
First a remark. For those students who did talk about ‘the revolution’ (a small minority, contrary to what certain legends would have us believe), the world revolution often didn’t mean very much. Before 68 in France, as in most countries, there had already ben student agitation. Many students were interested in the national liberation struggles in the less developed countries (because they thought nothing could come out of the ‘bourgeoisified’ proletariat in the industrialised countries); Che Guevara was the new idol; they often believed in the ‘socialism’ or ‘working class’ nature of the regimes in the east with some preferring China, others Cuba, others Albania…and when the idea of revolution wasn’t identified with Stalinist-typed state capitalism, it got lost in an artistic vagueness, throwing in schemes for self-management and the utopias of pre-marxist socialists; the stupidities of a Marcuse on the disappearance of the working class and the revolutionary nature of strata like the students enjoyed wide success.
Despite all this, despite all the confusions of the university milieu, reality posed the question of a revolutionary perspective. The forceful return of the proletariat onto the social scene, the fact that the class had shown in practice its capacity to seize hold of the whole productive apparatus of society, the fact that the arrogant rule of the dominant class suddenly lost its eternal, immutable, inevitable appearance – all this meant that the question of revolution was once again being raised in people’s minds, even if it couldn’t be realized straight away.
“…on closer examination, it will always be found that the problem itself only arises when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.” (Marx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy).
A new development of the conditions for revolution was “in the process of formation” in 68. This same proletariat which at several moments in history had been able to launch revolutionary assaults on this society of exploitation had come back, was once again preparing itself for new battles. But it was just at the beginning of the process.
Lenin defined the conditions of a revolutionary situation by saying, in essence, that it was necessary that ‘those on top can’t rule as before’ and ‘those on the bottom can’t go on living as before.’ A social revolution implies a total overturning of the existing social relations in order to establish new ones. This requires revolutionary will on the part of the masses but (contrary to what anarchism claims) also an ‘objective’ weakening of the conditions for the maintenance of the ruling class’ power. This power has its foundations, in the last instance, in the capacity of the ruling class to ensure the functioning of the mode of production and thus the material subsistence of society. Thus there can be no real weakening of the established order without an economic crisis, whether this crisis takes on a ‘pure’ form or the ‘disguised’ form of war.
The economic crisis is also a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition for the development of the revolutionary will of the working class. By aggravating its conditions of existence, the crisis pushes the exploited class to react and to unite on a world scale.
To these ‘objective’ conditions, is independent of the revolutionary class, must obviously be added those factors which measure the depth and extent of revolutionary will and consciousness within the class: disengagement from the grip of ruling class ideology, assimilation of its own historic experience, self-confidence, reappropriation of its historic programme.
In 1968 these conditions began to come together, but this development was very far from complete.
On the economic level, capitalism had only just come out of the period of relative prosperity due to the reconstruction. The recession of 1967, while it meant the end of something and the opening up of a new period of economic crisis, was still quite moderate. The bourgeoisie’s margin for maneuver began to shrink at an accelerating pace, but it still had the means to face up to the judderings of the economic machine, even if this was at the cost of economic manipulations by the state which were simply laying the ground for new and greater difficulties in the future.
For the world working class this situation meant that it could still have many illusions in the possibility of a new prosperity. The world-wide character of the economic crisis, so obvious today, wasn’t obvious then. It was still often thought that the problems were national in scope and that a better management of public affairs would suffice to re-establish the situation. In less developed countries there were all the illusions about so-called ‘national liberation struggles’.
Unemployment had begun to develop, hence a certain disquiet, but its level still remained close to that of ‘full employment’ (a term used at the time which has since more or less fallen into disuse). In general, while living standards were already falling, they were a long way from the violent slides they went through in the two ensuing decades (see the article in this issue on 20 years of economic crisis).
This general immaturity was also expressed in the level of autonomy attained by the proletariat vis a vis the union forces of capital. May 68, like all struggles in this epoch, was characterized by the intensification of open opposition between the workers and the union organisations. In May 68 as in 69 in Italy, the workers’ struggle often clashed violently with the unions. But here again this was just the beginning of a process. Despite a growing distrust, the workers still had considerable illusions in the unions, which tended to be seen as ‘working class, in spite of everything.’
But that the 1968 generation of workers lacked the most was the experience of struggle. However gigantic was the deployment of its forces in May 68, the working class as a whole was a long way from understanding what it had just done and even further from having a real mastery over its actions. In general, its immediate experience had been restricted to union promenades, to first of May funeral marches, to long and isolated strikes. No, May 68 was far from being a real revolutionary situation. The whole working class knew it, or felt it. And all the impatience of the rebellious petty-bourgeois intellectuals who wanted ‘everything now’ could not alter this.[1]
Nevertheless, the conditions for a revolutionary situation on a world scale have not stopped developing and deepening over the past 20 years. Those who deny this today are often the same ones who believed that revolution was immediately realizable in May 68. And it is not by chance that in both cases the link between economic crisis and class struggle is ignored or denied.
The objective evolution of capitalist society over these last 20 years can be summed up in a balance sheet that is both catastrophic and menacing. The most frightful poverty humanity has ever known has spread right across the less developed areas of the planet, but also more and more into the central countries; the destruction of any future for an ever-growing number of the unemployed and a ruthless intensification of the conditions of exploitation for those still working; the permanent development of the war economy and the exacerbation of commercial and military rivalries between nations: the evolution of the economic and political life of capitalism over the past 20 years has once again brought to light the fact that the only ‘way out’ for this decadent social system is a new world war. From the Vietnam war to the Iran-Iraq war, from the destruction of Lebanon to the war in Afghanistan, capitalism more and more threatens to turn the whole planet into a bloodbath (see the article on inter-imperialist conflicts in this issue and the previous one). The evolution of capitalism itself ruins the basis upon which the power the ruling class stands.
These years have destroyed many illusions held by the workers and have developed some important convictions:
It’s not so much the development of the necessity for revolution and of the proletariat’s awareness of this that is hard to see. What often does not appear to a superficial glance is the way that, through 20 years of experience of class struggle in all countries, the possibility of this transformation has developed and matured.
During these years the class struggle hasn’t developed in a linear way. In the contrary it has gone through a complex, uneven development, full of advances and retreats, passing through successive waves interspersed with periods of calm and counter-offensive by the bourgeoisie. If you look at these 20 years of struggles on a global scale – the only way which allows you to grasp the dynamic of the proletarian struggle – you can distinguish three major waves of workers’ struggles.
The first wave opened up by May 68 lasted until 1974. For around 5 years, nearly all countries, both the industrialised and the less developed, in the east as well as the west, workers’ struggles went through a new development. Already in 1969 in Italy (the ‘hot autumn’) a powerful wave of strikes in which clashes between workers and unions multiplied, confirmed that May 68 had indeed started a new international dynamic in the class struggle. In the same year in Argentina (Cordoba, Rosario) the working class launched massive struggles. In 1970 in Poland, the workers struggles reached new heights: generalised street confrontations with the militia, the working class forcing the government to back down. For the workers in the eastern countries it confirmed that it was possible to fight against state totalitarianism; for the workers of the whole world, the myth of the working class nature of the eastern bloc countries suffered a new blow. Then, in this international context of class combativity, particularly significant struggles developed in Spain (Barcelona 1971, in Belgium and in Britain (1972).
However, after 1973 the mobilisation of the workers was to start slowing down. Despite the important struggles waged by the working classes in Portugal and Spain when the regimes in these countries were being democratized (1974-77), despite a new wave of strikes in Poland in 1976, on the global level – and in particular in western Europe – there was a clear reduction in the level of workers’ mobilisations.
But in 1978 a new wave of worker’ struggles exploded on an international scale. Shorter in time than the previous one, we saw, between 1978 and 1980, a new deployment of proletarian forces, striking in its international simultaneity. The massive strikes of the oil workers in Iran in 78, those of the German and Brazilian metal workers in 78 and 80; the miners struggle in the USA in 79 then the New York transport strike of 80; the violent struggles of the French steelworkers of 79 and the Rotterdam dockers’ strike in the same year; the ‘winter of discontent’ in Britain in 78/79 which led to the fall of the Labour government, and the big steel strike at the beginning of 1980; the strikes in Togliattigrad in the USSR in 80 and the struggles in South Korea at the same time … all these struggles confirmed that the social calm of the mid-70s had merely been provisional. Then, in August 80, the most important workers, struggle since 1920s broke out. Drawing the lessons of the experiences of 70 and 76, the working class displayed and extraordinary level of combativity, of organization, of control over its own forces. But the dynamic was to falter in front of two deadly obstacles: first, the illusions the workers in the east have in ‘western democracy’ and particularly in trade unionism; and secondly, the national framework. Solidarnosc, the new ‘democratic’ union, formed under the attentive eyes of the ‘democratic’ forces of the western bloc, zealously propagating the most inculcated nationalist ideology, was in the forefront of distilling and cultivating this poison. The failure of the mass strike in Poland, resulting in the military coup by Jaruzelsky in December 1981, clearly posed the question of responsibility of the proletariat of the more central countries, those sections of the class with the greatest historical experience: not only at the level of their capacity to advance the internationalization of the workers’ struggle, but also because of the contribution they can make to overcoming illusions in western democracy’ which still weigh heavily in many countries.
The fall of the Labour government in Britain in the face of a wave of strikes illustrated what was to be response of the bourgeoisie to this second wave: the ‘left in government had been discredited.. It was essential to put the left in opposition where it could carry out its sabotage from within the struggles, allowing the government, usually in the hands of the right, to speak the language of ‘truth.’ This strategy had, and still has, an effect.
After the period of relflux in the international class struggle following the defeat in Poland, a new wave of struggles began at the end of ’83 with the public sector strike in Belgium. In Hamburg in West Germany there was the occupation of the ship yards. In 1984 Italy saw a powerful wave of strikes against the elimination of the sliding scale, culminating in a demonstration of nearly a million workers in Rome.
In Britain there was the great miners strike which lasted a year and which, despite its exemplary courage and combativity, showed more than any struggle the ineffectiveness in our epoch of long isolated strikes. In the same year there were important struggles in India, USA, Tunisia and Morocco.
In 1985 there was the massive strike in Denmark, and several waves of wild cat strikes shook that the other ‘socialist paradise’, Sweden; the first big strikes in Japan (railways); strikes in Sao Paolo when Brazil was in full transition towards ‘democracy’; there were also important struggles in Argentina, Bolivia, South Africa, and Yugoslavia. 1986 was marked by the massive strike in Belgium in the spring, paralyzing the country and extending by itself in spite of the unions. At the end of 36 and the beginning of 87 the railway workers in France developed a struggle which was remarkable for the workers’ attempts to organize independently of the unions. In spring 87 there was a whole series of strikes in Spain directly opposing the plans of the ‘socialist’ government. Then there were the struggles of the miners in South Africa, the electricity workers in Mexico and a big wave of strikes in South Korea.
Through good part of the year there were also struggles of the school workers in Italy who managed to organize outside of and against the unions. Finally, the recent mobilisation of the workers of the Rhur in Germany and the resurgence of strikes in Britain in 1988 (see editorial in this issue) confirmed that this third international wave of workers struggles, which has now lasted for more than four years, is far from over.
A simple comparison on the characteristics of the struggles of 20 years ago with those of today will allow us to see the extent of the evolution which has slowly taken place in the working class. Its own experience, added to the catastrophic evolution of the capitalist system, has enabled it to acquire a much more lucid view of the reality of its struggle. This has been expressed by;
But the experience of these 20 years of struggle hasn’t only produced negative lessons for the working class (what should not be done). It has also produced lessons on what is to be done:
In general, the workers are resorting less to the strike as a form of struggle; when the combat is joined it tends to be massive, the ‘street’, political actions, are becoming increasingly important. That is the response to attacks which are increasingly massive and which show more and more pitilessly the total incompatibility between the interests of the workers and those of the existing social order.
Over the course of these 20 years, slowly, unevenly, the world proletariat has developed its consciousness by losing its illusions and gaining experience and determination.
The world bourgeoisie has also learned a lot from these years. The problem of maintaining social order has become a priority. It has developed all the means of repression; over the last 20 years all the governments of the world have setup or-up of strengthened their riot police, invented new ‘civil war’ weaponry. Developed the political police… Many of them have used the despair of the petty bourgeois rebels who have taken then suicidal path of terrorism to reinforce a climate of repression. In the factories, the threat of unemployment has been used systematically as a means of repression.
But what the bourgeoisie has learned most has been how to use the political and union forces working inside the working class unions, left parties, organisations of the the extreme left. It has ‘democratised’ the regimes in a number of countries (Spain, Portugal, Latin America, Philippines…), not to lessen the weight of its dictatorship but in order to create union and political organs capable of completing the work that the army and the unions could no longer do on their own. In the countries with an old ‘democratic tradition’, faced with the wearing out of the official unions and left parties, it has resorted to ‘rank and file unionism’ or to its ‘extraparliamentary’ forces to drag struggle back onto the union and democratic terrain.
We’re a long way from the ‘surprise’ effect created by the workers struggled at the end of the ‘60s. But this ‘rearmament’ of the bourgeoisie actually expresses the need to resort to more and more extreme measures to deal with a situation that is increasingly difficult to control. Behind this ‘strengthening’ of the ruling class lies the disintegration of the real basis of its power.
For the impatient petty bourgeoisie of the 60s, all this is too long, too difficult, and can’t lead anywhere. For them, everything seems to have gone backwards since 60s.
For Marxists, the evolution of those years has simply confirmed the view already formulated by Marx in the 19th century, of what is the struggle of the only class in history which is both exploited and revolutionary.
Unlike the revolutionary struggles of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, in which each victory meant a development of its real political power over society at the expense of the nobility, the revolutionary combat of the proletariat doesn’t win progressive and cumulative gains at the level of political power. As long as the proletariat has not obtained its final political victory, the revolution, it remains an exploited, dispossessed, repressed class. This is why its struggles can look like an eternal process of starting again from scratch.
“Proletarian revolutions, however such as those of the nineteenth century, constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course. They return to what has apparently already been accomplished in order to begin the task again; with merciless thoroughness they mock the inadequate, weak and wretched aspects of their first attempts; they seem to throw their opponent to the ground only to see him draw new strength from the earth and rise again before them, more colossal than ever; they shrink back again and again before the indeterminate immensity of their own goals, until the situation is created in which any retreat is impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta.” (Marx, the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte.[2]
Perhaps it is less easy to talk about revolution in 1988 than in 1968. But when today the word is shouted out in a demonstration in Rome where workers are denouncing the bourgeois nature of the unions, or at an unemployed workers demonstration in Bilbao, it has a much more profound and more concrete meaning than when it was banded about in the feverish assemblies, so full of illusions, of 1968.
1968 affirmed the return of the revolutionary objective. For 20 years the conditions for its realization haven’t stopped maturing. Capitalism’s descent into an impasse, the increasingly unbearable situation this creates for all the exploited and oppressed classes, the experience accumulated through the fighting spirit of the workers, all this is leading to that situation of which Marx spoke, “in which any retreat is impossible.”
RV
[1] For a revolutionary history and analysis of the events of May 68 see Pierre Hempel, Mai 68 et la question de la revolucion, c/o Linear La Boulangera, 67, Rue de Bagneux, 32000, Montrouge, France.
[2] This refers to a Greek legend: a boaster who went around the towns of the Mediterranean saying that he had once made an immense leap in Rhodes one day found himself in this town and was told “Here is Rhodes, leap here and now.”
May 68: 10 million workers on strike in France announced the return of the proletariat onto the scene of history, opening up a wave of international struggles which up until the mid-70s was to make its, presence felt in virtually every country on the planet.
Not for decades, not since the failure of the revolutionary wave which began in 1917 and which was exhausted by the end of the 1920s, had the proletariat struggled with such strength and breadth. After 40 long years of counter-revolution, in which the triumph of the bourgeoisie was expressed by a degree of ideological domination unprecedented in history; in which the theorisation of the integration of the proletariat, its embourgeoisiment, its disappearance as a revolutionary class animated the thinking of intellectuals in search of novelties; in which socialism was identified with the sombre Stalinist dictatorship and their 'third worldist' caricatures; in which the jungles of South America and Indochina were presented as the centre of
the world revolution the reawakening of the proletariat had moved the pendulum of humanity. A bolt had been shifted the bolt of the counter-revolution. A new historical period had begun.
The renaissant workers' struggle was to polarise the discontent which had been accumulating in many strata of society over a number of years. The Vietnam war seemed to be going on forever and was intensifying; the first attacks of the crisis, which had returned in the mid-sixties after the euphoria of the post-war reconstruction, were to provoke a deep malaise among a younger generation brought up on the illusion of a triumphant capitalism, free of crises and assured of a bright future. The students' revolt in ,campuses all over the world was to provide the propaganda of the bourgeoisie with a means of masking the resurgence of class struggle, but it was also to give a distorted echo of the renewal of political reflection taking place in, the proletariat. This was concretised in a rebirth of interest in the class, its histories, and its theories, and thus in marxism. 'Revolution' became a fashionable term.
Brutally, as though astonished by its own force, a new generation of workers was asserting itself on the world historic arena. As a product of this dynamic, with a youthful ebullience but also in the greatest confusion, lacking experience and links with the revolutionary traditions of the past, with no real knowledge of the history of its class, strongly influenced by petty-bourgeois contestationism a new proletarian political milieu was forming. A new generation of revolutionaries was coming into existence in enthusiasm … and inexperience.
Of course, when we talk about the proletarian milieu, we don’ t, include those organisations who claim to represent and defend the proletariat but which are in fact expressions of the ‘left’ of the capitalist state’s political apparatus, whose task is to control the working class, mystify it and sabotage its struggles. This is so no matter what illusions the working class may have in these organisations. We are referring not only to the ‘Socialist’ and ‘Communist’ Parties which have for a long time been integrated into the state machine at all levels, but also to their Maoist emulators, who are just a late expression of Stalinism, and to the Trotskyists whose abandonment of class positions in the second imperialist world war, their support for one imperialist bloc against the other, definitively put them outside the proletarian camp. Even though in ‘68 and afterwards these ‘leftist’ groups had a determining influence and occupied the centre of the stage, their past history situates them radically outside the proletariat and its political milieu. Furthermore it was the reaction to the political attitude of these groups of the bourgeois ‘left’ that, in an initial period, laid the basis for the revival of the proletarian milieu, even if, in the confusion and disorder of the period, leftist ideas were to weigh heavily on the birth of this new, proletarian milieu.
Twenty years have passed since the events of 1968; twenty years in which the economic crisis has enforced its ravages on the world market, dug over the field of social life, swept away illusions about reconstruction. Twenty years during which the class struggle has been through dramatic advances and retreats. Twenty years in which the proletarian milieu has had to rediscover its roots and seek the clarification it needs to make an effective intervention.
During these 20 years, what has been the evolution of the political milieu? What balance sheet can be drawn up today? What political fruits have been left by the generation of 1968? What perspectives can we trace in order to fertilise the future?
The political groups which, prior to the break-through of the late 60s, were able to resist being smothered by the counter-revolution and, come rain or storm, maintain their existence on revolutionary positions, were a mere handful of individuals. These groups defined themselves in relation to their political ancestry. There were essentially two main currents, deriving from the fractions which in the 1920s had fought against the political degeneration of the 3rd International:
- the tradition of the ‘Dutch’ and 'German’ lefts (*) which was maintained by the political groups like Spartacusbond[1] in Holland or by more or less formal circles like the one grouped around Paul Mattick in the USA. ICO (Informations et Correspondences Ouvrieres) in France and Daad en Dedachte in Holland, which appeared at the beginning of the 60s, were the degenerated products of this tradition of ‘council communism’ which in the 1930s had been incarnated mainly by the GIK. This current, in political continuity with the theorisations of Otto Ruhle in the 1920s, and Anton Pannekoek and Canne Meier in the 30s, was characterised by a profound incomprehension of the failure of the Russian revolution and the degeneration of the Communist International, which led them to deny their proletarian character and to reject the necessity for the political organisation of the proletariat;
- the tradition of the ‘Italian’ left whose organisational continuity had been expressed by the Partito Comunista Internazionalista[2] founded in 1945 around Onorato Darnen and Amadeo Bordiga, and which had published Battaglia Comunista. A number of splits, the main one being around Bordiga in 1952 and giving rise to the group which was to published Programma Comunista[3], led to their being several avatars of the ‘PCI’, among whom we can mention the group that puts out Il Partito Comunista. However, these organisations, while they were able to maintain an organisational continuity with the communist fractions of the past, did not, paradoxically enough, lay claim to the work of the group which in the 1930s represented the highest level of political clarity attained by this tradition. This rejection of the political contribution made by Bilan[4] expressed a weakening in political continuity. This was to manifest itself in a dogmatic rigidity which denied the necessity for the clarifications imposed by decades of capitalist decadence. Thus, typifying this attitude, Bordiga and the PCI(Programma) insisted on the invariance of Marxism since … 1848. For these organizations, an insufficient critique of the erroneous positions of the 3rd International would express itself in the adoption of extremely wooly and often wrong political positions on such central points as the national or union questions. The perfectly correct determination to defend the necessity of the party unfortunately assumed the form of a characature among these groups, notably for Bordiga, who tended to conceive of and present the party as the answer to all the problems confronting the proletariat, as a universal panacea which the proletariat only had to accept. Of these groups, only Programma had an international existence, notably in France and Italy, while the others only existed in France and Italy.
In this tradition of the Italian Left we should include Internationalismo in Venezuela, founded in 1964 on the initiative of former members of Bilan (1928-39) and Internationalisme (1945- 1953)[5]. While not expressing a real organisational continuity, this group was the clearest expression of political continuity with the acquisitions of Bilan, and then of Internationalisme, which has carried on its work of theoretical elaboration. However, while Internationalismo explicitly referred to the contribution of Bilan and the Italian Left, it was also able to enrich itself, in a critical way, with the contributions of other fractions of the international communist left; this was concretised in the clarity of its positions on the question of the decadence of capitalism, or the national question, the union question, and the role of the party. It was certainly no accident that Internationalismo was the only group to foresee the historic resurgence of class struggle.
This portrait of the political milieu before 1968 wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t also include the groups which were formed just after the second world war in reaction to the treason of the Trotskyist 4th International and which emerged from this current. In particular we should mention the FOR[6], formed around Jorge Munis and Benjamin Peret, and Socialisme ou Barbarie around Cardin/Chalieu. These groups, coming out of a political tradition, Trotskyism, which had participated in the degeneration of the 3rd International and which had abandoned the class terrain by supporting the second world imperialist butchery, had an originality linked to this background: their incomprehension of the degeneration of the Revolution in Russia and of the economic foundations of state capitalism in the period of the decadence of capitalism; which led them to theorise about the end of the economic crises of capitalism, and thus to cut themselves off from the foundations of a Marxist, materialist understanding of the evolution of society. Socialisme ou Barbarie was explicitly to give up on the proletariat and marxism, developing a hazy theory in which the basic contradiction in society was no longer between capital and labour, bourgeoisie and proletariat, but in the ideological relationship between leaders and led. Denying the revolutionary nature of the proletariat, Socialisme ou Barbarie lost its reason for existence as a political organisation and disappeared at the beginning of the 60s. However, the pernicious influence of its theories was to weigh heavily not only among the intellectuals but also in the political milieu, notably the ICO, and, on its fringes, the Situationist International. As for the FOR, it never fell into such extremes, but its refusal to recognise the reality of the economic crisis weakened its political positions as a whole by depriving them of an indispensable coherence.
The events of the class struggle, particularly the strikes in May 68 in France, the 'rampant May' in Italy '69, the riots in Poland in 1970, because of their international echo, gave rise to a process of reflection within the proletariat and in society as a whole, and thus provided a new audience for the revolutionary theory of marxism. Carried along by this international wave of class struggle, a multitude of small groups, circles or committees was born in the greatest confusion but still looking for a revolutionary coherence. Out of this informal movement the new political milieu was to emerge.
The concrete confrontation with the sabotaging manoeuvres of those who claimed to be the most ardent defenders of the interests of the working class was to be a decisive factor in a brutal awakening about the anti-working class nature of the unions and 'left' parties. This putting into question of the proletarian nature of the union organisations, of the Socialist Parties which had been part of the defunct 2nd International, of the Stalinist CPs and their leftist emulators whether Maoist or Trotskyist, was the immediate product of the class struggle, which had a revelatory effect. However this intuition about the basic political positions of the proletariat could not hide the profound political fragility of this new generation that was taking up revolutionary positions without a real knowledge of the past history of the class, without any links to the previous organisations of the proletariat, without any militant experience and strongly influenced by the petty bourgeois illusions put about by the student movement. The weight of decades of counter-revolution was considerable. "Run, Comrade, The Old World Is Behind You" claimed the rebels of '68. But if the rejection of the 'old world' made it possible to approach certain class positions like the capitalist nature of the unions, the left parties, the so-called 'socialist fatherlands', in the same breath it also often lead to a rejection of the indispensable acquisitions of the proletariat: in the first place, the revolutionary nature of the proletariat, but also marxism, the past organisations of the proletariat, the necessity for a political organisation, etc. Straight away, the ideas which were to find the widest echo in an ambiance characterised by the immaturity and inexperience of youth were those of 'radical' currents like the Situationist International which had updated the theories of Socialisme ou Barbarie and which appeared as the most radical expression of the students' movement. Diluting the workers' struggle into the revolt of petty-bourgeois strata, identifying with a radical reformism of daily life, trying to make a clever synthesis between Bakunin and Marx, the Situationist International veered away from the terrain of marxism to return, a century late, to the illusions of utopianism.
And so it was with modernism[7], which, in its dedicated search for the New and its rejection of the Old, ended up re-discovering theories that were historically obsolete. But while the 'Modernist' current is fundamentally alien to the working class, councilism[8] is historically part of the proletarian political milieu. ICO in France was especially representative of this tendency: laying claim to the contributions of the German and Dutch lefts, it took up the errors of the Dutch Left in the 30s by rejecting the necessity for the proletariat to form political organisations. This position was to be very popular, because after decades of triumphant counter-revolution, of betrayal by proletarian organisations which had succumbed to bourgeois pressure and been integrated into the capitalist state, after years of anti-working class manoeuvres by organisations which claimed to speak in the name of the class, the proletariat had developed a strong feeling of distrust for any kind of organisation. This tended to culminate in a fear of organisation in itself. The very word scared people.
In an initial period ICO was to polarise the re-emerging political milieu in France and even internationally, given the planet-wide echo of the events of May 68. It contributed to the dissemination and reappropriation of the experience of past revolutionaries (notably of the KAPD in Germany) though in a partial and deformed manner. A number of groups participated in the conferences by ICO in France, Cahiers du Communisme de Conseil from Marseille; the Groupe Conseilliste from Clermont-Ferrand; Revolution Internationale from Toulouse, the GLAT, Vielle Taupe, Noir et Rouge, Archinoir; in the Bruxelles conference of 1969 there were Belgian' and Italian groups as well as ‘celebrities' like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Paul Mattick. But this dynamic impetus within the milieu took place more under the pressure of the class struggle than thanks to the political coherence of ICO; with the downturn of the workers' struggle in France at the beginning of the 70s, the anti-party, anti-organisation conceptions of ICO were to weigh more and more heavily on an immature political milieu. While in the beginning ICO had attracted towards proletarian positions groups and elements breaking from anarchism and academicism, with the reflux in the strikes the reverse happened: ICO was infected by the anarchist and modernist gangrene. Finally, ICO disappeared in 1971.
ICO's itinerary was quite typical of the dynamic of councilism within the international political milieu, even if in countries other than France this phenomenon may have been more drawn out in time. The theorisations of councilism, in rejecting the necessity for organisation, in denying the proletarian nature of the Russian revolution, the Bolshevik party and the 3rd International, represented a source of disorientation and decomposition within the emerging proletarian milieu, cutting it off from its real historical roots and depriving it of the organisational and political means to carry out a long term work. Councilism diluted the revolutionary energies of the class.
All the proletarian groups which emerged out of the youthful enthusiasm of the late 60s were more or less marked by the pernicious influence of modernism and councilism. How many speeches did we hear about state capitalism bringing crisis to an end, about the wicked Bolsheviks and the inevitable destiny of every party to betray the proletariat, about revolutionary militancy as the highest stage of alienation? Speeches that were 'a la mode' and which disappeared when the 'mode’ changed.
The inevitable decantation which came with the reflux in the class struggle, as well as sweeping away illusions and underlining the necessity for clarification was to result in the disappearance of the politically weakest groups. In the first half of the 70s it was a real cull: exit the SI which had only 'shone' for a brief spring; exit ICO, dead on the desolate fields of the critique of daily life; exit Pouvoir, Noir et Rouge and Vielle Taupe in France; exi t Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio, which had but partly broken away from the Maoist variety of leftism; exit, to all intents and purposes, Solidarity in Britain and this list is far from complete. With the reflux in the class struggle, history was inevitably bearing witness and handing out its judgements.
The various PCls descended from the Italian Left, unable to understand that the resurgence of class struggle at the end of the 60s signified the end of the period of counter-revolution, completely underestimating the importance of the strikes going on in front of their eyes, were to be incapable of carrying out the function for which they existed: intervening in the class and in the process of the formation of its political milieu. Those who claimed to represent the only organic and political continuity with the revolutionary organisations from the earlier part of the century, who should have been able to strengthen the re-emerging political milieu by accelerating the process of reappropriating the proletarian acquisitions of the past; who already claimed to be the Class Party - these groups were almost totally absent until the mid-70s. They slept on, believing that the long night of the counter-revolution was still continuing, clutching the 'holy tablets' of the communist programme. The PCI (Programma), the only organisation to have a truly international existence, treated with lofty disdain the elements who were stumbling along in search of a revolutionary coherence, and the PClnt (Battaglia Comunista), which was more inclined towards political discussion, remained timidly tucked away in Italy. Even if the position these groups had on the party, which distinguished them fundamentally from councilism, could not in the initial period have polarised the re-emerging political milieu in the same way as those of currents like ICO, their relative absence could only serve to reinforce the destructive weight of councilism on young and immature revolutionary energies.
In the end, only the group which, superficially, appeared to be the 'weakest' of the currents descended from the Italian left, because it was isolated in Venezuela, but which was certainly not the weakest politically, which is what interests us the most only this group was able to bear fruit. On the initiative of members of Internacialismo who had moved to France, the group Revolution Internationale was formed in Toulouse, right in the middle of the ferment of May '68. This small group, almost unnoticed in the multitude of those which appeared at this time, was to be the one which - because within it there were former militants of the Italian left, of Bilan and Internationalisme, who brought with them an irreplaceable political experience was able to play a positive role in the face of the tendency towards decomposition at work in a new political milieu which was suffering from the dangerous influence of councilism. This was to be concretised in particular in the dynamic towards regroupment which Revolution Internationale was able to embody.
And so within this new political milieu dominated by all kinds of confusion, a tendency had appeared which was to fight against the process of decomposition which expressed the weight of councilist ideas. The desire for political clarification, the concern to reappropriate the political acquisitions of marxism, was to be made concrete through a defence of the necessity of the political organisation of the proletariat, and a critique of the errors of councilism. Since its foundation, RI had devoted itself to this task: defending revolutionary principles on the question of organisation, but also proposing a coherent framework for understanding class positions and the evolution of capitalism in the 20th century: the theory of the decadence of capitalism as put forward by Rosa Luxemburg and Bilan, and the elaborations about state capitalism inherited from Internationalisme. This enabled it to be much clearer on questions like the proletarian nature of the Russian revolution, the Bolshevik party and the 3rd International, questions which had been posed most sharply in the post-68 milieu. Furthermore, RI's more solid political foundations were also expressed in its understanding of the events of May 68: while defending the historic significance of the workers' struggles developing on an international scale, RI firmly opposed the delirious overestimations of those in the councilist-modernist current, who saw the communist revolution as an immediate possibility and thus laid the ground for their future demoralisation. RI, even if in an initial period its audience was very restricted and soaked in councilist ideas, represented a pole of clarity in the political milieu of the time. In France, RI's participation in the meetings organised by ICO enabled it to confront the councilist confusions and polarise the evolution of other groups. The process of clarification which then took place gave rise to a dynamic towards regroupment which in 1972 resulted in the fusion of the Groupe Conseilliste of Clermont-Ferrand and Cahiers du Communisme de Conseil within RI.
On the international level the dynamic was the same. With the reflux in struggles debates gathered pace in the proletarian political milieu, and here RI and Internationalismo were to play a decisive role of clarification. The struggle against councilist conceptions intensified, pushing numerous groups to break with their libertarian councilist first loves. Internationalism was formed in the USA, in close contact with Internationalismo; discussions with RI were directly at the origin of the formation of World Revolution in Britain and were to have a strong influence on groups like Workers' Voice and Revolutionary Perspectives;' it was directly under
aegis of RI (and then of the ICC) that three groups fused to form Internationalisme in Belgium; similarly in Spain and Italy, Accion Proletaria and Rivoluzione Internationale were formed on the basis of the coherence of RI.
The appeal by Internationalism (USA) for the formation of an international network of contacts between existing proletarian groups helped speed up theoretical clarification and political decantation. An international conference was held in 1974, and this presaged and prepared the formation of the ICC in 1975, regrouping Internacialismo (Venezuela), Revolution Internatianale (France), Internationalism (USA), World Revolution (GB), Accion Proletaria (Spain), and Rivoluzione Internazionale (Italy) on the basis of a common platform. Internationalisme formed the Belgian section of the ICC soon afterwards. Existing in seven countries, rejecting the anarcho-councilist conceptions which are a thin cover for the influence of localism, the ICC was to function on an internationally centralised basis, in the image of the working class, which has no particular interests depending on the country in which it finds itself.
The wave of class struggle which began in an explosive manner in 1968 began to lose its impetus at the beginning of the 70s: the ruling class, which had initially been surprised by the developments, reorganised its apparatus of political mystification in order to confront the working class more effectively. This turn-around in the situation, which led to the disarray of a
councilist milieu marked by immediatism, and to the downfall of the conceptions which characterised this milieu, also caused a certain decomposition in the Maoist and Trotskyist groups. The latter were shaken by various splits, some of which attempted to move towards revolutionary positions. However these groups, heavily scarred by their past, were unable to really integrate themselves into the proletarian milieu. Thus it was with two splits from Lutte Ouvriere in France, Union Ouvriere and Combat Communiste; the first, which had at the beginning been influenced by the FOR, made a meteoric voyage through the proletarian milieu to finally vanish into modernism, while the second proved itself congenitally incapable of breaking with 'radical’ Trotskyism.
This dynamic in which a number of elements, more demoralised than clarified, came out of the groups of the extreme left was to intensify with the reflux in class struggle in the mid-70s. It was on this basis that the PCI (Programma) was to go through a certain development. After almost completely missing the class struggle at the end of the 60s, the Bordigist PCI began to shake off its torpor at the beginning of the 70s, but it treated the proletarian milieu in formation with a haughty disdain, while at the same time embarking on an opportunist campaign of recruitment of elements who had hardly broken from leftism. On the basis of erroneous positions on such crucial issues as the national or union questions, the PCI's opportunist course was to intensify and accelerate throughout the 70s. It supported national liberation in Angola, the Khmer Rouge terror, and the Palestinian 'revolution'. The Bordigist PCI was puffed up at the rate that it was being infected by the leftist gangrene.
At the end of the 70s the PCI (Programma) was the most important group in the international proletarian milieu. But if the PCI was the main pole in the political milieu during this period, this wasn't only due to its numerical importance and its real international existence. The reflux in the class struggle sowed doubts in the revolutionary capacities of the proletariat and created a new attraction for substitutionist conceptions of the party, which developed also in reaction to the obvious routing of the anti-organisational conceptions of councili sm. Bordigism which theorises about the party being the remedy to all the difficulties in a class that is presented as fundamentally trade unionist and which had to be led and organised like a general staff organises its army - enjoyed a revival of interest from which the PCI was to benefi t. But apart from the PCI, the whole political milieu was to be polarised around the absolutely necessary debate about the role and tasks of the communist party.
However, while the PCI (Programma) was the main organisation in the proletarian milieu in the second half of the 70s, it was not at all the product of a dynamic towards clarification and regroupment. On the contrary, its development took place on the basis of a growing opportunism and a sectarianism that was being constantly theorised. The PCI saw itself as the only proletarian organisation in existence and refused to discuss with other groups. The development of the Bordigist PCI was not the expression of the strength of the class but of its momentary weakening as a result of the reflux. Unfortunately sectarianism was not the sole attribute of the PCI even if it theorised it to the most absurd level. It weighed on the whole proletarian milieu as an expression of its immaturity. This was expressed in particular in:
- the tendency for certain groups to believe that they were alone in the world and to deny the existence of a proletarian political milieu. Like the PCI, numerous sects in the Bordigist tradition were to develop such an attitude;
- a tendency to be more concerned about distinguishing oneself around secondary issues in order to justify one's separate existence than about confronting the political milieu in order to advance the process of clarification. This attitude in general went together with a profound underestimation of the importance of the proletarian milieu and the debates which animated it. An example of this was the way Revolutionary Perspectives pulled out of the dynamic towards regroupment with World Revolution in Britain in 1973. It argued that there was a 'fundamental' divergence: according to RP, after 1921 the Bolshevik party was no longer proletarian. RP's 'fixation' on this question was simply a pretext. This was to be shown a few years later when (now in the form of the CWO) it abandoned this position. But it never drew out the consequences of the previous failure of regroupment in Britain;
- a tendency towards immature and premature splits, like that of the PCI which left RI in 1973 on an activist and immediatist basis which soon took on a councilist direction. However, not all the splits were unfounded; the GCI's split from the ICC in 1978 was justified to the extent that the comrades who were to form the GCI[10] were breaking with the coherence of the ICC on such fundamental questions as the role of the party and the nature of class violence, taking up essentially Bordigist positions. Nevertheless, this split still expressed the weight of sectarianism since the GCI took up a whole number of the PCI's sectarian conceptions;
- paradoxically the tendency towards sectarianism was also to find expression in attempts at regroupment which aped the efforts of the ICC. Thus the PlC initiated a series of utterly confused conferences which attempted to gather together groups more marked by anarchism than by revolutionary positions. The fusion of Workers' Voice and Revolutionary Perspectives to form the CWO[11], although it did express a positive move towards regroupment, was also unfortunately marked by the sectarian attitude the CWO had towards the ICC, even though its positions were very similar.
This weight of sectarianism on the political milieu was the result of the break brought on by 50 years of counter-revolution, of the forgetting of the experience of past revolutionaries on the question of regroupment and the formation of the communist party - a situation further accentuated in the second half of the 70s by the reflux in the class struggle. However, because the political milieu is not the mechanical reflection of the class struggle but the expression of a conscious will to fight against the weakness in the class, the determination in the different groups of the milieu to embark on a process of clarification with a view towards the regroupment of revolutionary forces is a concrete measure of their political clarity about the immense responsibility facing revolutionaries in the present historical period.
In these conditions, Battaglia Comunista's call for conferences of the groups of the communist left, after a long period in which this group had been 'extremely discreet on the international scene, marked a positive step for the whole milieu which, with the momentary reflux in the class struggle, was suffering heavily from the effects of sectarianism and dispersion.
In the second part of this article we, will look at the way the political milieu evolved in the late 70s and the 80s. This was a period marked by the holding of conferences and their eventual failure, the crisis that this situation opened up in the milieu, and the brutal decantation resulting from this, the most notable expression of which was the break-up of the PCI. We will then examine how the milieu reacted to the development of a new wave of struggles from 1983 and to the responsibilities this imposed on revolutionaries.
JJ. 7/3/88
Notes
* A preliminary remark: it's obvious that in the framework of these notes it's not possible to outline the itinerary and positions of all the groups mentioned in this article, many of which have since vanished into history's dustbin. We will thus limit ourselves to referring to the groups of the left communist tradition and which still exist.
[1] Spartakusbund: see IR 38 and 39. On the Dutch Left, see IRs 30,45,46,47,49,50,52.
[2] Partito Comunista Internazionalista, founded in 1945, publishes Battaglia Comunista and Prometeo. See for example IRs 36,40 and 41. Address: Prometeo, Casella Postale 1753 20100 Milan, Italy.
[3] Parti Communiste International, result of a split from the preceding group in 1952. In France publishes Le Proletaire and Programme Communiste. See IRs 32,33,34,36. Bilan, publication of the Italian left Fraction, formed in 1925. Published from 1933-1938. See the ICC pamphlet Le Gauche Coomuniste d'Italie; IR 47.
[5] Internationalisme, publication of the Gauche Communiste de France, 1945-52. See articles in the IR, Italian Left pamphlet.
[6] Forment Ouvriere Revolutionaire; publishes Alarme. BP 329, 75624, Paris, Cedex 13. See IR 52.
[7] ‘On 'modernism', see IR 34.
[8] On 'councilism', see IRs 37,40,41.
[9] See IR 40 'Ten years of the ICC'. See the different territorial publications listed in this review.
[10] GCI, BP 54, BXL 31, Bruxelles, Belgium. See IR 48,49,50, on the decadence of capitalism.
[11] CWO, PO Box 145, Head Post Office, Glasgow, UK … See IRs 39, 40, 41.
Introduction
We are publishing here the communiqué from the Grupo Proletaria Internacionalista from Mexico concerning the aggression to which they were subjected by elements coming from the decomposition of leftism. We entirely agree with the positions developed in it and affirm our total solidarity with the GPl. At a time when workers are more and more developing their struggles on a class terrain, against the attacks on their living conditions, against wage cuts and wage freezes, against redundancies, and this in all countries including the less developed ones; at a time when these struggles are more and more openly calling into question the authority of the unions; at a time when a resolutely internationalist proletarian political milieu is beginning to develop, defending the necessity for massive proletarian struggles and denouncing as bourgeois practices any form of trade unionism, of nationalism or terrorism - at this time, the 'leftism' which came out of the 'guerrillas' .and the 'national liberation struggles' which dominated political life in Latin America from the end of the 60s shows its true face. Not only has this 'radical' ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, with its advocacy of terrorism, never called into question the state rule of the bourgeoisie: yesterday's impotent acts of terrorism against the state are now being converted directly into an indispensable instrument of this state against the real communist groups, against the immediate and the general interests of the proletariat. Thus, just a few months since the appearance of Revolucion Mundial, publication of the GPI, and in particular no. 2 denouncing the bourgeois character of this leftist ideology and the impasse for the proletariat of guerillaism and radical terrorism, the response has been organized, using the methods of bourgeois violence and state terror against proletarian elements: torture, theft, intimidation, etc.
Proletarian political groups, and with them the working class as a whole, must express their solidarity with the GPl without any reservations.
To the international communist milieu,
To the world working class,
On Tuesday 9 February 1988, the state terror to which capital subjects the working class and its revolutionary forces all over the world manifested itself this time in the acts of gangsterism and repression which the GPI suffered at the hands of one of the residual bands of leftist terrorism in this country.
The counter-revolutionary character of the guerrilla and terrorist groups has a pernicious history in this region of the world(as in the rest of Latin America and elsewhere):
- as one of the expressions of the desperate, hopeless activities of the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie, it dominated the social scene of the country from the mid-60s until the early 70s, disseminating within the working class, with different nuances, the reactionary ideology of capital;
- as a direct or indirect instrument of capital when the first signs of the reawakening of the proletariat appeared in the region - around 1973 - it propagated within the workers' struggles the counter-revolutionary ideology of terror, facilitating the state's repressive work;
- today, when all that remains of the terrorist and guerrilla groups are some caricature-like residues and mere gangs of thieves; when for several years the working class in this country has been integrating itself into the struggle against capital which is being carried out by its class brothers all over the world; now, when a real revolutionary political presence is beginning to be formed in the region in the face of great difficulties; now, the ghost of 'guerrillaism' and 'terrorism' is beginning to stir, with the state making a much more direct use of these decomposing groups against the working class and its revolutionary forces.
One of these groups has attacked a number of militants of the GPI, torturing them and stealing from the group printing material, political documents, propaganda of the communist milieu and the official papers of comrades. This is the response of this band to the political denunciation of the counter-revolutionary role
of terrorism and guerrillaism which the GPI made in its publication Revolucion Mundial; this is the way these bands will continue to work in the future, in direct or indirect collaboration with capital's work of repression.
Faced with the action of this band and with actions related to it which may take place in the future, which in accord with the reality of the class struggles constitute an attack against the proletariat, against its emerging revolutionary forces in this country and against the whole international communist milieu, and which are entirely within the logic of state terrorist activity, the GPI:
1) reiterates its denunciation of the counter-revolutionary role of terrorism and the guerrillas and its warning to the working class against the activity of these individuals and their attempts to lead it into the dead-end of
minoritarian violence(by groups or individuals);
2) denounces the use to which these individuals or the state may put the political documents of the GPI and the whole international communist milieu in order to intensify the climate of state repression against the working class and its revolutionary forces;
3) affirms that the GPI has nothing to do with the frightened advocates of 'democratic' pacifism or with the desperate petty bourgeois or déclassé elements who make the cult of minority terrorist violence the centre of their existence; the GPI bases its revolutionary activity on the conviction that the only force capable of opposing the reactionary violence of the capitalist state is the working class in the exertion .of its struggle and of its own revolutionary violence.
Grupo Proletaria Internacionalista.
Mexico, 15 February, 1988
In the first part of this article we pointed out the utterly irrational character of war in the period of the decadence of capitalism. Whereas last century, despite the destruction and massacre they brought about, wars constituted a means for taking capitalist production forward by facilitating the conquest of the world market and stimulating the development of the productive forces of society as a whole, wars in the 20th century are simply the most extreme expression of the barbarism into which capitalism's decadence plunges social life. This first part of the article underlined the fact that world wars in particular, but also the numerous local wars and all the military expenses poured into preparing and perpetuating them, can in no way be seen as ‘overhead costs' for the development of the capitalist economy but have to be written, into the latter's entirely negative balance-sheet: a major result of the insoluble problems undermining this economy, they are also a powerful factor in aggravating and accelerating its collapse. In the final analysis, the total absurdity of war today is illustrated in a striking manner by the fact that a new generalised war, which is the only perspective capitalism can offer despite all today's pacifist campaigns, would simply mean the destruction of humanity.
Another illustration of the completely irrational and absurd character of war in the period of capitalism's decadence, an expression of the absurdity that the very survival of the system implies for society, is the fact that the bloc which, in the last resort, unleashes the war is precisely the one that comes out of the war ‘defeated' (if you can talk about there being a ‘victor'). Thus in 1914 it was Germany and Austria-Hungary who declared war on the Entente countries. Similarly in 1939, it was the invasion of Poland by Germany which provoked hostilities in Europe, and in 1941 Japan's bombing of the US fleet in Pearl Harbour which was at the immediate origins of the USA's entry into the war.
This ‘suicidal' path taken by countries who in the end are going to be the main losers out of a world conflagration obviously can't be explained by talking about the ‘madness' of their leaders. In reality, this apparent ‘madness' in these countries' conduct is simply the translation of the general ‘madness' of the capitalist system today. This ‘suicidal' march has above all been the one followed by capitalism as a whole since it entered its period of decadence, and has got worse and worse the more capitalism has sunk into decay. More precisely, the conduct of the future ‘losers' of the world wars merely expresses two realities:
The first point has been part of the ‘classical' patrimony of marxism since the beginning of the century. It is one of the foundation stones of the whole perspective of our organisation for the present period and has been amply developed in other articles in our press. What we have to emphasise here is the absence of any real control over this phenomenon on the part of the ruling class. Just as all the bourgeoisie's efforts and policies aimed at overcoming the crisis of the capitalist economy can't prevent the crisis from getting worse and worse, so all the gesticulations of all the governments, even when they are ‘sincerely' aimed at preserving peace, can only grease the wheels carrying the world towards a generalised imperialist butchery. In fact the second phenomenon (war) derives from the first (crisis).
Faced with a total economic impasse, with the failure of the most brutal economic ‘remedies', the only choice open to the bourgeoisie is that of a forward flight with other means - themselves increasingly illusory - which can only be military means. For several centuries, force of arms has been one of the essential instruments for the defence of capitalist interests. In particular it was through colonial wars that this system opened up the world market, that each bourgeois power constituted its own empire for selling its commodities and providing itself with raw materials. The explosion of militarism and of armaments expenditure at the end of the last century meant the completion of the division of the world market between the big (and even the small) powers. Henceforward, for each one of them, increasing (or just preserving) its part of the market necessarily involved a confrontation with the other powers, and the military means which sufficed to deal with native populations armed with arrows and spears had to be increased more than tenfold in order to square up to other industrial nations. Since then, even though colonisation has given way to the other forms of imperialist domination, this phenomenon has been amplified to monstrous proportions, completely changing its relations with the whole of society.
In the decadence of capitalism, the same goes for war and militarism as for other instruments of bourgeois society, in particular the state. In its origins, the latter appeared as a simple instrument of civil society (of bourgeois society in the case of the bourgeois state), with the function of ensuring a certain ‘order' and of preventing the antagonisms within society from leading to its dislocation. With capitalism's entry into its period of decadence, with the development of major convulsions in the system, there was also the development of the phenomenon of state capitalism, in which the state acquires a growing weight, to the point of absorbing the whole of civil society, of becoming the main, if not the only, boss. Even though the state continues to be an organ of capitalism (and not the reverse), as the supreme representative of this system, as the guarantor of its survival, it tends in most of its functions to escape the immediate control of the different sectors of the bourgeois class, imposing on them the overall requirements of capital and its own totalitarian logic. The same applies to militarism, which is one of the essential components of the state and whose development is precisely one of the major factors in the intensification of the phenomenon of state capitalism. In its origins a simple instrument of the economic policies of the bourgeoisie, it has acquired a certain level of autonomy within the state, and with its increasing role in bourgeois society has more and more tended to impose itself on society and the state.
This tendency towards the coordination of the state apparatus by the military sphere is illustrated in particular by the importance of the military budget within the overall state budget (it's generally the biggest part), but not only by this. In fact, the whole conduct of state affairs is under the grip of militarism. In the weakest countries, the grip often takes the extreme form of military dictatorships, but it is no less real in countries where the state is run by specialists in politics, just as the grip of state capitalism is no less strong in countries where, unlike the so-called ‘socialist' regimes, there is not a complete identification between the political and the economic apparatus of capital. Furthermore, even in the most developed countries, there are plenty of examples, since the First World War, of the participation of military figures in the highest bodies of the state: the eminent role of General Groener, the first quarter-master general, in inspiring the policies of the social democratic chancellor Ebert in the repression of the German revolution in 1918-19; the election of Marshall Hindenburg as President of the Weimar republic in 1925 and 1932 (it was he who called Hitler to the Chancellery in 1933); the nomination of Marshall Pétain as French head of state in 1940 and of General de Gaulle in 1958; the election of General Eisenhower as US President in 1952 and 1956, etc. Moreover, whereas in the framework of ‘democracy' the political parties and personnel at the summit of the state are liable to change, the general staff and the military hierarchy enjoy a remarkable stability, which can only reinforce their real power.
Because of this domination of political life by the military, the more the ‘solutions' to the crisis advocated and applied by the economic and political apparati of bourgeois society are shown to be useless, the more ‘solutions' specifically put forward by the military apparati tend to impose themselves. It's in this sense, for example, that we can understand the accession to power of the Nazi party in 1933:
this party was the most determined representative of the military option in response to the economic catastrophe which was felt with particular force in Germany. Thus, the more capitalism sinks into the crisis, the more it has to follow the irreversible and uncontrollable logic of militarism, even if (as we saw in the first part of this article) it is no more capable than any other policy of solving the economic contradictions of the system. And the logic of militarism - in a world context where all countries are dominated by it, where the countries which don't prepare for war, which don't use military means when they are ‘required', risk becoming the ‘victim' of other countries - can only lead to generalised war even if this brings massacre and ruin to all the belligerents, and even their total destruction.
This ineluctable pressure towards a generalised confrontation is felt all the more strongly by those world powers which haven't fared so well in the division of imperialist spoils; those better placed obviously have more interest in preserving the status quo. Thus, at the time of the first world war, the two powers which pushed most strongly for war were Russia and above all Germany: the bloc which launched the conflict was the one dominated by Germany, which had a smaller colonial empire than Belgium or Portugal, even though it had become the greatest economic power in Europe. This situation was even clearer in the second world war when Germany's situation had got even worse, owing to the conditions of the treaty of Versailles which had deprived it of its rare colonial possessions and even part of its ‘own' national territory. Similarly, Japan destroyed the US Pacific Fleet in 1941 in the hope of enlarging a colonial empire which it judged insufficient given its new economic power: it had only acquired Manchuria at the expense of the Chinese in 1937. Thus, the imperialist brigands who precipitated the war as a result of the narrowness of their ‘lebensraum' were in the end the ones least placed to win:
In many respects, the USSR and its bloc finds itself today in a similar situation to that of Germany and its allies in 1914 and 1939. In particular, the main problem confronting both these powers has been their late accession to industrial development and to the world market, which forced them to make do with the crumbs left them by the older industrial powers (France and Britain in particular) after they had divided up the imperialist cake. However there is an important difference between the USSR today and Germany in the past. Although like Germany in 1914 and 1939, the USSR is today the second economic power in the world in the world (although in terms of GNP it has fallen behind Japan), it differs from Germany in that it no way has an industry and an economy which is in the, vanguard of development. On the contrary: it is ‘considerably and insurmountably behind at this level. This is one of the phenomena of capitalist decadence: the impossibility for newly-arrived national capitals to raise themselves to the level of development reached by the ‘established' powers. The industrial ascent of Germany took place at a time (the end of the 19th century) when capitalism was enjoying its greatest-ever prosperity, which enabled this economy to be the most modern in the world at the moment capitalism entered its decadence. The industrial ascent of modern Russia, after the terrible destruction of the first world war and of the civil war which followed the revolution, took place right in the middle of the decadent period (the late 20s and 30s): because of this, Russia never really managed to break out of its underdevelopment and is actually one of the most backward parts of the bloc it dominates [1].
Thus, as well as having a much smaller empire, the USSR suffers from an enormous financial and economic weakness with regard to its western rival. This economic gap is al the more evident when we look at the two blocs as a whole: thus, of the eight main world powers (in terms of GNP), 7 are part of NATO or are, like Japan, sure allies of the USA. In contrast, the USSR's allies in the Warsaw Pact are at positions 11, 13, 19, 32, 40 and 55. This weakness has repercussions on a whole series of areas today.
One of the main consequences of the economic superiority of the western bloc, and especially of the USA, is the variety of means at its disposal for maintaining its imperialist domination. Thus, the USA can establish its domination over countries governed by democratic regimes, by the army, by a single party apparatus and even by Stalinist type parties. The USSR, on the other hand, can only control regimes directly in its image (and even more so) or military regimes directly relying on the support of troops from its bloc.
Similarly the Western bloc can, alongside the military card, make wide use of the economic card in controlling its dependents (bilateral aid, intervention of organs like the IMF, the World Bank, etc). This isn't the case with the USSR which doesn't have, and never had, the means to play such a card. The cohesion of its bloc is based entirely on its military force.
Thus the economic weakness of the Russian bloc explains its unfavourable strategic position on the world arena: the limited nature of the means at its disposal has never allowed it to really break out of its encirclement by the American bloc. It also explains that even on the strictly military terrain - which is the only one remaining to it - it has no chance of victorious confrontation with its rival.
So whereas at the beginning of the century or in the 3Os Germany was able, thanks to its modern industrial base, to gain a temporary military advantage over the countries whose hegemony it was contesting, the USSR and its bloc, owing to its economic and technological backwardness, has always been behind the American bloc at the level of armaments. What's more, this lagging behind has been aggravated by the fact that, since the Second World War - and this is an expression of the constant accentuation of the main tendencies of capitalist decadence - the whole world hasn't had a moment's respite from local conflicts and military preparations. This wasn't the case following the first world war.
Since the Second World War, the USSR has been able to do no more than run behind - a long way behind - the military power of the Western bloc, without ever being able to catch up. The enormous effort it has devoted to armaments, notably in the 60s and 70s, while permitting it to attain a certain parity in some areas (notably in nuclear fire power), has had the result of further aggravating its industrial backwardness and its fragility in the face of the convulsions of' the world economic crisis. And with the exception of Indochina, it hasn't enabled it to preserve the positions which it had conquered through the wars of decolonisation against the Western bloc countries. The examples of China and Africa (especially Egypt) illustrate this.
At the turning point of the 70s and 80s there was an important change in the context in which imperialist conflicts' had been played out since the end of the world war. Behind this change is the increasingly obvious fact that the capitalist economy is in a total impasse: the 1981-83 recession was a particularly clear illustration of this. This economic impasse can only accentuate the headlong flight towards war by all sectors of the world bourgeoisie (see in particular the article ‘The 80s, Years of Truth' in International Review n°20, 1st quarter 1980).
In this context we are seeing a qualitative change in the evolution of imperialist conflicts. Its major characteristic has been the general offensive of the American bloc against the Russian bloc. The basis for this offensive was laid by Carter with his ‘human rights' campaigns and the essential decisions he made about armaments (MX missile systems, Euro-missiles, the Rapid Deployment Force), and it has been continued and expanded by Reagan through a major increase in the military budget, the sending of US expeditionary corps to Lebanon in 1982 and Grenada in 1984, the decision to go ahead with ‘Star Wars' and, more recently, the bombing of Libya by the US Air force and the deployment of the US Navy in the Persian Gulf.
This offensive aims to complete the encirclement of Russia by the western bloc, depriving it of all the positions which/it had been able to establish outside its direct sphere of domination. It involves the definitive expulsion of the USSR from the Middle East, already realised by the insertion of Syria into the west's imperialist plans in the mid-1980s and the disciplining of Iran and the reintegration of this country into its strategy. It also has the ambition of recuperating Indochina. In the final analysis its aim is to strangle the USSR completely, depriving it of its status as a world power.
One of the major characteristics of this offensive is the US bloc's increasingly massive use of its military power, in particular through sending expeditionary corps, American or from other central countries (especially France Britain or Italy, to theatres bf conflict, as in 1982 to the Lebanon and in ‘87 to the Persian Gulf. This characteristic corresponds to the fact that the economic card that was so widely used in the past to get the better of the its adversary is no longer sufficient:
On this point, the Iran events have been particularly revealing. The collapse of the Shah's regime and the consequent paralysis of the US bloc's war machinery in this region enabled the USSR to step up its presence in Afghanistan, installing its troops a few hundred kilometres from the ‘hot seas', of the Indian Ocean. These events convinced the American bourgeoisie of the need to set up its Rapid Deployment Force (and it was able to get the population to swallow this by exploiting the affair of the American embassy hostages in Tehran in 1980), and in general to reorient its imperialist strategy.
Thus the present situation differs from the one that preceded the Second World War by the fact that it is now the most powerful bloc which is on the offensive:
However, this doesn't call into question the fact that it's the bloc in the most unfavourable position which in the final analysis unleashes the generalised conflict. For the USSR, the stakes are very high. At the end of the US offensive is a life or death question for this country. If the American bloc is able to take its offensive to its ultimate conclusions (which presupposes that it isn't being held back by the class struggle), the USSR would have no alternative but to resort to the terrible means of generalised war:
So while in the first analysis the schema that applied in 1914 and 1939 remains essentially valid today (i.e. that it is the bloc in the most unfavourable position which takes the decisive step), in the period ahead of us we can expect to see a progressive advance by the US bloc (in contrast to the 1930s when it was Germany that was marking up the points: Anschluss in ‘37, Munich in ‘38, Czechoslovakia in ‘39...).
In response to this advance, we can expect to see a dogged, blow-by-blow resistance by the Russian bloc wherever such resistance is possible, which will mean a continuation and intensification of military confrontations in which the US bloc will be more and more directly involved. In this sense, the diplomatic card, while it will still be played, will more and more tend to be the result of a balance of forces already established on the military terrain.
This is in fact what has happened with the signature on December 8 1987 of the Washington agreement between Reagan and Gorbachev concerning ‘intermediate range' (between 500 and 5,500km) missiles, and the current negotiations about the withdrawal of Russian troops from Afghanistan.
In the latter case, if such a withdrawal takes place, it will be the result of the impasse Russia has reached in this country, especially since the USA has been supplying the guerrillas with ultra-modern armaments like the Stinger air-to-ground missiles, which have done a great deal of damage to Russian planes and helicopters.
As for the Washington agreement about the elimination of ‘Euromissiles', it must be underlined that this is also a result of military pressure exerted by the US and its bloc on the rival bloc, notably the installation of Pershing 2 and Cruise missiles in various western countries (Britain, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy) from November ‘83 onwards. The fact that this agreement is largely the result of a Russian initiative and that the number of missiles and nuclear warheads eliminated by the USSR is much higher than on the American side (857 missiles and 1687 warheads as opposed to 439 missiles and the same number of warheads), illustrates the fact that it is indeed the USSR which is in a position of weakness (especially when you consider that its SS20 missiles are much less precise than Pershing 2 which can strike to within 40 metres of the target from a distance of up to 1800km, not to mention the Cruise missiles which are even more precise from distances of up to 3000km).[2]
For the leader of the Western bloc, the operation is even more useful to the extent that the withdrawal of its own Euromissiles doesn't imply any withdrawal or stopping the deployment of weapons produced by its allies: in fact, behind the Washington agreement there is the USA's intention to pass a portion of its military burdens over to the European countries. This increased involvement of the countries of Europe in the defence of the US bloc was confirmed in the summer of ‘87 in a very significant manner by their often massive participation in the western armada in the Persian Gulf. It was also clearly confirmed at the end of 87 with the Franco-British decision to work jointly on an air-to-ground nuclear missile with a range of over 500km, and by the recent French-German military manoeuvres, which prefigure an increasing integration of these two armies, and eventually, of all the armies of the Western European countries. It was confirmed yet again at the last NATO ‘summit' at the beginning of March where the members of this alliance, i.e. mainly the countries of Western Europe, committed themselves to regularly modernising their weapons (in fact to further military expenditure).
Thus the Washington agreements in no way call into question the general characteristics of the inter-imperialist antagonisms which dominate the world today. In particular, the suppression of the ‘Euromissiles' is just a tiny scratch in proportion to the, phenomenal destructive potential in the hands of the great powers. Despite the frightful destructive capacities contained in the 2100 atomic weapons to be eliminated (each one more powerful than the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima in August 1945), they only amount to a small part of the 40,000 bombs which remain ready to be launched by missiles of all kinds installed on the ground, on planes, on submarines or ships - not to mention the nuclear shells probably tens of thousands which can be fired by 6,800 canon.
If the Washington agreement doesn't involve. any real reduction in the formidable destructive potential in the hands of the governments of the great powers, neither does it open up the prospect of disarmament and of the end to the threat of war. The present ‘warming up' in the relations between the two main powers, the amicable exchanges between Reagan and Gorbachev, which have been swapped for the mutual insults of a few years ago, don't mean at all that international relations are about to be governed by ‘reason' instead of the ‘madness' of conflict between the powers. As the resolution on the international situation adopted by the ICC's 7th Congress in July ‘87 put it:
"In reality, pacifist speeches, grand diplomatic manoeuvres, and international conferences of all sorts have always been part of the bourgeoisie's preparations for imperialist war (e.g. the 1938 Munich agreements). In general, they alternate with war mongering speeches and their function is complimentary. While the latter aim to make the population, and especially the working class, accept the economic sacrifices demanded by the arms race and the preparations for general mobilisation, the former try to let each state appear to be the ‘peace-lover', not at all to blame for the increasing tension, in order to afterwards justify the ‘necessary' war against an enemy ‘who bears the entire responsibility' for its outbreak. In recent years and especially on the part of the Reagan administration, we have witnessed just this kind of alternation between ‘pacifist' and ‘warmongering' talk, from its initial ‘extremism', designed to justify the gigantic increases in military spending and the various interventions abroad (Lebanon, Grenada), which gave way to an ‘openness' to Russia's proposals once the orientation of increased military preparation had been consolidated, and it was necessary to ‘show willing'."
The fact that the main ‘target' of these different campaigns is the world proletariat becomes clearer when you examine the moment in which each one developed. The culminating point of the warlike campaign was at the beginning of the 80s when the working class had suffered an important defeat, concretised and aggravated by the repression of the Polish workers in December 81. The working class was momentarily dominated by feelings of powerlessness and disorientation. In this context, the warlike campaigns promoted by the governments, the daily speeches about war, while producing among the workers a justified disquiet about the terrible prospect the system is holding out to humanity, had the principal result of increasing their feelings of powerlessness and disarray, making them an easier ‘prey' to the big pacifist demonstrations organised by the forces of the left in opposition. The pacifist campaign launched by the western governments and conducted by Reagan, got going in 1984 just after a whole series of massive struggles in Europe had proved that the working class had come out of its temporary disarray and was regaining confidence in itself. In these conditions, the disquiet resulting from the warlike speeches is much less likely to lead to feelings of powerlessness among the workers. In fact, it risks accelerating the development of consciousness about the fact their present struggles against capitalism's economic attacks are the only real obstacle to the unleashing of a world war, that they prepare the ground for the overthrow of this barbaric system. Today's pacifist campaigns are aimed precisely at conjuring away this ‘risk'. No longer able to make the workers fatalistically accept the perspective of a new aggravation of imperialist conflicts and the terrible implications contained in such a perspective, the bourgeoisie is now trying to lull the workers to sleep, to make them believe that the ‘wisdom' of the world's leaders is capable of ending the threat of a third world war.
Thus, the essential idea that these two types of campaigns try, with different arguments, to fix in the workers' heads, is that the fundamental questions in the life of society, and in particular the question of war, are decided outside of any intervention of the proletariat as a class.
Revolutionaries must put forward the exact opposite of this view: all the ‘conferences', all the ‘agreements' between imperialist brigands, all the wisdom of the world's statesmen amount to nothing: only the working class can prevent the present crisis from leading to a third world war and thus to the destruction of humanity; only the working class, by overthrowing capitalism, can free humanity from the curse of war.
Today, when the western bourgeoisie is doing everything it can to hide the real gravity of the sending of its formidable armada to the Persian Gulf - which raises the perspective of a considerable intensification of tensions between the two great powers; when it presents the decisions of the last NATO summit as a call for the continuation of disarmament and a reduction of these tensions, whereas what they really decided on was an increase in arms expenditure and an aggravation of imperialist conflicts; when Gorbachev is everywhere presenting himself as the great champion of peace - at such a time as this, it is up to revolutionaries to underline and emphasise, as this article seeks to do, the enormous dimensions, and the inevitable character of the barbarism into which this system is plunging society. At the same time they have to strengthen their denunciation of all pacifist illusions, carrying out the work their predecessors undertook at the beginning of the century:
"The formulae of pacifism: universal disarmament under the capitalist regime, tribunals of arbitration, etc, are not only a reactionary utopia but a way of duping the workers, of disarming the proletariat and distracting it from its real task, which is the disarmament of the exploiters." (Lenin, Programme of the Bolshevik Party, adopted in 1919).
FM.
[1] This Review has on several occasions (see in particular the ‘Report on the International Situation' from the 3rd ICC Congress in IR 18 and ‘On The Critique of the Theory of the Weak Link', International Review n°37), dealt with Russia's economic backwardness, and its incapacity to catch up with the west, so there is no need to go over this again.
[2] This is also one of the reasons why the conflicts of the ‘Cold War' at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s didn't degenerate into a world conflagration: the failure of Russia's attempts in Berlin (the blockade of West Berlin between April 48 and May 49, outflanked by a Western bloc airlift) and Korea invasion of South Korea by North Korea in June 1950, which led to the sending of American troops and to an armistice in July 1953 in which the North lost some of its territory), convinced it from then on that it lacked the means to carry out its objectives. The USSR's later attempts to improve its position have also mostly met with failure. This was the case, for example, in 1961, with its attempt to install nuclear missiles in Cuba directly threatening US soil, and which it had to abandon after the US imposed its naval blockade. This is why all the speeches about the so-called military ‘superiority' of the Warsaw Pact over NATO, especially in Europe, are pure propaganda. In 1932, the aerial battle over the Bekaa plain in Lebanon was conclusive: 82 planes to nil in favour of Israel, equipped with American material, against Syria equipped with Russian material. In Europe, NATO doesn't need as many tanks and planes as the Warsaw Pact to have a crushing superiority.
The media, the television newsreels, the press, are all full of news. Little by little during the last year, we have learnt everything there is to know, more even, about the Austrian President Waldheim's Nazi past, and Chirac saying “balls” to Thatcher, to cite only two of the countless "important news events" that have cost so much ink.
By contrast, only the most painstaking reader, scouring several papers every day, could ferret out the rare news concerning the daily miseries and struggles of millions of men. Occasionally, between brackets, we hear that a strike has ended ... but whith no one spoke of when it began. Or, in an article in the Portuguese Socialist Party, we learn that the whole country is being shaken by a wave of "social discontent' (February 88). And when a workers' struggle is too big and has too much of an echo among the public for news of it to be censured, then lies and total misinformation are brought into play. Or else, the workers in struggle are simply subjected to insults.
The bourgeoisie is doing everything it can to hide the reality of the workers' struggles. It is no longer possible today to hide capitalism's economic bankruptcy. The international bourgeoisie is preparing still more dramatic attacks against the living conditions of all humanity, and especially against those of the world proletariat. The medias' censorship of any news about the struggle aims to limit, and if possible prevent completely, the development of the proletariat's confidence in itself, its strength, and its combat.
But the bourgeoisie is not only trying to hide the workers' struggles. The media are being singularly discreet, apart from occasional very precise propaganda campaigns, about the major nations of the Western bloc's armada, on a war footing in the Persian Gulf to confront the Russian bloc, under the pretext of bringing Khomeiny's Iran to reason. And yet, not a day passes without some kind of military operation, not to mention the continuing war between Iran and Irak. The great powers are strengthening their weaponry, all the while trying to hide behind campaigns about East-West "disarmament" (the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, the NATO summit, etc). Everywhere, everything possible is being done to limit the development of a consciousness that capitalism means war: that if it is not destroyed from top to bottom, it has nothing to offer humanity but a Third World War.
The full horror of the future that capitalism is preparing for us appears in the Middle East. Not content with having sent more than a million men to their deaths at the front, Iran and Irak are now massacring the civilian population by launching missiles blindly into city centres, to "put pressure" on the enemy. The horror of the situation in Lebanon has become endemic, and spread to the Israeli "occupied territories".
We denounce the vicious repression meted out by the Israeli state to the populations of the occupied territories: populations in revolt against poverty, massive unemployment, famine, and systematic, brutal, and constant repression. Hundreds have been shot. Thousands have been injured, tortured, and beaten up. The army has systematically and cold-bloodedly broken arms and hands, leaving some handicapped for life. In short, this is capitalist terror; it's banal and every-day -- nothing really out of the ordinary.
But it is not enough to denounce repression. It is also necessary to denounce unequivocally all those forces which act to derail this anger and revolt into the dead-end of nationalism. The PLO is one of them of course. But the whole Western bloc, with the USA in the lead, is also pushing for PLO's implantation – up to now relatively weak - in the occupied territories. The US is aiming, if not at the constitution of a Palestinian state, at least at the PLO controlling the population, since the Israeli state, with the best will in the world, is unable to do so. All we can expect from the PLO is the same state terror as that exercised by Israel. The PLO has already proved itself by maintaining capitalist order in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon.
Whether under the Israeli or a Palestinian state, the populations of the occupied territories or exiled in the Lebanese refugee camps or elsewhere are going to suffer still more from the poverty, repression, and permanent war that are continually worsening in this part of the world, just like the other populations in the region. The only limitation on this growing barbarity is the working class' ability to give a lead to the population as a whole in refusing the logic of war and misery. And this is possible: as we have seen in the street demonstrations in Lebanon against price rises, and in the workers' strikes and demonstrations in Israel.
And thirdly, we denounce the chorus of weeping left-wing democrats and suchlike humanists, who recommend "with all their heart" that repression should be "humane". Non-violent, probably. And how about a "humane" war?· Non-violent, and without anyone dying? These people aren't as stupid as that. In fact, they are hypocrites who with their tears, and the Western bloc's' propaganda campaign, aim to tie the population to the false alternative of Israel or the PLO.
The media publicity around the misdeeds of the Israeli army is consciously decided by the US bloc: it is using the violence of Israeli repression just as it did the massacres in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Chatila in Beirut during September 1982. The Israeli army was an accomplice to these massacres too, and they were used to justify in the eyes of the populations of the Western bloc the dispatch of US, British, French and Italian troops to Lebanon in 1982.
The situation in the occupied territories means that the Israeli state is in its turn being "Lebanised". The whole Middle East is being "Lebanised". The whole of society is falling apart, rotting. This decomposition is the product of capitalism's own putrefaction. Capitalism is rotting as it stands. The whole world over.
Economic collapse, growing poverty, and war: this is the full Horror of what capitalism has to offer us. And this at a time when the world holds the potential for a development of the productive forces that would put an end to poverty on this planet. The reality of these contradictions is forging the developing consciousness within the working class:
- of the future that the bourgeoisie is preparing unless we seize power,
- that only the working class is up to seizing power from the bourgeoisie, because everything only functions thanks to the workers; and because a ruling class that no ohe obeys is no longer a ruling class.
The development of revolutionary consciousness demands the unification of the proletariat. And this unification can only take place in the common struggle, for common interests, against a common enemy.
at the time of writing, and despite the censorship pf silence practised by the international press, the struggle is continuing in Britain: strikes in the car industry; permanent discontent and struggles among hospital workers, public service workers, and teachers. Nonetheless, from the news received from the comrades of our section in Britain, we can say today that the movement seems to be marking a pause.
In the first days of February, hospital workers, 15000 miners, 7000 sailors, 32000 Ford workers, as well as workers at General Motors (Vauxhall), Renault Truck (RVI), and teachers, were mobilised, in spite of trade union oppositions and sabotage[1]. Although unable to control the movement at first, the unions quickly won a first victory: in managing to delay the outbreak of the strike at Ford until after the national nurses' strike on 3rd February. Despite the simultaneity of the struggles, despite the various demonstrations of solidarity with the miners and nurses, despite the outbreak of an unofficial strike in the Ford factories in London on the 4th February, the unions took control of the situation by avoiding any attempt at unification and extension starting from Ford, the movement's real heart. Once the Ford workers were isolated, and their return to work gained at the cost of a 14% wage rise over two years, the chance of a first unification of the different struggles slipped away. Today, the trade unions, for the moment masters of the situation, are preparing a whole series of "days of action" sector by sector, in order to exhaust the workers' combativity in isolated actions without any perspective.
Despite the bourgeois propaganda about passive, resigned workers who have lost all combativity, the movement of struggle in Britain confirms the existence of an international wave of struggle. This movement follows that of the Belgian workers in spring 86, the strike on the French railways last winter, the workers' struggles of spring 87 in Spain, as well as the massive movement in Italy throughout 1987 and the struggle in Germany at the end of the same year. Not to mention the innumerable little conflicts, that nobody talks about but which nonetheless represent for the proletariat an immense gain in experience as to what capitalism really is. Nor are these struggles isolated in the heart of old Europe: there are struggles in Eastern Europe, in Yugoslavia, Russia, Roumania, and Poland; in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan; in Sweden and Portugal, in Greece; in Latin America … all since the beginning of 1987. Even in those countries where the bourgeoisie had up to now succeeded in preventing the outbreak of workers struggles, the crisis brutal acceleration has broken their fragile equilibrium.
Every continent is hit by the development of workers' struggles. Apart from their simultaneity these movements all reveal the same characteristics: they are massive; they hit several sectors at once, and those they hit are the most concentrated with the largest numbers of workers, especially the state sector; they all pose the necessity of breaking down corporatism and unifying the different sectors in struggle; they reveal an a ever-growing distrust for the trade unions by escaping from their control, at least at the outset ; and by trying to take the strugge's control and organisation out of their hands.
The situation today is marked by a terrible acceleration of history at every level: economic, in the plunge into the crisis; military, in the sharpening of inter-imperialist antagonisms; social, in the existence of workers' struggles for defence against economic attacks. For the proletariat, this acceleration at every level heralds still more dramatic attacks on its living conditions. These attacks are going to demand a great effort to develop the struggle at a higher level. More and more, the proletariat will have to assume the political aspect of its economic struggles:
“In the working class' combats to come a clear understanding of what is really at stake, of the fact that they are not merely a day by day resistance to capitalism's growing attacks, but the indispensable preparation for humanity's only way out -- the communist revolution – will be a precondition, both of their immediate effectiveness and of their ability truly to serve as preparations for the confrontations to come.
By contrast, every struggle that remains limited to the purely economic terrain of defence against austerity will be defeated more easily, both on the immediate level and as part of a far vaster struggle. It will be deprived of a vital weapon for workers today: generalisation, based on the consciousness of the class combat's social, not trade, nature. Similarly, from lack of perspectives, immediate defeats will be above all factors of demoralisation rather than acting as elements of experience and developing consciousness. (International Review, no 21, 2nd quarter 1980)
Struggles that are limited to fighting the economic consequences of the capitalist crisis without fighting its cause, will in the end be useless even on the economic level. Fighting the cause of humanity's misfortunes means not only fighting the capitalist mode of production, but destroying it from top to bottom, to put an end to wars and poverty for good. Only the proletariat can do this. To advance, the working class must draw the lessons of its past struggles. The British workers have just shown us that they have got over the severe defeat suffered during the miners strike,,In particular by drawing its main lesson: isolated strikes, even long ones, are doomed to defeat.
Italy's “creeping May” in 1969 had already been bitter confrontations between workers and unions.
and a strong suspicion of the unions is without doubt one of the Italian proletariat's principal characteristics. In 1984, workers fighting the abolition of wage indexation refused to obey the official unions, and the movement started under the leadership of the "factory councils" -- which were in fact rank-and-file union organisations. Its apogee, and at the same time its burial, came when one million workers' took part in the demonstration in Rome in April 1984.
The defeat of this struggle has required three years of "digestion", reflection, and maturation on of working class consciousness. The movement which began in the schools in the spring of 1987 rejected the official unions. It organised in mass meetings and delegates' committees the COBAS -- and spread throughout the country. In May, 40000 people demonstrated in Rome at the call of the COBAS alone. But despite widespread mobilisation, it did not succeed in spreading to other sectors. After the summer holidays, the movement in the schools ran out of steam, and the other areas of working class mobilisation above all in public transport remained dispersed and isolated, without really managing to take up where the school workers had left off. This was due in particular to the increasing grip of rank-and-file unionism on the COBAS which had sprung up in pretty well all the sectors in struggle.
When mobilisation drops, when the movement retreats, these delegates' committees become an easy prey for trade unionism, which diverts the vital search for solidarity and extension among the various sectors in struggle, towards false problems; problems which are nothing but traps to stifle the workers' combativity:
- first of all to the question of the COBAS' institutionalisation or legalisation, in order to turn them into new trade union forms which don't dare say their names, and which have the workers' confidence;
- towards the question of corporatism ((in Italy, among the railway engine drivers especially);
- in an over-hasty centralisation of the committees, in regional and above all national assemblies, where the leftist rank-and-file unionists can use to the full of all their bureaucratic and … trade union maneuvering skills.
In the name of extension, the rank-and-file unionists -- who in fact are completely opposed to it -- don't hesitate to push either too early or completely artificially for the "centralisation" of the workers' first immature attempts to take the struggle into their own hands, the better to stifle them in the mass meetings at the base; not unlike buds which develop too early, and are killed by the last winter frosts. Only the struggle's movement and vitality, the existence of workers' mass meetings, the search for extension, and the process towards the workers' taking charge of the struggle themselves, can lead to the vital, and real, centralisation of workers' combats.
The December 87 movement focused an the opposition to 5000 redundancies at the Krupp factory in Duisberg was the mast important struggle in Germany since the 1920's. The German proletariat is called to play a central part in the revolutionary process because of its concentration, its power, its immensely rich historical experience, and its links with the proletariat of East Germany and the Eastern bloc. The struggles in December have dealt a blow to the myths of German prosperity, and of German workers' discipline and docility. We are at the beginning of massive struggles in West Germany.
This struggle was important because, because it provoked the participation from workers in different towns and different sectors, in a movement of class solidarity. Not in a strike, but in street demonstrations, in mass. meetings and mass delegations. Whereas in the French rail workers' strike (SNCF) the central question was still extension from one isolated sector to the rest of the class, in Germany, the question of unifying the struggle around "the Krupp workers was posed right from the start.
But this struggle is. important above all for what it heralds for the future. In spite of its inexperience in confronting the unions and their maneuvers, the left-wing parties and the leftism of the rank-and-file unionists, nonetheless as soon as it entered the social scene the German proletariat clearly demonstrated the major characteristic of and perspective for the movements to come: the attacks are going to hit the central sectors, the very heart of the European proletariat, in the major working class concentrations the Ruhr, the Benelux countries, the regions of London and Paris, and the North of Italy. These central fractions are going to enter the fray and open up, "offer" to the whole class, the concrete perspective of uniting the workers' struggles in each country: the perspective of the struggle's international generalisation.
The movements in Italy together and crystallise the ALL the struggles going on in over and above local and particularities:
- not remaining isolated in corporatism,
- spreading the struggle,
- organising in mass meetings, and not letting unionism whether official or "hidden", "radical", or rank-and-file – stifle them with its sabotage and manoeuvres,
- taking up the general and political nature of the struggles: the whole working class is attacked, and the struggles must be united in one struggle against the different states.
The struggles to come will not be won in advance, automatically. The working class must prepare them and prepare itself for them. It has done and continues to do so through the struggle itself, through its own practice. In developing its experience, and drawing the lessons from it, by gaining confidence in its own strength, the whole working class is strengthening itself collectively and massively; it is doing so both during and after its struggles, "invisibly" or underground, as Karl Marx said of the “old mole”.
In this task, the most militant and class consious workers -- whether orqanised or not have a special part to play. Amongst them, the revolutionary groups are irreplaceable, and must live up to what the situation demands.
This means, first of all, recognising it: recognising the present international wave of struggles, and its significance. For communist groups, this recognition must ensure their political intervention on the ground, in the struggles. This intervention must be correct and effective both immediately and in the long term. For it to be so, revolutionaries must avoid falling into the traps laid by rank-and-file unionism, and above all they must not let themselves be imprisoned, as we have seen in recent years, in:
- the "fetishisation" of self-organisation through the coordinations and other centralising "national assemblies" set up by left unionists;
- corporatism and localism, even in the violently radical and extremist form purveyed by the CP's and the leftists.
Finally, revolutionaries must encourage and take part in workers regroupments, and in particular help in the formation of struggle committees. The most combative workers cannot wait for movements to begin before they start making contacts, in order to discuss and think together; in order to prepare themselves for future struggles so as to be able to agitate within them. And then, whatever the unionists' tricks and maneuvers, or even violent opposition, they must intervene and speak out in strikes, meetings, and street demonstrations to defend the needs of the struggle and draw the mass of workers with them.
The immediate defense of working class living conditions is at stake: and so is the future of humanity itself, seriously threatened as it is by capitalism's blind and suicidal absurdity. Only the international proletariat today can limit the spread of misery. Above all, only the proletariat can put an end to capitalist barbarity.
RL: 7/3/88
[1] For a more precise account of this movement, we refer our readers to our various territorial publications.