The collapse of the stock exchange, a new aggravation of the economic crisis; the mobilization of the armed forces in the main western industrial countries for the war in the Persian Gulf. History is accelerating. The contradictory forces undermining capitalist society are exacerbating. The system is, with increasing rapidity, plunging mankind into poverty, barbarism and war.
But the economic crisis isn't just that. The crisis which has been ravaging the world economy for 20 years has also developed the contradictions between the classes. It is creating the conditions for the unification of the only social force that can offer a way out: the world working class.
**************
The stock market crash has announced that the world economy is sinking deeper into recession, ie. into unemployment, low wages, super-exploitation, poverty, repression, insecurity and military tensions. Everyone knows it, or at least feels it in a more or less confused way. But the ruling class is exerting an enormous presure -through repression, through the media, through its omnipresent propaganda - aimed at sustaining feelings of powerlessness in the face of the existing order.
However, for the exploited class, this is no time for lamentation, for resignation, for the ‘ostrich' policies recommended by the ruling class. More than ever, its struggle against capitalism is on the agenda. More than ever it is faced with the necessity to unify its scattered struggles of immediate resistance and to take them to their logical conclusion, to the battle not just against the consequences of exploitation but against exploitation itself. The world economic crisis develops the conditions for such a process. And this above all is what the working class must have in mind when faced with the calls for resignation from all the defenders of the national economy.
The economic crisis weakens the power of the world bourgeoisie
The economic crisis inevitably results in ferocious attacks against workers' living conditions. But this doesn't mean that the world bourgeoisie is getting stronger. Faced with the crisis of its system, the ruling class has nothing more to offer but the war of each against all. Competition becomes more acute, both on the commercial and military levels. Those who gain from these struggles don't create new wealth; they simply enrich themselves on the corpses of their vanquished rivals. The bourgeoisie is no longer able to carry out the only social function which allows it to base its power on anything more than brute force: the function of organizing the social production of the means of existence. The bourgeoisie can no longer produce; it only survives through destruction. Economic destruction: massive unemployment, factory closures, the destruction of harvests and ‘unsaleable surpluses.' Military destruction: arms production, wars. Thus its power is based more and more on repression and ideological lies. And history shows that for a ruling class, this is a situation of weakness. "You can do everything with bayonets except sit on them," said Talleyrand in the days when the bourgeoisie still had a revolutionary role and was sure of its ‘social usefulness.'
What the proletarians have to see in the present aggravation of the economic crisis is that at the same time as this erodes the foundations of the bourgeoisie's power, it also develops the objective conditions for the unification of the world working class, for a development of its revolutionary class consciousness and of its combat against capitalism.
The crisis creates the conditions for proletarian unification
The crisis tends to unify the international proletariat because the crisis unifies the conditions of existence of the exploited class, because the attacks of capitalism tend to be more and more simultaneous on all sectors of the working class, in all countries. It's no longer mainly the least developed countries which are going through this austerity. West Germany, Japan, like all the little ‘miracles' of the Far East (Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan) or Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela), just like the oil producing countries -all those countries which, at one moment or another, have in recent years appeared to have been spared from the crisis, are now experiencing the same kind of unemployment and misery as the countries which were hit earlier on.
When the development of the crisis is relatively slow, the bourgeoisie is able to disperse its attacks, in time and geographically, with the conscious aim of avoiding sudden and, above all, united reactions. The famous ‘Davignon Plan' put into place by the governments of the EEC with the goal of laying off thousands of steel workers all over the continent, and which was very careful to disperse the attacks over a number of years and going from one country to another, was an illustration of this kind of tactic. The aggravation of the economic crisis makes it more and more difficult to plan this kind of dispersed attack. Pushed forward by its own imperatives of capitalist competition and profitability, the bourgeoisie is compelled to hit the whole working class more and more simultaneously, rapidly and violently. The massive attacks by the bourgeoisie create the conditions for a massive response by the proletariat. The Polish bourgeoisie has learned to its cost, in 1980 and in 1970, how violent measures like the overnight doubling of milk and meat prices can constitute such a threat to the maintenance of its order. The policies of ‘privatization' and ‘deregulation', like Gorbachev's ‘perestroika' or Teng Shiao Ping's ‘liberalism', all have the aim of avoiding such disorders. Unfortunately for the bourgeoisie, it's too late - the world economic crisis is too deep to allow it to hide the massive nature of its attacks.
The worst trap for the working class would be to see only ‘misery in misery', and not to seize hold of the possibilities for unification contained in the collapse of the economic system. The working class can only unite in and for the combat against what divides it: capitalism. This is being confirmed every day by the workers' struggle all over the planet. The fact that in little more than a year the working class has developed massive struggles like those in Belgium ‘86 or in South Korea during the summer of 1987, that it has launched simultaneous struggles in Yugoslavia and Rumania, Italy and Bangladesh, shows this quite unambiguously.
The crisis lays bare the real stakes in the workers struggle
The capitalist economic crisis lucidly illustrates the simple but fundamental truth that society has reached a total impasse not because of any technical problems or a lack of material means, but because of the social organization of production. The bourgeoisie responds to the crisis of its system through destruction and through threatening to launch a new worldwide destruction as it did after the crisis of the ‘30s. Unsatisfied economic needs are developing at a dizzying speed at the same time as society has at its disposal the most powerful technical capacities - capacities that could allow humanity to live like ‘masters without slaves', in a society where the only goal of productive activity would be the unlimited satisfaction of human needs.
The more the crisis deepens, the more clearly will appear the contrast between what is materially possible and what exists in capitalist reality, and the more the proletariat will be able to grasp the historic scope and significance of its struggles.
The triumph of Marxism
The real dynamic of capitalism provides a striking verification of the marxist analysis which affirms the inexorable nature of the capitalist crisis and the fact that this crisis creates the objective material conditions - necessary though not sufficient - for the unification and revolutionary action of the working class.
However, ruling classes never believe in the possibility of their own disappearance...except perhaps in some kind of unnamable chaos. They only see of reality what their class blinkers allow them to see. The bourgeoisie no more understands the underlying reasons for the violent crisis shaking its system than it sees in workers' strikes the possibility of a communist society. More than anything else it fears the generalization of the workers' struggles because it is afraid of losing control of the situation and thus of its privileges, not because it glimpses in them a society without poverty or exploitation.
That the bourgeoisie doesn't see how the crisis can lead to the transformation of the workers' defensive struggles into revolutionary offensive struggles is quite normal. What are more surprising are the objections to these marxist fundamentals raised by currents who claim to be partisans of Marx and of the communist revolution.
Three arguments based on a superficial observation of history are often cited against marxist analyses:
1. During the ‘80s the crisis has been deeper and has hit the working class harder than during the ‘70s. However, there are less strikes.
2. The great economic crisis of 1929 didn't lead to revolutionary struggles but to the mobilization of the workers behind their national bourgeoisie, to the workers slaughtering each other in a world-wide butchery which left 50 million dead.
3. In the past the workers' struggles which have led to a revolutionary challenge to the power of the bourgeoisie weren't produced during a period of ‘pure' economic crisis but during or after wars between nations.
We have often replied to these kinds of arguments in our press, and particularly in this Review[1]. However, at a time when the acceleration of the economic crisis is bringing the deadline of history closer, it seems to us important to recall certain essential elements of the perspective for today's workers' struggles.
‘There are less strikes in the ‘80s'
It's true that in general there have been less strikes, less days lost due to strikes' as the statistics put it, during the last few years than during the wave of struggles at the end of the ‘60s or during the ‘70s. It's also true that the economic crisis, if you measure the effects of it, like unemployment for example, has been much deeper and wider in the ‘80s. But to deduce from this that the economic crisis doesn't create the conditions for the unification of the proletariat is to be completely ignorant of how this process of unification takes place.
This process can't be measured mechanically by looking at the number of strike days in this or that country. You have to use other criteria such as the consciousness behind the struggle or the international scope of the movement.
Strikes in the ‘80s may be less numerous than in the previous decade but they are much more significant. To go on strike today means confronting the threat of unemployment, this insidious repression which is like a gun pointing at every worker's back. This requires a lot more will and determination than taking part in a dozen dead-end union days of action, the kind that was so common in the ‘70s. And this is the case even when less hours of striking are involved.
The consciousness which informs workers' struggles today is much deeper than it was in the period we've often referred to as the years of illusions: illusions in ‘national liberation', in ‘the left in power' or in putting bankrupt firms under workers' self-management. Today, in the main industrial centers of Europe, as in other countries where the ‘democratic' forms of the bourgeoisie's dictatorship have been around for a long time, the proletariat has lost an enormous amount of illusions in union institutions, in the parties which are part of the apparatus of the ruling class (CPs, SPs, Democrats, etc), in the role of elections, in the possibility of getting out of the crisis by making sacrifices for the firm or the nation, and so on. The majority of the important movements of the working class begin outside the unions, and confrontations between the workers and their so-called representative organizations are becoming more and more frequent. After the struggles in Belgium in the Spring of ‘86, which showed how to extend a movement of struggle despite the unions; after the railway workers' strike in France in the Winter of ‘86-87, when there was an attempt to form centralized coordinations outside the unions, the workers' struggle in Italy during the course of 1987 has shown, right from the beginning, with the movement of school-workers, then of other sectors, particularly transport, a ferocious determination to wage the fight outside union control by creating independent forms of organization founded on base assemblies.
There are less strikes in the ‘80s, but they express a much greater depth and maturity. A maturity which has been acquired not in spite of the economic crisis, but under its direct pressure.
And yet ...
‘The crisis of 1929 didn't lead to the unification of the working class but to its most violent negation: imperialist war'
Marxism has never seen social reality as a simplistic and unconscious mechanism. Without class consciousness, the capitalist crisis in itself can't lead to the unification of the proletariat's struggles. This is why, as we've already said, the economic crisis is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. The historic al experience of the ‘30s doesn't show that the economic crisis doesn't contribute to the process of proletarian unification, but that, in itself, the crisis alone isn't enough.
In 1929, when the Wall Street Crash took place the European proletariat was still reeling under the blows of the repression meted out to the international revolutionary wave which shook Europe at the end of the first world war. The Russian revolution, an event which had raised so many hopes, which had been a beacon for all workers' struggles, had died from suffocation after the bloody defeat of the revolution in Germany between 1919 and 1923.
In these conditions, having been through such a defeat, the proletariat wasn't up to the challenge thrown to it by capitalism in crisis.
To this must be added another difference at the level of consciousness in the class, one directly related to the unfolding of the crisis itself: in the 30s, the policies of rearmament and public works, which were a preparation for war, made it possible to reabsorb unemployment to a large extent, to limit the effects of the crisis (see the article in this issue on the economic crisis and its differences with that of ‘29).
The present generation of workers hasn't been through defeats on this scale in its biggest concentrations. 50 years of capitalist decadence have gone by, with their tally of barbarism, but also with their sum of slowly digested experiences, with their power to destroy illusions.
Capitalism in crisis is today facing a proletariat whose consciousness is being freed from the worst of the myths which tied it down 50 years ago.
And yet ...
‘All the important revolutionary struggles of the proletariat in the past were produced by wars and not by pure economic crises'
It's true that the greatest workers struggles up to now have been provoked by situations of war: the Paris Commune of 1871 by the Franco-Prussian war; the 1905 revolution in Russia by the Russo-Japanese war; the international revolutionary wave of 1923 by the First World War.
But it doesn't follow from this that war creates the best conditions for the proletarian revolution. Much less than the ‘pure' economic crisis - because imperialist war is simply a manifestation of the economic crisis - does war favor the unification of the working class. Because of the extremes of suffering they impose on the exploited classes in so short a time, wars do tend to create revolutionary situations. But this only takes place in countries which have been defeated (France in 1871 defeated by Prussia, Russia in 1905 defeated by Japan, Russia in 1917 defeated by Germany, Germany in 1918 defeated by the Allies). In the victorious countries war doesn't have the same consequences.
The economic crisis has a much slower effect on the living conditions of the working class. But this effect is also deeper and geographically wider. In the world economic crisis of capital, there are no ‘neutral' or victorious countries. It's the whole capitalist machine which is vanquished by its own contradictory laws. Impoverishment knows no frontiers. Furthermore, movements of struggle unleashed by the resistance against war come to a stopping point or at least tend to slow down significantly, when the bourgeoisie is compelled to make peace. The economic crisis, on the other hand, if it doesn't have a revolutionary outcome can only result in war. Here war plays a role in the development of consciousness, but as a threat.
Recognizing the role war has played in past revolutions in no way calls into question the unifying role that the economic crisis can have for today's workers' struggles. On the contrary.
The unification of the world working class will be a conscious affair or it won't happen. But this consciousness can only develop and be victorious in the objective conditions created by the economic crisis of the capitalist mode of production. What is shown by the evolution of workers' struggles in the ‘80s, by the experience of the ‘30s, and by the role played by war in previous proletarian revolutions isn't that the crisis prevents the unification of workers' struggles but that never before in history have the objective conditions for the proletarian revolution been so ripe.
It's up to the world proletariat to rise to the challenge which is being thrown to it by history.
RV 21.11.87.
[1] See among others the articles ‘The Proletariat in Decadent Capitalism' (IR 23), ‘The 80s are not the 30s' (IR 36) and ‘On the Historic Course' (IR 50).
We have already, in IR 50, briefly presented the Grupo Proletario Internacionalista of Mexico, on the publication of the first issue of its review, Revolucion Mundial. We are reprinting here a text from Revolucion Mundial no 2: a critique of the "Theses of the Alptraum Communist Collective" (CCA), also from Mexico[1], which were published in IR no 40 in January 1985.
We will let the GPI present themselves to our readers:
"We came together as a political group, only a few months ago under the name GPI, and united around principles set out[2] in the first issue of our publication Revolucion Mundial. Just beforehand, we were essentially a "discussion group": a largely informal grouping from the organizational standpoint, (without a name, or rules of functioning etc.), and politically concentrated and orientated in an effort of political discussion and clarification, mainly towards giving more precision to the "class frontiers", ie the principles we should defend.
"This rapid sketch of the GPI's formation would be incomplete were we not to mention an important fact: the influence of the propaganda of the international communist milieu, and especially the intervention carried out over the years in Mexico by the ICC.
"To sum up then, the CPI is a new group, formed, in general, as a break with bourgeois nationalist, and especially leftist, ideology, which has had such bad effects in Latin America. The GPI claims no continuity, either political or organizational, with any pre-existing group in this country - with the sole exception of the "Marxist Workers' Group"[3] one of the "Left Communist" fractions which existed in Mexico during the late ‘30s, and whose continuators the GPI aims to be. The GPI's formation is part of the process of communist minorities reappearance throughout the world, in particular since the historic resurgence of the world working class struggle since 1968."
The existence of two communist groups - CCA and GPI - both sharing essentially the same positions may come as a surprise. And indeed, were this situation to last, it would express a weakness in the revolutionary forces in Mexico. For the moment, it is no more than the product of circumstance, of the emergence of revolutionary elements in a newly formed milieu. The formation of a political relationship of discussion and debate between the two groups, closely linked to the international revolutionary milieu, is the "sine qua non" for the vital political clarification of all revolutionary elements in the country. It is the first and foremost condition for the regroupment of both groups, and of isolated elements, for the creation of one united proletarian political presence in Mexico.
If for no other reason, we would welcome the GPI's text that we are publishing here: "Crisis and Capitalist Decadence (critique of the CCA)". This critique is absolutely in the fraternal spirit whose necessity we have just insisted on: it initiates a debate with the CCA to clarify the question of the explanation of capitalist economic crises, and of capitalism's present period of decadence.
Moreover, the choice of crisis and capitalist decadence as a subject for discussion by new comrades who have just adopted class positions is a sign of their intention to give the very foundation of revolutionary positions a serious grounding. When we greeted the first issue of Comunismo, the CCA's publication, we wrote:
"Don't think that this question only concerns pedantic historians, or that it is only a theoretical question in itself without practical implications for revolutionaries. The recognition and comprehension of the end of the progressive, historical period of capitalism and its entry into decline was the basis of the formation of the 3rd International on the ruins of the 2nd International which died in 1914. It underpins the coherence of all the class positions which the comrades share with the ICC. And in particular the denunciation of the unions as organs of the capitalist state in the 20th century and the movements of national liberation as moments in today's inter-imperialist antagonisms." (IR no 44, p. 22).
Finally, we welcome the text's seriousness, its high quality, and above all the correct position that the comrades have adopted towards the CCA's "Theses". We have already criticized briefly the CCA's position[4] on the explanation of capitalist crises solely by the law of the "falling rate of profit", and above all the Alptraum Collective's inability to place capitalism's entry into decadence clearly at the turn of the century marked by the outbreak of the first world holocaust in 1914. Despite a few errors (which we will indicate by notes in the text), the comrades of the GPI defend the marxist explanation of crises, and the reality of capitalism's decadence since the turn of the century.
The GPI's text is part of the same endeavor as that expressed in the series of polemical articles (published in IRs nos 47-49) against the GCI on the same question of decadence; we also intend to continue this effort in a forthcoming issue. The participation in this debate of groups like the GPI and the CCA - which both recognize the existence of capitalist decadence -is a sign that despite the multitude of difficulties they confront, the world's slender revolutionary forces are in a time of upsurge, development, political clarification and regroupment. Through their seriousness, their effort to reappropriate the lessons and debates of the past, their concern for clarification and their intent to discuss, the CCA and the GPI are an example to today's proletarian political currents, and hold up to ridicule the GCI's "anti-decandentist theories", the EFICC's learned "discoveries" on state capitalism, and such like modernist ramblings which turn their back on marxism.
ICC 25.10.87
Crisis and decadence of capitalism
This article aims, through a critique of the Colectivo Comunista Alptraum, to help clarify our group's positions on the crisis and capitalist decadence.
We have chosen to put forward our viewpoint in the form of a polemic, since the attempts to do so in the form of Theses only produced pure generalities, conclusions without arguments, which would not at the moment be a help to our internal discussions.
We started with a critique of your positions since we had intended at the same time to enter into direct discussion with the CCA. Although this has not been able to develop, some demarcation is nonetheless necessary, since the Colectivo group is in contact with the international milieu.
We will deal with the following questions:
1) the characteristics of the present crisis,
2) the crisis' causes,
3) the limits of the market,
4) the particularities of capitalism's decadent epoch.
Our critique will refer to your "Theses" and other articles dealing with points under discussion. We will use nos. 1 and 2 of your review Comunismo.
The characteristics of the crisis
The CCA's Theses highlight two particularities of the present crisis:
-- "it is on a world scale", because capitalism exists worldwide, and dominates every branch of production. This kind of crisis goes in a spiral moving from the developed countries to the rest of the world capitalist system;
-- "it should be considered as a classic crisis of over-accumulation", which verifies the cycle of prosperity-crisis-stagnation.
The first particularity is extremely important in understanding the course of the world situation. Capitalism has spread throughout the planet, and its inherent crisis has therefore also become worldwide. The interpenetration of every national economy, the creation of a world market, prevents anyone escaping from the blows of the crisis. We must therefore throw into relief the fact that the crisis has no national solution. No sooner than a country or a region shows signs of recovery, than it is once again caught up in the whirlpool of this world crisis. The way out can only be on a planetary scale, and as we will see later, two roads lead there: war or revolution.
But in that case, the second point -- the crisis' cyclical nature -- is meaningless; it invalidates the first one -- unless we think that since the late 60's capitalism has undergone a real phase of prosperity. The idea that the crisis is at one and the same time "worldwide" and a verification of the prosperity-crisis-stagnation cycle leads the Colectivo into a juggling act when it comes down to analyzing the concrete situation.
Sometimes, they do indeed seem to be talking about a world crisis which has developed and deepened since the end of the 60's. They mention "the crisis which has got worse in recent decades", and that the "first signs of the present crisis are to be found in the mid-60's", and that since then the GDP has fallen and unemployment increased. But at the same time, they say that "in their ‘periodicity, the cyclical crises of over-production....tend to become more and more profound, above all since 1968". The Colectivo solves this contradiction by introducing two concepts: the "recession" and the "relative recovery". According to the CCA, we learn that:
"In 1973-74, the rise in oil prices hit capitalism's central regions, for it accentuated the fall in their-rate of profit. 1974-75 was a phase of recession when the peripheral areas, fundamentally oil-producers, were less affected since, thanks to the rise in oil prices and the resulting transfer of capital, their capital was increased and they were able to maintain an accelerated rhythm of accumulation in the following phase of relative recovery. 1980-83 was another phase of recession, but where the reverse happened; oil prices fell, and this countered the fall in the rate of profit in the central areas, whereas the countries in the periphery remained submerged by the depression; a situation aggravated by the transfer of surplus value to world finance capital. In a period of relative recovery this transfer helped strengthen the central regions. Nevertheless, by the end of 1985 the central areas began once again to show signs of recession through the measures of reorganization set in motion; and moreover, this recession also hit the oil-producing countries". (Comunismo no. 2, Editorial)
What does the CCA mean? If there have been several cyclical crises since 1968, we can only suppose that these crises are what the Colectivo calls "recession", and that the phases of "relative recovery" are equivalent to prosperity.
So there was a crisis from 1974-75, 1980-83, and in 1985, and prosperity in 1976-79, 1981-85, and presumably in the near future we can expect it again. In this case, we don't see the point of using such terminology, which is taken from the arsenal of bourgeois ideology, and whose meaning is ambiguous.
But the Colectivo knows very well that in reality, the situation is not like that. If they speak of "relative recovery", it is because they know that since 1968, there has been no "absolute recovery" of the world economy. If they speak of "recession", it is to differentiate "capital transfers" from the real, general, worldwide crisis.
If we were to take the Colectivo's reasoning to its logical conclusion, where the "transfer of capital" in a phase of "recession" opens the door to "recovery", it would lead us to conclude: firstly, that the crisis is merely regional (since in the "recession" some regions are "more affected" than others), and secondly that the crisis has a national solution. Thus, in the 1974 recessionary phase, the oil-producing countries gained a great mass of capital which allowed them to "maintain an accelerated rhythm of accumulation in the following phase of relative recovery". Of course, the Colectivo does not share the dream of the different fractions of the bourgeoisie: getting out of the crisis to the detriment of others. But this kind of idea is the result of identifying "recession" with a "cyclical crisis".
We must therefore recognize:
-- that since the mid-1960's, world capitalism has not been through any phase of prosperity without each time necessarily plunging still deeper into stagnation and paralysis; and that the "relative recovery" of certain regions is only momentary, and at the cost of an overall fall;
-- that the worldwide nature of capitalist production relations, and so of the crisis, makes any national way out of it impossible.
In other words, there began in the mid-60's a chronic crisis of capitalism as a world system, which is unavoidably deepening and becoming more general. The cycle of crisis-stagnation-prosperity no longer exists.
Certainly, in theory this cycle describes the life of capital: the crisis appears as a temporary solution to the contradictions of capitalism itself, as the destruction of productive forces opening the way to a new phase of prosperity. Theoretically, a "chronic" or "permanent" crisis could not exist, since it would mean the total destruction of the productive forces and capitalism's definitive collapse. This is probably why the Colectivo upholds the idea of the "classic cycle".
In the form in which it has spread, and deepened during all these years compared to the periodic crises of the previous century, today's crisis does indeed, paradoxically, appear as a permanent crisis. Not only that. From the turn of the century onwards, we can see that crises lead to wars of destruction of the productive forces; that capital, in trying to preserve itself, really does tend toward a definitive collapse, dragging all humanity down with it; that the "classical" industrial cycle has been turned into a barbaric cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction[5].
The facts need to be explained, and in the final analysis, theory must be "adapted" to reality and not the other way round as the Colectivo sometimes seems to claim. This is why we must get to the root causes of the crisis.
The causes of the crisis
Capitalism's development is determined by its contradictions; these latter lead to the crisis. The crisis is the open expression of all capitalism's contradictions, and at the same time their temporary solution. In the final analysis, the cause of the crisis is the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. This is why finding the cause of the crisis means defining capitalism's contradictions, and especially its fundamental contradiction.
Very generally and very briefly, these contradiction can be expressed as follows: in order to live, men must associate with each other in order to produce; they must contract determined relations of production, which are independent of their own will, and which correspond to a given degree of development of the instruments of production, and of the way in which labor is organized, ie of development of the productive forces. At certain moments the productive forces tend to break out of the relations of production. The relations of production are transformed, from an adequate framework for the productive forces, they become a hindrance to their further development. They need to be transformed; they are transformed. So opens an epoch of social revolution, where the old relations of production must be destroyed, and replaced by new ones that correspond to the material conditions of production. In capitalism, the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and capitalist relations of production gives rise to the crisis.
The paralysis of factories and the mass of products that can find no outlet, like the army of unemployed, point to an excess of productive forces for the relations of production based on the accumulation of capital and profit-making. Each crisis calls capitalism's existence into question.
But at the same time, each crisis appears as a temporary solution to these contradictions. On the one hand, through the destruction of a part of the productive forces; on the other, through an extension of the framework of the relations of production, which does nothing other than prepare new, still deeper and more widespread crises.
In this sense, the Colectivo insists:
"The crisis we are now living through is the result of the clash between the enormous development of the productive forces (existing wealth) and the capitalist relations of production impose' by private appropriation of production."
In the crises is expressed:
"...the historically limited character of its production relations which can only hold back the progressive development of social productive forces. Moments of crisis occur when capitalism is obliged to destroy a growing mass of productive forces, revealing the decadence of the system." ("Theses of the CCA" in International Review no. 40)
However, such a general explanation of capital's contradictions does not explain their determining causes. Nor does it tell us anything about the fundamental contradiction, or about the causes of the present crisis.
The Colectivo expands on its viewpoint in the "Theses" only when it deals with the question of decadence. But before discussing the relation between crisis and decadence, we have to get at the causes of the crisis; to do so, we will for the moment deal separately with what they say on this point. The Colectivo attributes the crisis to the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit:
"...both the development and the decline of the system reside in two essential factors: one expressing the form, in the general law of the tendency of the profit rate to decline..." (ibid).
They, they try to sum up this law in the following points:
-- the system's aim is the "increasing and uninterrupted formation of capital",
-- this implies the expansion of capital, the growth of labor productivity, and an accelerated development of the productive forces;
-- the above is expressed in the growth in the organic composition of capital: the volume of constant capital (means of production) grows more in relation to variable capital (labor power), which is the source of surplus value;
-- this leads to the fall in the rate of profit.
"At this point, capitalist crisis occurs when the accumulated capital is more than the profit rate which it can sustain or when the growing organic composition of capital does not correspond to an equivalent increase in value (...) the over-accumulation of capital in relation to its ability to exploit labor leads the capitalist system to a crisis" (ibid).
If we follow the Colectivo's polemic with the ICC, where they expand their arguments, we see that their criticism of the ICC lies in that the latter considers the law of the falling rate of profit as an insufficient explanation of the crisis, since for the ICC "capitalism's fundamental contradiction lies in its inability indefinitely to create markets for its expansion."
The Colectivo replies that it "does not reject the problem of realization" but that it is a mistake "to place the fundamental contradiction in the sphere of exchange" (Comunismo no. 2, p.34)
And the Colectivo adds:
"...when we referred (in the "Theses") to the level of essential determinations, we were referring simply to the level where surplus value, which according to Marx is the source of capitalist wealth, is generated and produced..."
"...The fundamental contradiction in the capitalist mode of production and exchange lies in the dominant pole of this totality, ie in the framework of production. Although in its singularity, it may also be determined by exchange, distribution, and consumption". The contradiction of production is between "the process of valorisation of capital, and the labor process" (Comunismo no. 2, p.35)
The CCA places the fundamental contradiction in production, for this is where surplus value is generated, this is the "dominant pole" in relation to exchange. However, since we also "remember" Marx, we have to say that if surplus value is only generated in production, it is only realized in exchange.
"Although capital, through the production process, reproduces itself as value and as new value, at the same time it finds itself as non-value, as something which is not valorized until it enters into exchange...." (Marx, Grundrisse, our translation)
"The conditions of direct exploitation, and those of realizing it, are not identical. They diverge not only in place and time, but also logically. The first are only limited by the productive power of society, the latter by the proportional relation of the various production branches and the consumer power of society. But this last-named is not determined either by the absolute productive power, or the absolute consumer power, but by the consumer power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduces the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum varying within more or less narrow limits." (Capital, Vol III, quoted in ‘Marxism and Crisis Theory', IR 13). In other words: there is a determining contradiction between the conditions in which surplus value is produced, and those in which it is realized, ie between production and the market. What then is the fundamental contradiction? Between labour and valorization, or between production and the market?
We consider that these are not in fact two different contradictions, but different aspects of the same one: the first indicates the content as an abstract category; the second is the concrete form in which it appears.
The internal contradiction between labor and valorization is repeated externally as between production and exchange (similarly, the commodity's internal contradiction between use value and exchange value is expressed in the concrete form of commodity and money).
In the abstract, the creation of value and surplus value appears as a barrier to the creation of use value. Concretely, the market appears as a real and determined limit for production.
The law of increasing accumulation of capital accompanied by a falling rate of profit does not exist independently of the problem of the market. The fact that the rate of profit falls through the increase in constant capital relative to variable capital, because a greater amount of total invested capital appropriates a proportionately smaller amount of surplus value, will only appear tangibly on the market when the capitalist can no longer find anyone to buy his commodities at the established price of production.
Nor are there two kinds of crisis: one of over-accumulation of capital, the other of overproduction of commodities. They are one and the same crisis in its two determinations. In its content, it is the inability to use all the existing capital given a determined rate of profit, and hence the devalorisation of capital. In its form, it is the lack of outlets for commodities, warehouses gorged with stock, and hence the paralysis and destruction of the means of production and consumption. The crisis originates as the contradiction between labor and valorization, and is realized as the contradiction between production and the market.
Those who explain the crisis solely by the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit may say that they go to the "bottom" of the question, to the origin of surplus value. But this kind of explanation is inadequate when we return to the terrain of concrete reality. If we make an abstraction of the market, ie if we leave it to one side, then the limits of capitalism, as the Colectivo poses them -- the absolute impossibility of increasing surplus value with any increase in capital -- will also appear as a pure abstraction, an inaccessible and purely theoretical limit.
Moreover, those who give their attention to the problems of realization in the market get a better grasp on the real course of events, in its multiple aspects, and on the real limits of production; although if they, ignore the basis of the origins of surplus value, every crisis appears to them as an absolutely insurmountable limit.
The CCA inclines toward the "dominant pole". It tries to explain the crisis solely through the law of the falling rate of profit. This is why it misses the real limits that capitalism is coming up against today. The crisis' obviously worldwide character has no special significance for the Colectivo: it is just one more in the "classic cycle". Its tendencies (towards war for example) are the same as in all the others. For the Colectivo, there is nothing new under the sun. There is only the confirmation of theory.
We need therefore to note not only each crisis' common traits, but also to study their particularities, their forms. Only thus will we understand the true course of events, by passing from the "origins of surplus value" to the limits imposed by the market.
The limits of the market
Let us now explain how the accumulation of capital with its falling rate of profit appears in the capitalists' inability to sell all their commodities at given production prices, ie in the limits of the market.
We have already seen that the capitalists' aim is profit and capital growth, which demands an increasing extraction of surplus value. The capitalists must not therefore consume all the surplus value they gain in luxury commodities: they must continue to invest a major part of it as capital, by increasing the scale of production. The accumulation of capital is the reinvestment of surplus value so that it functions as capital. But growth in production, and in the accumulation of capital, is not harmonious: it contains a contradiction, which is reflected in the fall in the rate of profit due to the changing organic composition of capital.
The organic composition of capital sums up the two aspects of capitalist production:
-- firstly, capital's technical composition, the relation that exists between means of production and workers employed. The development of the productive forces means that a given number of workers can set in motion ever more powerful means of production, making it possible to create a greater number of products (use values) in less time;
-- secondly, capital's value composition: the proportional relation existing between value simply transferred into the commodity (constant capital employed as means of production), and the value which returns to reproduce itself and which allows the creation of surplus value (variable capital invested in labor power).
The development of the productive forces, seen as accumulation of capital is expressed as a proportionately greater growth of constant capital in relation to variable capital. Of course, variable capital also increases, and the quantity of surplus value appropriated therefore increases as well; but this increase takes place at the price of a proportionately greater increase in constant capital, which brings about a decrease in the rate of profit -- which is the relation between the surplus value gained and total capital: (constant plus variable) invested. The more capital accumulation increases, the less -- proportionately -- is the surplus value obtained, which contradicts the aim of the capitalists. At a given moment, there is over-accumulation, ie too much capital in relation to the demands of the exploitation of labor power, and production is paralyzed.
The fall in the rate of profit would make capitalism's existence impossible were there not at the same time factors that counteract it: lengthening of the working day, intensification of work rhythms and reduction of wages make it possible to extract more surplus value without increasing investment; the diminution of production costs, over-population, and foreign trade make it possible to create new branches of production with a low organic composition of capital. The fall in the rate of profit thus appears solely as a tendency, which in spite of everything, still gets the upper hand in the crisis.
In this way, the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit expresses the contradiction between the productive forces and the relation of production. As production develops, it "takes no notice" of the creation of surplus value. This is why, at a given moment, the creation of surplus value opposes the continued advance of the productive forces. But this contradiction is internal, invisible. It must show itself concretely as a limit to exchange, as a limit to the realization of surplus value. This is a double limit, and has two aspects:
1) As a disproportion between different industries. Society's global capital is divided amongst a multitude of private capitalists, who compete among each other in search of the greatest profit. In this effort, each one introduces new production methods, better machines, and so pushes forward the development of the productive forces to gain market share by introducing cheaper commodities.
This means both that social production is divided up into a multitude of individual industries, but which form a chain -- the social division of labor -- where the production of one enters that of others either as raw material, or as a means of production, right down to the product of personal consumption.
However, the growth of each industry is not proportional to the demands of others, but is determined by private interest. It goes where it can find the greatest profit. Changes in the organic composition of capital, ie the more rapid growth of constant capital in relation to variable, mean here a disproportionate growth in the sector producing the means of production, in relation to the sector producing the means of subsistence: of heavy in relation to light industry, and of industry generally in relation to agriculture. All this is expressed in an over-production of commodities, an excess of products in demand by other capitalists.
If a capitalist at a given moment, because of his industry's disproportionate growth, is no longer able to sell his commodities at a price equivalent to the realization of surplus value, then his factory's output will slow, provoking a chain reaction. Further up the chain, his suppliers will no longer be able to sell their products either, while further down his clients will no longer be able to buy the product they need; all this in turn slows down their production, and so on. This is why overproduction only has to appear in a few key industries for the crisis to break out and spread. The crisis appears here as the result of anarchy in production, in opposition to the social division of labor.
Hence the illusion of bourgeois theories (as well as those of Hilferding and Bukharin) as to the possibility of avoiding new crises by means of a production regulatory mechanism such as private monopoly, or better still state capitalism, which would eliminate competition and disproportion. This kind of theory simply forgets that behind this disproportion lies the thirst for profit, that private monopolies and state capitalism also seek maximum profit, and that they can only reproduce the anarchy of production on a larger scale. The most striking proof is to be found not only in the competition between monopolies, but within them: eg, the price war within OPEC provoked by the disproportionate growth of each member; or again, the state capitalism of countries like the USSR, where anarchy of production and competition between companies within the same state reappear in spite of the "state plan."
The essential point in what we have said above, then, is that the appearance of modern monopolies, and of countries dominated by state capitalism does not mean a step forward, a "transition" from capitalism to socialism, nor does it lead to a "growing socialization" of production. All that this means, is that the material conditions for the existence of communist society have already been in existence for a long time[6] and that capital engenders these monstrous parodies of "social production" in a desperate but vain attempt not to sink in its own contradictions. 2) The second limitation that the realization of surplus value comes up against, is the working masses capacity for consumption. We are not of course talking about an absolute ability to consume, the complete satisfaction of their needs, but of the capacity of consumption determined by the antagonistic relations of distribution, ie the ability to pay.
In this case, the greater growth of constant in relation to variable capital appears as a greater growth of commodities in relation to wages.
The worker reproduces value equivalent to his wage (variable capital) and also gives another sum of value to the capitalist, without receiving anything in exchange (surplus value). If the capitalist can exploit more labor power with the same variable capital, he will obtain more surplus value. Hence capital's tendency to increase the length and intensity of the working day, and to lower wages. The result is to create an industrial reserve army, which puts pressure on active workers to accept a lower wage. This in turn increasingly restricts the working class' buying power. Capital tries to increase the creation of surplus value. It succeeds, but only by reducing the possibility of realizing this same surplus value[7].
It should be noted that we are speaking in terms of value. But it can also happen that the consumption of use-values increases, while the realization of surplus value nonetheless diminishes. If consumer goods production methods improve, this means that more can be produced in less time, ie with less value: the capitalists thus reduce the value of labour power, the variable capital invested, since it is possible to buy as much with less money, if not more; they thus obtain more surplus value for an equal time of labor power usage. But once again, this comes up against the possibility of realizing this surplus value. Moreover, and this is what is happening today, the capitalists try to cut wages absolutely, which tends to reduce them to a value below that of labor power, with malnutrition, disease, and even death by starvation among the working population as a result.
Here again, the crisis appears as an overproduction of commodities, with a mass -- "paradoxically" -- of unemployed and starving. The bourgeois ideologues -- especially of the left -- come on stage once more to say that the crisis could be avoided if the workers' ability to consume were increased, ie if wages were to rise. But any increase in wages is transformed into a drop in surplus value, which contradicts the very purpose of capital. In reality, the left of capital's election-time promises of "wage rises" are nothing but disgusting lies to attract workers' votes. This is demonstrated by the present crisis, where no government, whether "left" or "right" has done anything but cut wages.
"Since the aim of capital is not to minister to certain wants, but to produce profit, and since it accomplishes this purpose by methods which adapt the mass of production to the scale of production, not vice versa, a rift must continually ensue between the limited dimensions of consumption under capitalism and a production which forever tends to exceed this immanent barrier..." "On the other hand, too many means of labor and necessities of life are produced at times to permit of their serving as means for the exploitation of laborers at a certain rate of profit. Too many commodities are produced to permit of a realization and conversion into new capital of the value and surplus value contained in them under the conditions of distribution and consumption peculiar to capitalist production, ie too many to permit of the consummation of this process without constantly recurring explosions..." "The ultimate reason for all crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit." (Marx, Capital Vol III, Lawrence and Wishart, pp 256,258,484)
"And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and destructive crises, and by diminishing the means by which crises are prevented." (Communist Manifesto, Moscow, p50)
With the devalorisation of capital through the paralysis and the closure of factories and even the destruction of producer and consumer goods which takes place during the crisis, the capitalists look for a solution to over-production by seeking out new markets. Hence the tendency to create the world market.
In an initial period, each national capital attempts to impose its exchange relations on the independent producers and on countries where pre-capitalist relations of production still dominate. But these markets are also limited because in pre-capitalist production all that is exchanged is that which exceeds the satisfaction of individual needs. Capital thus needs to create its own market, "to create a world in its own image."
Thus, by allying itself with or struggling against the land-owners and princelings, the bourgeoisie carried out the dispossession of the small producers. Wealth was concentrated in the hands of the few and could be oriented towards the production of commodities required by the capitalists; at the same time, this created an army of proletarians who could now only sell their labor power in order to be able to buy the things they needed to live. In this way, the capitalists could export their commodities, realize their surplus value and acquire other commodities. Moreover, the industries created in the more backward countries operated at a higher rate of profit because there was a lower organic composition of capital: older machines, raw materials, a very low price for labor power and longer hours of work. But all this only led to the reproduction, on a much wider scale, of the same contradictions of the capitalist system.
The oldest capitalist nations, in their search for outlets for their products, obtained them by turning the most backward countries into new competitors, thus laying the bases for new, wider, and more profound crises.
Thus at the beginning of the century, we see the "end of the division of the world among the great powers," the end of capitalist expansion in the inhabited parts of the world. Since then, this solution to the crisis no longer exists. All that remains is the destruction of the productive forces, which has to reach such a scale that it can only be achieved by war.
In this period, the fundamental object of inter-bourgeois wars is not the conquest or pillage of territories or nations but the pure destruction of the productive forces, of factories, of cultivated lands, ports, hospitals, industrial zones and entire towns[8]. This is the only way that capitalism can open up a new period of "prosperity", which lasts as long as he reconstruction lasts; at that point capital once again encounters its inherent limits and plunges society into a new world crisis. The industrial cycle in which crises led to a new phase of growth and expansion is transformed into the cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction.
The completion of its creative work, of the world market, and the beginning of wars to destroy the productive forces, marks the end of the progressive historical mission of capitalism and the opening up of its phase of decadence. From now on, its existence is not only an obstacle to social progress but, with its growing barbarism, it puts the very existence of human society in danger. For the revolutionaries at the beginning of the century, the changes taking place in capitalism represented its "disintegration", its "definitive collapse". With these changes, the era of the world communist revolution had begun.
The Colectivo Comunista Alptraum also considers that we are living in the epoch of capitalist decadence. We will thus continue the critique of its positions which we began in section II in order to try to define more clearly the characteristics of this epoch.
The decadence of capitalism
"We consider" says the Colectivo in its Thesis no 6, "that capitalism is in its decadence..." "The decadence of the system implies the accentuation...and the deepening of all contradictions..." "The law that explains the development of the capitalist system of production is also an adequate basis for understanding its decadent nature. From our point of view, both the development and the decline of the system reside in two essential factors: one expressing the form, in the general law of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline; the other , expressing its content, in the formal and real domination of capital over the process of labor". (International Review no. 40, p30)
Thus decadence, like ascendancy, has a form in which it expresses itself, and a content.
The form is the law of the falling rate of profit. We've already seen that the crisis arises from this law. There is thus a relationship between the crisis and decadence. According to the Colectivo:
"Moments of crisis occur when capitalism is obliged to destroy a growing mass of productive forces revealing the decadence of the system". (ibid, p28)
But the fall in the rate of profit and the crisis have existed throughout capitalism. To say that these things express the decadent nature of capitalism could make it appear that decadence has existed since crises first arose (and the "classical" cycle of crises began in 1825) or that capitalism goes through cycles of ascendance and decadence; in short, that decadence simply means capitalism in general. Obviously, this is not what the CCA thinks. If it insists on the "decadent nature" of capitalism, its not because it sees decadence as the eternal nature of capitalism, but simply because the germ of decadence has indeed been there since the origins of the system. Fine. But now, apart from recognizing that decadence is a "natural" phase in the life of capitalism, we haven't advanced one inch in characterizing it. In what way is this phase of decadence distinguished from the previous, ascendant phase? Perhaps we will find the solution in the "content" of decadence, in the formal and real domination of capital over labor.
Formal domination is the period in which capitalism exploits wage labour in the form in which it appeared in previous modes of production. The worker carries out the same processes as he did when he was an artisan, but a cooperative character is already imprinted on this process and, fundamentally, the instruments and the products of labor already no longer belong to the worker but to the capitalist, under whose orders he works. The industrial revolution laid the bases for real domination, for the transformation of the labor process itself, for the development of labor in its specifically capitalist form with its high degree of cooperation, division, and simplicity. This is the emergence of the modern proletariat, deprived not only of its means of production but also of its spiritual power. Historically, the passage from formal domination to real dominations is no more than the passage from manufacture to big industry. The subsequent expansion of capital appears as a reproduction of these phases in a rapid and violent manner: firstly capital appropriates production in the pre-capitalist form in which it is encountered, and immediately imprints its capitalist character on it. If the epoch of decadence corresponded to the passage from formal domination to real domination, we would have to situate it at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. Once again, we are faced with a tendency to dilute the specific epoch of decadence into the general development of capitalism.
At one point, it seems that the Colectivo situated decadence at the beginning of the century. Having mentioned the decadent nature of capitalism, they carry on as follows:
"In this logic, capitalism is periodically led to destroy a growing mass of the social productive forces....From this internal tendency emerges the need for wars to prolong its existence as a whole. Historically, we have seen that after each war there is a period of reconstruction". (ibid).
But wars of this type were only a reality at the beginning of the present century, and we suppose that the Colectivo is referring to these wars and not to another kind of war from the previous century. In its response to the IBRP, the CCA adds:
"If we observe how the capitalist system has become more and more barbaric from the first world war until today, it is possible to understand why the more capitalism develops, the more it sinks into barbarism (or decadence)..." (Comunismo no. 1, p22).
Thus decadence is situated at the beginning of the 20th century, which coincides with the position that we have adopted. However, in a note to the above paragraph, the Colectivo "clarifies" as follows:
"In strict historical terms, we can say that this progressive ‘barbarization' of the capitalist system begins in the middle of the 19th century, the date at which the bourgeoisie loses its progressive role in the history of Europe and at which the proletariat appears at the historic level of the class struggle as its antagonistic po1e....We can situate the beginning of the global decadency of the capitalist system in 1858. This is situated precisely in the course of its progressive alienated expansion on a planetary scale." (ibid).
So finally the Colectivo places decadence in the middle of last century, the period of the maturation of capitalism in Germany and of the revolutions of 1848. This dooms any attempt to characterize this period to remain at the level of generalities about capitalism. From this standpoint there are no substantial differences between capitalism today and capitalism last century because everything was there already: the cyclical crisis, he world market, the tendency towards war, the possibility of revolution. This is where you are led by the claim that you can explain everything with reference to the "dominant pole" of production, while leaving aside the changes that have taken place in the sphere of exchange.
But this is an error. The Colectivo doesn't seem to notice that it's a conceptual nonsense to place the epoch of decadence, of the decline of capitalism, "precisely in the course of its progressive alienated expansion," and that adding adjective "alienated" doesn't solve anything.
In this same note, the Colectivo twice quotes Marx to support its position. The first is a false and lamentable misinterpretation. Marx said that bourgeois economy is in decadence. He was obviously referring to bourgeois economic science, but the CCA, far from clarifying this, implies that Marx is referring to the mode of production. However, it would be worthwhile reproducing the second quote:
"We cannot deny that bourgeois society has experienced its 16th century a second time -- a 16th century which will, I hope, sound the death-knell of bourgeois society just as the first one thrust it into existence. The specific task of bourgeois society is the establishment of a world market, at least in outline, and of production based upon this world market. As the world is round, this seems to have been completed by the colonization of California and Australia and the opening up of China and Japan. The difficult question for us is this: on the Continent the revolution is imminent and will immediately assume a socialist character. Is it not bound to be crushed in this little corner, considering that in a far greater territory the movement of bourgeois society is still in the ascendant?" (Marx to Engels, 8 October 1858)
It would be difficult to conclude from this passage that, in Marx's day, capitalism as a world system had already reached its phase of decadence while in a much wider territory it was still "in the ascendant."
Marx understood that the revolution wasn't possible at any moment but that it required certain material and social conditions. For him: "No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society." (Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)
Fine. What can we draw from the passage cited by the Colectivo? That Marx considered that the conditions for the revolution were already ripe? In Europe, yes. For the rest of the world, no.
The preoccupation of revolutionaries in this period was that there was a perspective for revolution in Europe whereas in the rest of the world the struggle of the proletariat was improbable or non-existent. Perhaps communism could have been extended to the backward areas; in Russia, for example, it might have been possible to go from the patriarchal community to modern communism. But perhaps also the European revolution would have been crushed by the weight of the still ascendant movement of capitalist society in the rest of the world.
Marx, like revolutionaries and the working class in general, was limited by historical conditions. The European revolution seemed to equal the end of bourgeois society because at this stage bourgeois society was virtually limited to Europe. At that time, nobody could guess whether the revolution in this "little corner" would be enough to install communism in a world that was still under-developed.
Today we earl say that this was not possible. That at that time, capitalism still had something in reserve, that its tendencies towards an ascendant development were stronger than its tendencies towards decline and than the forces of revolution; that the opening up of the East opened Marx up an immense field for expansion; that the limits of the world market were still a long way from expressing themselves in an open manner. In short, that the exacerbation of the contradictions of capitalism had not arrived at the point which really opened up the epoch of its decadence and of the world revolution.
Marx posed the general bases for a theory of decadence but was unable to develop them; this could only be done by revolutionaries at the beginning of the 20th century; when decadence became a reality. This was announced by the chronic depression at the end of the 19th century, the inter-bourgeois wars at the beginning of this century and the Russian revolution of 1905; and it was expressed with a blinding clarity by the the transformation of the crisis of 1913 into the generalized imperialist war of 1914-18 and by the revolutionary explosion of the international proletariat in 1917-23.
The conception of the decadence of capitalism defines the epoch in which capitalism has already definitively accomplished its "historic mission" and in which its contradictions are no longer simply expressed in a, "high degree of development"; rather, the development of capitalism in this period is such that it is turned into barbarism, because the exploitation of wage labor no longer has as its counterpart the progressive mission of bringing "civilization" to the "barbaric" countries. Now, civilization appears as the generalization of barbarism.
The decadence of capitalism opens up the epoch of the world communist revolution, not only because, through the creation of the world market, capitalism has already created the material conditions for the new society, but also because the disintegration of capitalism, the advance of barbarism, has its counterpart in the advance of the forces of the revolution.
The crisis, as destruction of the productive forces, doesn't only mean the destruction of the means of production, but above all the destruction of human productive forces. It means more unemployment, more exploitation, more accidents, misery, and death. The antagonism between capital and wage labor is expressed in the most brutal and open manner. These are the conditions for the maturation of consciousness and of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.
"A revolution is only possible as the consequence of a crisis...but the latter is just as certain as the former... " (Marx)
The present crisis with its worldwide character and its long duration doesn't only tend towards a new world war. It also opens up the perspective of a definitive assault by the proletariat on the enemy's fortress. It creates, as never before, the conditions for the world revolution of the proletariat.
These conditions must be the object of all our attention.
Grupo Proletario Internacionalista
The GPI comrades do not as yet have a box number for correspondence, but will be getting one soon.
[1] See the presentation of the CCA in International Review no. 50
[2] We lack the space to reproduce these here. The GPI shares the main political positions which are published on the back page of all the ICC's territorial press, and of the International Review.
[3] See International Review nos. 10, 19, 20.
[4] International Review no. 40
[5] A remark seems necessary to us here: in the present period of decadence, the economic cycles do not stop with the "reconstruction". Contrary to the ascendant period, when the cycles appeared in the form "Production-Crisis-Enlarge Production", today's cycles are characterized by the formula "Crisis-War-Reconstruction-Deeper Crisis" (ed. Note)
[6] We think that the comrades make a mistake here. It is wrong to say that "material conditions for communist society are already given." In fact, material conditions make the continued existence of the capitalist system more and more impossible, whence decadence and the permanent crisis. And in this way, there appear the possibility and the necessity of taking the path of the sole solution: socialism. It is only in the period of transition that the material conditions allowing the installation of communism will be complete: "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." (ed. note).
[7] It is wrong to say that the fall in wages reduces the realization of surplus value. By definition, wages never buy surplus value. A fall in wages is always an increase in production of surplus value, both absolutely and relatively (ed. note).
[8] The generalized destruction of the productive forces is not a "goal" sought by capital, but a "blind" consequence of its contradictions. This idea of war as a "search" for destruction is false. at most, it might be valid when applied to one capitalist bloc when it is out to destroy or seize hold of the industrial apparatus of its rival. Such a view glosses over a decisive element the exacerbation of inter-imperialist tensions as the direct cause of generalized war in our period (ed. note).
Through one of its best known militants, G. Munis, the FOR came out of the old Spanish Trotskyist group formed in the '30s. The evolution of Munis and his positions towards revolutionary positions didn't take place without difficulties. Munis - following Trotsky's directives - was in favour of the 'Bolshevik‑Leninists' entering the Young Socialists, but on he other hand opposed fusion with the POUM, a 'left socialist' party which was to play an essential role in the defeat of the Spanish workers in 1936-37.
In 1936, Munis and his friends spent a period in the Socialist militias on the Madrid front. This was an itinerary which was far from revolutionary and was a long way from the intransigent positions of the communist left at that time (the Italian Left, and even the Dutch Left). It was only in May 1937, when the proletariat in Barcelona was massacred by the Popular Front government, that the Munis group began to abandon its false trajectory[1], resolutely placing itself at the side of the insurgents and denouncing the POUM and CNT-FAI as well as the Stalinists. Munis' courageous revolutionary attitude led to his imprisonment in 1938. In 1939, he managed to escape, evading an assassination attempt by he Stalinists and finally reaching Mexico.
The immense merit of Munis and his friends in Mexico - who included the surrealist poet Peret - was to have denounced the policy of the 'defense of the USSR' and the integration of the Trotskyist '1Vth International' into the imperialist war. This led to Munis and other former Spanish Trotskyists breaking with the Trotskyist organisation in 1948, because of its betrayal of internationalism. But - and this was a characteristic of the Munis group which still exists today in the FOR - the group considered that the revolution was simply a question of will and decided to return to Franco's Spain to carry out clandestine activities. Seized by the police, Munis was subjected to a harsh term of imprisonment.
It is worth noting that the Munis group's rapprochement with the positions of the communist left, at the beginning of the 50's, was facilitated by the discussions it had with groups coming from the Italian Communist Left. The discussions with Internationalisme and then with Damen's group[2] were not unconnected to the fact that little by little the Union Ouvrere Internationaliste ( the name of the Munis group ) was able to cleanse itself of a whole Trotskyist ideology and finally arrive at a real revolutionary trajectory.
During the 50's and 60's, the group of Munis and Peret ( who died in 1959 ) bravely held on to revolutionary proletarian positions in a period of counter-revolution. It was during this difficult period, when revolutionary elements were extremely few and dispersed, that the ancestor of Itoday's FOR published texts of political reference: Les Syndicats contre la Revolution and Pour un Second Manifeste Communiste[3]. These texts, after the long night of counter-revolution which enveloped the world until the international resurgence of proletarian struggles marked by May '68 in France, played a by no means negligable role for those young elements who were trying , with great difficulty, to reappropriate the positions of the communist left and to combat the nauseating theories of Maoism and Trotskyism. The FOR, which today publishes Alarme in France and Alarma in Spain[4], is the organizational continuation of the old Munis group and consequently defends the political positions expressed in these texts. Unfortunately, the FOR also refers to and continues to distribute texts from the 40's which show that the Munis group was only just ridding itself of the Trotskyist gangrene[5] as if there was a continuity between the old Spanish and Mexican Trotskyist groups of that period and the FOR of today.
It is therefore necessary to see to what extent the FOR of today is situated on the terrain of the communist left and to what extent it is still marked by the ambiguities of its origins.
Unfortunately it has to be said that Munis and the FOR have not proclaimed their break with the Trotskyist current without reticence.
While on the one hand they affirm that Trotskyism has passed over to the counter-revolution since the Second World War, on the other hand they display a great nostalgia for this current in the 30s when it still had a proletarian character.
It is astonishing to see the following assertions in the literature of the FOR:
"It was the (Trotskyist) Left Opposition which best formulated the opposition to Stalinism" (Munis, Parti-Etat, Stalinisme, Revolution, Cahiers Spartacus, 1975).
Or again, more recently:
"Trotskyism, being the only internationalist current active in dozens of countries, embodied the continuity of the revolutionary movement since the First International and prefigured the pertinent liaison with the future".(Munis, Analisis de un Vacio, Barcelona, 1983, p.3).
Reading this pane to Trotskyism and Trotsky in the 30's, you would think that there had never been a communist left. By proclaiming that only the Trotskyist current was "internationalist" in the 30's, you end up with a gross and shameful falsification of history. Munis and his friends remain silent about the existence of a communist left (in Italy, Germany, Holland, Russia... ) which, well before the Trotskyist current existed, was waging the battle against the degeneration of the Russian revolution and for internationalism. This glossing over the real revolutionary movement in the 20's and 30's ( KAPD, GIC, Bilan... ) can only have one aim: To absolve the original opportunist politics of Trotsky and Trotskyism and to pin a revolutionary medal on the activities of the Spanish Trotskyists of whom Munis was a part. Have Munis and the FOR 'forgotten' that the Trotskyists' position of 'defense of the USSR' directly led to their participation in the second imperialist butchery? Have they 'forgotten' the antifascist policies of this movement, which led them to propose a 'united front' with those executioners of the proletariat, the Stalinists and social democrats? Has Munis 'forgotten' the policy of entrism into the Spanish Socialist Party which he supported in the 1930's? Such silences express serious ambiguities in the FOR, which it is a long way from having overcome.
Such lapses of memory are not innocent. They derive from a sentimental attachment to the old Trotskyist current, which leads directly to lies and falsifications. When the FOR proclaims so lightly that "Trotsky never defended the Popular Front even critically, neither in Spain nor anywhere else" (L'arme de la critique, organ of the FOR, no 1, May 1985 ), this is simply a lie[6]. Unless the FOR is totally ignorant of the real history of the Trotskyist movement (..of course, it's never too late to learn...).
We will provide Munis and his friends with a few 'edifying' quotations from Trotsky. They are from Broue's selection of texts La Revolution Espagnole 1930-40 and need no comment.
"To renounce supporting the Republican armies can only be done by traitors, agents of fascism,"(p 355); "every Trotskyist in Spain must be a good soldier alongside the Left," (p.378); "Everywhere and a1ways, when the revolutionary workers are not strong enough to overthrow the bourgeois regime, they defend against fascism even a decaying democracy, but above all they defend their own positions inside bourgeois democracy," (p. 431); "In the Spanish civil war, the question is democracy or fascism," (p. 432).
In fact, it has to be said that this attachment of Munis and his friends to the Trotskyist movement of the '30s isn't just 'sentimental'. There are still important vestiges of Trotskyist ideology in today's FOR without making an exhaustive list, we can mention some of the most significant ones.
a) an incomprehension of state capitalism in Russia, which leads the FOR like the Trotskyists - to talk about the existence not of a bourgeois class but of a bureaucracy:
"...in Russia there is no property-owning class, either new or old. The attempt to define the bureaucracy as a sort of bourgeoisie are just as inconsistent as describing the 1917 revolution as bourgeois...When the concentration of capitalist development has reached world-wide proportions and has through its own dynamic eliminated the function of private capital acting in a chaotic manner, this isn't the time for a brand new bourgeoisie to constitute itself. The characteristic process of capitalist civilization can nowhere be repeated, even if one imagines it modified forms," (Munis, Parti-Etat, p. 58).
Like the Trotskyists then, the FOR considers capitalism is defined by the juridical form of appropriation: the suppression of private appropriation implies the disappearance of the bourgeois class. It doesn't occur to the FOR that the 'bureaucracy' in the Eastern Bloc (and in China, etc), is the form taken by the decadent bourgeoisie in its appropriation of the means of production.
b) the drawing up of a new 'Transitional Program' after Trotsky's example in 1938 shows the FOR's difficulty in understanding the historic period, the period of capitalism's decadence. In its 'second Communist Manifesto' the FOR considered it correct to put forward all kinds of transitional demands in the absence of revolutionary movements of the proletariat. These go from the 30 hours week, the suppression of piece work and of time and motion studies in the factories to the "demand for work for all, unemployed and youth" on the economic terrain. On the political level the FOR demands democratic 'rights' and 'freedoms' from the bourgeoisie: freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly; the right of workers to elect permanent workshop, factory or professional delegates "without any judicial or trade union formalities," (Second Manifesto, p. 65-71).
This is all within the Trotskyist logic, according to which it is enough to pose the right demands to gradually arrive at the revolution. For the Trotskyists, the whole trick is to know how to be a pedagogue for the workers, who don't understand anything about their demands, to brandish in front of them the most appetizing carrots in order to push the workers towards their 'party'. Is this what Munis wants, with his Transitional Program Mark 2?
The FOR still doesn't understand today:
It's very characteristic that the FOR should put on the same level its reformist slogans about democratic 'rights and freedoms' for workers, and slogans which could only arise in a fully revolutionary period. We thus find mixed pell-mell such slogans as:
"expropriation of industrial, finance, and agricultural capital;
workers' management of the production and distribution of goods;
destruction of all the instruments of war, atomic as well as classical, dissolution of armies and police, reconversion of war industries into consumer industries;
individual armament of those exploited by capitalism, territorially organized according to the schema of democratic committees of management and distribution;
suppression of frontiers and constitution of a single government and a single economy to the extent of the proletariat's victory in diverse in countries."
And the FOR adds the following comment to this whole catalogue: "It's only on the wings of revolutionary subjectivity that man will overcome the distance between the reign of necessity and the reign of freedom," (ibid, p.71). In other words, the FOR takes its desires for reality and considers the revolution as a simple question of subjective will, and not of objective conditions (the revolutionary maturation of the proletariat in the historic crisis of capitalism, a capitalism that has sunk into its economic crisis).
All these slogans display enormous confusions. The FOR seems to have abandoned any marxist compass. There is no distinction made between a pre-revolutionary period in which capital still rules politically, a revolutionary period in which a dual power is established, and the period of transition (after the seizure of power by the proletariat) which alone can put on the agenda (and then not immediately!) the "suppression of wage labor" and the "suppression of frontiers."
It seems clear that the FOR's slogans show not only poorly digested vestiges of the Trotskyist Transitional Program, but also strong anarchist tendencies. The slogan of 'workers' management' is part of the anarchist, councilist or 'Gramscian' baggage but certainly not of the marxist program. As for the "individual armament" (and why not collective?) of the proletariat and the exaltation of "subjectivity" (individual no doubt), they are all part of anarchist confusionism.
Finally, the FOR's 'theory' looks like a melange of confusions inherited from Trotskyism and anarchism. The FOR's positions on Spain 1936-37 show this in a striking manner.
In the ICC's press (footnote 6) we've already had occasion to criticize the conception Munis and his friends have of the events in Spain in 1936-37. It's necessary to come back to this because the FOR's interpretation leads to the worst kind of aberrations, fatal for a group situating itself on the terrain of the proletarian revolution.
For the Munis group, the events in Spain were the highest moment in the revolutionary wave which began in 1917. What it calls the 'Spanish revolution' was even more revolutionary than t':)e Russian Revolution:
"The more we look back at the years down to 1917, the more the Spanish revolution gains in importance. It was more profound than the Russian revolution..." (Munis, Jalons de Défaite, Promesse de Victoire, Mexico, 1948, postface Réaffirmation, 1972).
There's more: the events of May '37, when the Spanish proletariat was crushed by the Stalinists with the complicity of the anarchist 'comrade ministers', expressed "the supreme level of consciousness in the struggle of the world proletariat," (Munis, Parti-Etat, p. 66).
Munis simply takes up the Trotskyist analysis of the events in Spain, including concessions to anti-fascism. For him, the events in Spain weren't a counter-revolution which enabled the bourgeoisie to crush the proletariat, but the most important revolution in history. Such assertions are justified in the following way:
It is useless to dwell too much on the falsity of the gospel according to Jalons. It is characteristic of a sect which elevates itself 'on the wings of subjectivity' and takes its fantasies for reality, to the point where they acquire an autonomous life of their own. Munis' invention of the 'government-committees', which never existed (what did exist were the militias which were a cartel of left parties and unions), is evidence of a tendency towards self-mystification, and above all of the kind of bluff which the Trotskyists have always specialized in.
But the most serious problem with Munis' position is that he takes up the analysis of the Trotskyists and anarchists of the time, puts them to his own use and, in the end, justifies them. By saluting the activities of the Spanish Trotskyists as 'revolutionary', Munis absolves them of their call "to ensure the military victory" of the Republic against fascism (ibid, p. 305). And what we can say about his enthusiasm for the much-vaunted 'International Brigades' -- an enthusiasm shared with the Stalinist Marty, the butcher of the workers of Albacete. Munis sees them as a magnificent example of thousands of men offering "their blood for the Spanish revolution," p. 395). As for the workers' blood shed by the Stalinist butchers who acted within these brigades, a coy silence is maintained.
By persisting in repeating the same errors committed by the Spanish Trotskyists in '36, the FOR ends up in a complete failure of understanding, fatal to any proletarian group:
Finally, the FOR displays a complete incomprehension of the conditions for the proletarian revolution today.
The FOR today stands at a cross-roads. Its whole raison d'etre has been its affirmation that the revolution is a question of will and subjectivity. It has continually insisted that objective conditions (general crisis of capitalism, economic decadence) are of little importance. In an idealist manner, the FOR still claims that there is no economic decline but a 'moral' decadence of capitalism. Even worse, since the 1970s it has seen the economic crisis of capitalism as no more than "a tactical ruse of the bourgeoisie," as Munis himself put it at the beginning of the 2nd International Conference of the Groups of the Communist Left[8].
At a time when the two 'black Mondays' of the 1987 stock exchange crash (19 and 26 October) have provided a striking confirmation of the economic bankruptcy of the world capitalist system, is the FOR going to go on calmly insisting there is no crisis? At a time when the collapse of capitalism is becoming more and more obvious, is the FOR going to say - as it did in 1975 - that capitalism "will always be able to solve its own contradictions - the crises of overproduction" (cf Revolution Internationale no 14, March '75, 'Response a Alarme')?
If the FOR continues to hover above reality in the rosy clouds of 'subjectivity', it will be seen as a sect condemned by objective reality itself. And, by definition, a sect which has withdrawn into itself to defend its own hobbyhorses - like the 'Spanish revolution' and the absence of economic crisis - and which denies reality, is doomed either to disappear or to break up into multiple segments in the most abject confusion.
The FOR is situated at the confluence of three currents: Trotskyism, councilism and anarchism.
Vis-a-vis Trotskyism, the FOR conserves not only ideological vestiges (Spain '36, 'transitional demands', voluntarism), but also a singular attraction for its 'critical' elements, those trying to break from it. While the FOR today is clear that "nothing revolutionary can have its source in any Trotskyist tendency," (Munis, Analisis de un Vacio, 1983), it retains the illusion that splits from Trotskyism "could contribute to building an organization of the world proletariat," (ibid). This same illusion could be seen in the FOR's response to the formation of the group Union Ouvriere in 1975 which emerged from Lutte Ouvriere in France. The FOR didn't hesitate to see this split - which proved itself to have no future - as "the most positive organic fact to have taken place in Franc since the war at least," (Alarma no 28, 1975, 'Salut a Union Ouvriere').
The FOR now has to say clearly, when the responsibility of revolutionaries is much weightier today than ten years ago, whether or not it sees itself as part of the communist left, working for its regroupment, or as part of the marshy milieu inhabited by 'critical' grouplets coming out of Trotskyism. The FOR must pronounce unambiguously on the conditions for the formation of the revolutionary party. It must say clearly whether the party will be formed around the groups coming out of the communist left, around those who lay claim to the contribution of the lefts in the 20s and 30s (KAPD, Bilan, Dutch Left, or around groups coming out of Trotskyism. A clear response to this question will determine whether the FOR is to participate in any future conferences of the communist left - something rejected in 1978, in a sectarian manner.
In the second place, it seems that the FOR has left the doors wide open to councilism. By seeing the economic crisis of capitalism as secondary or even non-existent, by arguing that the consciousness of the proletariat can only arise from the struggle itself[9], the FOR underestimates not only the objective factors of the revolution, but also the subjective factor, that of the existence of a revolutionary organization, which is the highest, most elaborated expression of class consciousness.
In the third place, the FOR shows a very dangerous attachment to and attraction for anarchist conceptions. If the FOR has rejected the Trotskyist vision of 'political revolutions', it is mainly to proclaim that the revolution is first and foremost 'economic' and not political:
"This political vision of the revolution shared by the extreme left and the majority of what can be called the ultra-left is a bourgeois vision of the seizure of power" (L'arme de la critique, no 1, May '85). This conception is exactly the same as that of the Dutch councilists of the GIC (see the forthcoming pamphlet on the Dutch-German Left), which is close to that of anarchism. In believing and in spreading the belief that the revolution will immediately do away with the law of value and quickly realize the economic tasks of communism, the FOR has fallen into the anarchist illusion that communism is a simple economic question, and thus evades the issue of the political power of the proletariat (the dictatorship of the councils on a world scale, which alone can really open up the period of the economic transformation of society).
The FOR is at the crossroads. Either it will remain a sect with no future, doomed to die a beautiful death, or it will decompose into various segments drawn towards Trotskyism, anarchism or councilism, or it will orient itself resolutely towards the communist left. As a hybrid sect somewhere between a rabbit and a fish, disdainful of present day reality, the FOR is not a viable group. We can only hope, and we will contribute all that we can to this, that the FOR will orient itself towards a real confrontation with the revolutionary milieu. In order to do this, it should make a self-criticism of its negative attitude in 1978, at the second conference of groups of the communist left.
The proletarian milieu has everything to gain if revolutionary elements like the FOR don't lose themselves and are able to unite with the existing revolutionary forces, those of the communist left. The brutal acceleration of history is making the FOR face its historic responsibilities. What's at stake is its existence, and above all the survival of the young revolutionary energies which comprise it.
Ch.
[1] The militants of the FOR who were ironic about the "false trajectory" of Revolution Internationale - the title of the pamphlet they gave out at the second conference of groups of the communist left - would do better to analyze the false trajectory of the Spanish Trotskyists before 1940 (cf the texts cited by Munis himself in his book Jalons and Broue's book La Revolucion Espagnole, editions de Minuit, 1975).
[2] This was Damaen's Partito Communista Internazionalista, which came out of the '52 split with Bordiga's fraction which publishes Battaglia Communista.
[3] Pour un Second Manifeste Communiste French and Spanish, Eric Losfeld, Paris 1965; Les Syndicats contre la Revolucion by B. Peret and G. Munis, Eric Losfeld, Paris 1968. Publishing Peret's text fom the 50's (which can be found in the latter selection) in Libertaire, organ of the anarchist federation, was more than a little ambiguous. It giving a revolutionary aura to the anarcho-syndicalist elements who chose their camp in the anti-fascist war in Spain in 36-37 and who continue to sing the praises of the CNT.
[4] Alarme: BP 239, 75624 Paris, cedex 13;
Alarma: Apartado 5355 Barcelona
[5] Cf text criticizing the IVth International published in Mexico between 1946 and 1949.
[6] Cf IR 25, 1981 'Critique of Munis' and the FOR'; the ICC pamphlet on Spain 36-37 (1987 in Spanish) and the articles 'Critica de Jalones de derrota, promoesa de victoria'
[7] It's not by chance that the Trotskyist Broue takes up Munis affirmation that there were 'government committees' equivalent to workers' councils, in order to prove the existence of a 'Spanish Revolution', cf Broue, La Rebolution Espagnole 1931-39, Flammarion 1973, p. 71
[8] 2nd Conference of groups of the Communist Left, November '78. The FOR having decided to remain 'in the margin of the conference', finally left it soon after it began, not wanting to recognize the crisis of capitalism.
[9] "... the school of the proletariat is never theoretical reflection or experience accumulated and then interpreted but the result of its own realizations in the heat of the struggle. Being precedes consciousness of it for the overwhelming majority of its protagonists ...
"... In sum, the material motivation for the liquidation of capitalism is given by the declining (?) contradiction between capitalism and the freedom of the human species," (Alarme no 13, July-Sept 1981, 'Organization et conscience revolutionaires').
The Dutch Left, 1919-1920, 2nd Part
The Third International
The German question
It was by way of a maneuver that the leadership of the KPD brought about the expulsion of the left majority from the party in September 1919. Since the Congress of 18 December this majority had had as its watchword "leave the unions" (Heraus aus den Gewerkschaften). The Communist militants, especially in Bremen and Hamburg, attacked the social democratic union offices in Legien, taking the cash boxes and distributing the content to the unemployed workers. When the first Unions (Unionen) were formed the leadership of Levi and Brandler had at first supported them: they called for the formation of Unionen in the railways and amongst the agricultural workers. The factory organizations (Betriebsorganisationen) made up of workers and revolutionary delegates were centralized to form the Unionen. The latter organs, with the decline of the revolution, appeared as organs of political struggle, a heritage from the factory councils. Throughout 1919 these became generalized in the main sectors of the working class: miners, naval shipyard workers, sailors, metal workers.
From the summer of 1919, the position of the leadership of Levi and Brandler changed entirely, not without some political reservations. They moved closer to the Independents of the USPD, who controlled the opposition in the official unions. They set about attacking the left as a 'syndicalist' tendency. But in reality, this tendency was represented only by a minority: in Wasserkannte (Bremen and Hamburg) around Laufenberg and Wolffheim, who dreamed of a German IWW, and in Saxe around Ruhle. These two tendencies underestimated the existence of a political party of the proletariat, which they tended to reduce to a propaganda circle for the Unions. This wasn't the case for the great majority who would form the KAPD in April 1920: they were strongly hostile to anti-political revolutionary anarcho-syndicalism. They conceived the Unions only as organisms of struggle applying the directives of the party. They were therefore not 'syndicalist' but anti-syndicalist[1].
In August 1919 Levi, at the time of the Frankfurt national conference, pronounced himself in favor of work both in the trade unions as well as in Parliament. Then at the Congress in October, the so-called Congress of Heidelberg, Levi presented - without it having been possible to discuss it in the sections of the party before the Congress - a resolution excluding elements who refused to do work in the trade unions and in Parliament. In contradiction with any principle of workers' democracy in the party, each district disposed of one vote whatever its size, and voting rights - in violation of the decision of the Frankfurt Conference - were accorded to the central organ, which agreed to the expulsion of the left. Thus the left, despite being the majority of the KPD, was expelled. It is noteworthy that the opposition outside the party refused to follow Laufenberg, Wolffheim and Ruhle who immediately wanted to form a new party. This attitude of fighting to the bitter end for the reconquest of the party was a constant in the communist left of the time, and in this they were very like Bordiga's Fraction.
The Dutch Left solidarised with the German Left. Pannekoek particularly attacked Radek, who had theoretically supported Levi[2] in his fight against the German Left. He denounced the rapprochement of the KPD with the Independents, as a sliding towards opportunism.[3] These politics expressed a petty bourgeois 'Blanquist' approach to the conception of the party. By defending the non-marxist theory that a 都mall revolutionary minority could conquer political power and keep it, Radek was only justifying Levi's dictatorship of the Centrale inside the party. His position was in fact foreign to Bolshevism. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks didn't want a dictatorship of the party but of the councils:
"You find the truth of the Russian example in the days preceding November 1917. There the communist party never declared or believed that it must take power and that its dictatorship should be the dictatorship of the working masses. It always declared: the soviets, the representatives of the masses must take hold of power; its own task was to establish the program, fight for it, and when finally the majority of the soviets recognized the justice of the program they had to take power into their own hands...."[4]
The Pannekoek of 1919 wasn't yet the 'councilist' Pannekoek of the thirties and forties. He recognized, like the rest of the communist left in the twenties, the irreplaceable role of the partyty. Contrary to what the Bordigist current reproached him with much later, Pannekoek and the Dutch Left had nothing to do with the anti-party and democratist positions of Ruhle, with his cult of spontaneous democracy and his suivism of the masses.
"We are not fanatics for democracy, we have no superstitious respect for majority decisions and we do not subscribe to the belief that everything that the majority wants is good and should happen."
What in fact the Dutch Left was underlining was the great difficulties facing a revolution in Western Europe whose course is "slower and more difficult". Radek's recipes for accelerating events at the price of a dictatorship of the minority in the party were a sure road to defeat.
In the countries dominated by an 'old bourgeois culture', where there was an individualistic spirit and a respect for bourgeois ethics, Blanquist tactics were impossible. Not only did they deny the role of the masses as a revolutionary subject, but they underestimated the strength of the enemy and the propaganda work needed to prepare the revolution.
It was the difficult process of the development of class consciousness which would make the triumph of the revolution possible. To this end, and for the first time in an explicit way, Pannekoek rejected the union tactic. He fully supported the German Left which was calling for the formation of factory organizations[5]. The position of the Dutch communists on the parliamentary question remained much less clear. Pannekoek had published a series of articles in Der Kommunist, organ of the Bremen opposition, which on most question showed an attitude of centrist oscillation between right and left. While showing the impossibility of using parliamentarism as a "method of the proletarian revolution" in "the imperialist and revolutionary period"[6], Pannekoek seemed to envisaged the utilization of the parliamentary tribune in the less developed countries; according to him, using parliament depended on "the strength, the stage of development of capitalism in each country". This theory of 'particular cases' led to the implicit rejection of anti-parliamentarism as a new principle of the revolutionary movement in the era of imperialist decadence - "a period of crisis and chaos" - a principle valid worldwide, in all countries. Parliamentarism was thus seen as no more than a tactical question, to be determined according to the level of the productive forces in a given country. This idea was only implicit, but would to a large extent be taken up by the degenerating Bordigist current[7].
The theoretical conceptions of the Dutch left developed slowly; they were enriched by polemical confrontation and by the experience of the German revolution. In reality, it learned as much from the German left as the latter learned from the Dutch. There was an interpenetration of the various lefts, including the Italian Left, at an international level. The crystallization of the positions of the communist left into a body of doctrine was to a large extent facilitated by the creation of the Amsterdam Bureau of the Communist International. This was to be the high point of the Dutch left's audience in the world revolutionary movement.
The Amsterdam Bureau (1919-1920)
Throughout 1919 the isolation of the centre of the IIIrd International - being established in a country plunged into civil war and surrounded by the cordon sanitaire of the allied armies - led the executive committee to decide on installing bureaux of the International in Western Europe. These bureaux had responsibility both for propaganda and for the organization of the different parties dependent on them. The executive of the Communist International therefore created bureaux in Scandinavia, in the Balkans, in the South of Russia and in Central Europe in Vienna; simultaneously the ‘Latin American' bureau of Mexico was set up, at the instigation of Borodine. All these badly co-ordinated organisms led to still greater confusion in the centralization of the international work. But it was still clear for the CI that, with the development of the revolution, in the near future the centre of the International must be transported into Western Europe. The bureaux in question were the rough beginnings.
But in the Autumn of 1919, the CI simultaneously put in place a provisional secretariat for Europe, sited in Germany, and a provisional bureau sited in Holland, keeping in permanent contact with the former. The secretariat was under the control of the right wing tendency of Levi and Clara Zetkin, who were tending towards the Independents; the Amsterdam bureau regrouped the left communists hostile to the KPD right wing.
The CI accorded a particular place to the Dutch comrades in the Amsterdam bureau in carrying out propaganda and the establishment of links between the European communist parties and North America. The Dutch communists were to direct this work. Through a decision on 28 September, the executive of the CI nominated Gorter, Pannekoek and Roland-Holst - all on the left of the KPN - Rutgers, Van Ravesteyn and Wijnkoop - who represented the right. Rutgers arrived at the beginning of November to set up the ‘sub-bureau' and organize an international communist conference. Despite divergences with the Dutch comrades, the Bolsheviks had great confidence in them, particularly in Pannekoek. He was expressly invited to go to Russia to help with the theoretical work and serve as an expert. Pannekoek refused in order to remain materially independent of the Russian government.
From the beginning, Wijnkoop, through a series of maneuvers, got Pannekoek and Gorter eliminated from the leadership of the Bureau - in particular he spread rumors that Gorter was a psychopath[8]. This only left Rutgers, Roland-Holst and Wijnkoop, in contravention to the CI's decisions. It is true that Wijnkoop, during his brief existence in the Bureau gave the appearance of radicalism, appearing to situate himself to the ‘left' of the CI. He took a position against the rapprochement of the KPD with the USPD, and against the entry of the English CP into the Labor Party. In spite of this radicalism he took a middle position on such questions as the parliamentary question - seeing as he was a deputy. In reality, he refused to take a position explicitly for the communist left: so that in Germany, on the struggle between the German opposition and Levi's right wing, he came out saying this was a "struggle between the two old doddering leaderships of the party". But this apparent radicalism of Wijnkoop lasted for only a short time, just in time to demand the exclusion of the Independents and Cachin and Frossard[9] at the Second Congress of the CI. The only exclusion he achieved was finally that of the left in the KPN in 1921 (cf below).
In preparation for the international conference which was to be held in February 1920, a set of Theses was produced and Pannekoek and Roland-Holst[10] participated in writing it. It was preceded by an appeal for the unity of communists who should form themselves into one party, conforming to the decision of the Executive of the CI. But these Theses were moving away from the CI's line. The Theses on parliamentarism - probably written by Rutgers - were a compromise between the positions of the communist left and those of the International. They affirmed that "parliamentarism can never be an organ of the victorious proletariat", this being one of the lessons of the October revolution. The theory of revolutionary parliamentarism was strongly defended:
" ... parliamentary action comprises the most energetic forms of protest against imperialist brutalities, and this in combination with outside action, will show itself as an effective means to arouse the masses and sustain their resistance."
It is true that this assertion was accompanied with reservations: on the one hand, there was the affirmation that parliaments had "degenerated into fair ground parades where crooks abuse the masses", which demonstrated the emptiness of ‘revolutionary' parliamentarism; and on the other hand there was support for electoralism when it was simply a question of determining local and not world matters: " ... the question of knowing when and how parliamentarism should be used in the class struggle must be regulated by the working class of each country"[11]
These Theses were only an outline; they were to be rewritten and modified (by Pannekoek probably). The rejection of revolutionary parliamentarism appeared more explicitly, but was still conditional, linked to the emergence of workers' councils:
" ... when parliament becomes the centre and organ of the counter-revolution, and when on the other hand the working class builds its own instruments of power under the form of soviets, then it is indispensable that it repudiates any participation, of whatever kind, in parliamentary action."
On the union question, the Theses also held a compromise position. It recommended that revolutionary workers form a "revolutionary opposition inside the unions", which was the position of the CI who sought to ‘revolutionize' the counter-revolutionary unions, under the pretext that that was where the broad masses were gathered together. On the other hand, the Amsterdam Bureau envisaged the possibility of forming ‘new organizations'. These organizations would be industry-wide unions and not corporatist unions based on trade. These unions, inspired by the revolution, would be based on the IWW and the English shop stewards. In the last analysis, the Bureau demarcated itself expressly from the CI when it came to the question of the role of unions after the taking of power by the proletariat: contrary to the Russians - like Trotsky[12] - who saw the councils as no more than "shapeless parliaments of labor", the Dutch communists vigorously rejected the idea that the unions could "build a new proletarian society". This role fell to the soviets, unitary, political organs of the proletariat. The influence of the German revolution, but also that of Pankhurst and Fraina, led the Bureau to take far more clear-cut positions, better grounded theoretically and closer to those of the German opposition. The Bureau was to become the centre of regroupment for the whole of the international communist left, opposed to the orientations of the CI on the union and parliamentary questions. This is what the work of the international communist conference held on 3-8 February 1920 in Amsterdam showed.
The conference was very representative of the left communist forces in the developed countries. Those present from this tendency were: Fraina from the USA; Sylvia Pankhurst from Great Britain; Van Overstraeten from Belgium; Pannekoek and Roland-Hoist from Holland; Carl Stucke[13] from the Bremen left. The other delegates were situated either at the centre, like Wijnkoop, Rutgers and Mannoury, or squarely on the right, like the members of the BSP, a ‘left' socialist party, Willis and Hodgson. Also present were an Indonesian and Maring-Sneevliet, delegate for Indonesia[14]. Having undoubtedly been informed too late, the delegates of Levi's KPD - Zetkin, Frolich, Posener and Munzenberg - arrived at the end of the conference, as did the Swiss anti-parliamentarian, Herzog, and the secretary of the Latin-American bureau, F K Puerto[15]. The delegates from Finland and Spain also arrived too late ...
This conference had the appearance of an international congress by its length, the breadth of its work and the important participation of delegates from countries of three continents. It was more representative than the preceding conferences of Imola and Frankfurt.[16] However, it should be noted that the Dutch in particular were far from being in top of clandestine work. The whole conference took place under the surveillance of spies and the Dutch police, who made a note of all the discussions and all the decisions. Clara Zetkin[17] was arrested on her arrival in Amsterdam and was only freed by the intervention of the right social democrat Wibaut, who had made a sad name for himself in 1917 in the repression of workers. Was this a homage rendered to the leadership of the KPD for its lack of ‘extremism'?
Described by Clara Zetkin as a ‘rump-conference', the international conference represented left communism on two essential questions: trade unionism and the refusal of any entrism into the organizations linked to the Second International, such as the Labor Party.
Fraina's Theses on trade unionism, voted for unanimously, went much further than the provisional Theses mentioned before. They excluded any work in the trade unions, which were "definitively integrated into capitalism", and connected to ‘Laborism', whose "governmental form of expression is state capitalism". They were not in favor of revolutionary industrial unionism after the taking of power, and by assimilating these organs with the factory councils, the Theses were an implicit rejection of the apoliticism of the IWW. By recommending industrial unionism, the Left Communist bureau was much closer, apparently, to the KAPD. But this was in appearance only, for much later the KAPD, like the minority of the KPN, went, on to reject the union form, even its ‘revolutionary' or ‘industrial' varieties.
But in the Bureau confusion still remained over the question of political party and revolutionary union. In spite of very strong opposition by Fraina and Pankhurst, the conference accepted the representation of economic organizations of the shop steward type in the Bureau. This was also the decision of the CI up until the Second congress.
The most important decision of the conference concerned Great Britain. Here there was a very strong Labor Party, linked to the IInd International, and left socialist parties - BSF, ILP[18] - comparable to the USPD in Germany. Lenin and the CI wanted the communist groups to join the LP in order to win over the ‘masses'. This was in contradiction with the watchword that revolutionaries should break with the IInd International, as it was considered a dead body, whose member parties were considered not as the right wing of the workers' movement but as the left wing of the bourgeoisie. Parties where the ‘left' predominated were called ‘centrist' currents. In the beginning of the 1920s, the politics of the CI charged, calling for the formation of mass parties: either by the fusion of communist groups with the majority centrist currents, such as the Independents in Germany; or by the entrism of small communist groups into a party of the IInd International, in the ‘particular case' of Great Britain. But a policy of ‘particular cases' always ends up in opportunist practices.
The resolution adopted by the conference was Fraina's. It replaced Wijnkoop's, which was a too vague and eluded question about the unity of communists and splits. Fraina put forward the necessity of not only separating from the social patriots from the ‘opportunists' that is the current navigating between the IInd and IIIrd Internationals. A position which was identical to Bordiga[19]. It was symptomatic that the resolution for a split in order to form a communist party and against the "so-called possibility that a new British communist party could be linked to the Labor Party" - according to Pankhurst's term - was rejected by the BSP delegates and a Dutch delegate (Van Leuven). As such the resolution appeared to be a decision applied both to the Labor Party and to the USPD.
In fact, the Amsterdam Bureau, whose work Fraina's had became the center of the left opposition in the IIIrd International, with executive power, since it demanded that the Secretariat of Berlin, which was in the hands of the right, take up positions on Western European matters. The American sub-bureau[20], whose work Fraina's CP had been mandated to carry out, could well have become a centre of propaganda for the left in whole American continent. Faced with this danger, and at the very moment when the Bureau was saluting the formation of the KAPD in Germany, the CI decided to dissolve it - through a simple radio message from Moscow on the 4 May 1920. From now on the centre of opposition was transferred to Germany, putting an end to even the slightest opposition on the part of Wijnkoop's leadership and by the majority of the KPN.
Ch.
[1]The KAPD was very hostile to anarcho-syndicalism, represented by FAUD, created in 1919, which in March 1920 took a pacifist position at the time of the Kapp putsch, while the communist left participated in the armed struggles in the Ruhr. For its part, the KPD didn't disdain the syndicalism of the FAU of Gelsenkirchen, which in 1920-21 passed under its control.
[2]Nevertheless Radek tried from his prison to oppose Levi's attempt at a split. Once this had happened, Lenin, having acquainted himself with the situation, pronounced himself for the unity of the party, seeing in the opposition a sign of youthful and inexperience.
[3]A. Pannekoek, under the pseudonym K. Horner, 'Die Gewerkschaften', in Der Komunist, 28 January 1920, and also cf 'Der Wag nach rechts', in Der Komunist, 24 January 1920
[4]This quote and the following one are extracts from the article by Karl Horner: 'Der Neue Balnquismis' in Der Komunist, 1920, no. 27.
[5]K. Horner, in Der Komunist, no. 22, 1920.
[6]K. Horner, 'Taktische und organisatorische Streitfragen' in Der Komunist 13 December 1919.
[7]Before its shattering into pieces in 1982, the Bordigist current envisaged participating in elections in certain 'geographical areas' of the 'third world', where the 'bourgeois revolution' would still be on the agenda.
[8] This what Wijnkoop declared at the KPN Congress of Gronigue in June 1919. Gorter broke all personal relations with him.
[9] On the other question - parliamentarism, trade unionism - Wijnkoop remained silent. On his return to Holland, he was supposed to get the line of the CI applied in the KPN.
[10] It is difficult to know if Rutgers or Pannekoek, or the two together, wrote these theses on parliamentarism.
[11] The Theses of the Amsterdam Bureau were published as propositions in the organ of the CI (January 1920): ‘Vorschlage aus Holland', in Die Komunistische Internationale, nos 4-5. Translated in Broue, opcit. P. 364.
[12] Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism ed Promethee, 1980, p. 119:
"... the dictatorship of the soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party. It is thanks to the clarity of its theoretical vision and its strong revolutionary organization that the party has afforded to the soviets the possibility of becoming transformed from shapeless parliaments of labor into the apparatus of the supremacy of labor."
[13] Carl Stucke was one of the leaders of the Bremen tendency. At the time of the Amsterdam conference, he was first of all anti-parliamentarian, but some months later he defended the participation in elections in April 1920.
[14] Sneevliet said not a word during conference. He was accompanied by the Sino-Indonesian Tjun Sju Kwa, correspondent of the KPN in Indonesia, who was introduced as a "Chinese comrade" (sic).
[15] Undoubtedly, this is a pseudonym of the Russian, Borodine, responsible for the secretariat of the Latin-American bureau and much later an agent of Comintern in China, where he played not a negligible role in the defeat of the Chinese proletariat, with the political adhesion of the Chinese CP to the Kuomintang.
[16] The Imola conference of 10 October 1919 was an international ‘informational' meeting of some West European delegates, under the leadership of the PSI. apart from Pankhurst, the delegates were far from being the left. The Frankfurt conference on 19 December was of an informal character. The secretariat emerging out of it, comprised Radek, Levi. Thalheimer, Bronski, Munzenberg and Fuchs, who represented the right tendency in the CI.
[17] Fraina's courier, a man named Nosovitsky, who participated at the conference, was a police agent. The Dutch police recorded all the debates from a room adjoining the conference room; and they communicated the content to the bourgeois press. Several delegates were arrested by the police.
[18] BSP: British Socialist Party, created in 1911, it was the main force constituting the CPGB in July 1920. ILP: Independent Labor Party, created in the 1890s on the basis of the Fabian society. Non-marxist, it denounced the war in 1914.
[19] In Italy, the ‘centrist' tendency was represented by the Serrati ‘maximalist' current.
[20] The sub-bureau became after the IInd Congress of the CI, the Pan American bureau of the Komintern. Installed in Mexico, it was composed of the Japanese Katamaya, Fraina and a North American who used various Spanish sounding pseudonyms.
What point has the crisis reached?
The crash: When the debts have to be paid
Some weeks after 1929's famous "Black Thursday", the USA's President Hoover declared: "Prosperity is awaiting us just around the corner". We know what followed: the dark years of the 1930's, the crisis that was never overcome, and in the end, the world war. Thirty years later, the reassuring statements on the health of the world economy no longer reassure anyone. While the powers that be remain obsessedwith the need to "reassure", a new and extremely serious step forward in theworld recession is considered inevitable, even by the most optimistic. The veryday that the USA, through its famous spokesman Reagan, announced, to calmthings down ("reassure the markets" as the specialist press puts it), that itwas ready to reduce the budget deficit by several billion dollars, a study bythe renowned and powerful Morgan's Bank published an analysis forecasting acoming recession "three to four times more destructive than that of 1981/82".Already in 1981/82, unemployment rocketed in the developed countries, while theothers were plunged in misery. If we bear in mind the wounds inflicted onmankind's social body by the recession of 1981/82, this kind of perspectivegives food for thought. Let there be no mistake: the October 87 stock marketcrisis is only the foam on the waves, the forewarning of a fantasticallypowerful tidal wave, whose consequences it is still hard to measure.
Amuch more serious situation than in the 30's
It is only natural that thelatest quakes in the international financial system should call to mind thecrisis of the 1930's, and by analogy the stock market crash of 1929. But overand above immediate appearances, the historical situation is radicallydifferent today, and any comparison of the two periods only highlights, fromthe strictly economic viewpoint, the seriousness of the present situation.
As at the end of the 20's, thestock market crisis was preceded by an orgy of speculative drunkenness, wheremoney and profit seemed to engender themselves in an infinite spiral. All thecapital and social savings, whose thirst for profit could not be slaked bytraditional markets and industry, were sucked into an unprecedentedspeculation. As in 29, tine speculative bubble burst at the first sign of arecession, and again as in 29, the stock market crisis was triggered by a withdrawal of European capital, marked in 1929 by arise in the Bank of England's base rate and in October 87 by a rise in WestGerman interest rates.
This is where any resemblancebetween the two situations stops.
It is true that the 1929 crashdid not come out of the blue. It matured slowly throughout a period of chronicover-capacity in traditional industries like the railways, the mines, coal, andtextiles, and of a constant drop, between1920 and 1929, in workers' andfarmers' buying power. But alongside these sectors, the years before the crashwere highly prosperous for new and increasingly powerful industries like thecar industry, steel, electricity, gas, and oil.
In 1929, the stock market crashdid indeed open up the economic crisis. Today, crash follows crisis. And infact, the financial speculation at the origin of the crash only lasted for ayear. Simply from the standpoint of speculation, which reveals profit-seekingcapital's flight from the sphere of production, the speculation preceding theOctober 87 crisis is not a recent phenomenon, lasting one year as in 1929.Today, speculation has been for years an integral part of capitalist activity,and as such expresses all the difficulty capitalism has in valorizing itself inthe productive sphere.
Speculation has been going onfor 10 years, although a mounting crescendo did precede the delirium of 1986.Speculation on futures prices of raw mateials like oil in the 1970's;speculation on currencies like the dollar at the beginning of the 80's;speculation through company takeover raids for the last two years....
The fact that capital, after itsflight en masse from the sphere ofindustrial production, has been tracked down and trapped in the stock exchangetemples, where it has been barricading itself these last years, feverishly seeking refuge in financial speculation,shows, not that the economic crisis is born of the stock market crash but thereverse. And, above all, it reveals the depth of the contradictions that areundermining capitalist relations of production.
The relationship between themovement of trade and of capital is a sign of this reality:
"Capital movements have grown out of all proportion to those ofcommodities: the ratio is 50:1, since to every $5 billion of daily commercial trade, there correspond $200 billion ofinternational capital transfers" ("Dossiers et Documents", Le Monde, November 87)
Today's crisis is more seriousthan that of 1929 because of the greater weight of accumulated contradictions,but also and at the same time, because all the remedies intended to confront orat least to get around it, have been worn to the bone. Just as, contrary to1929, the present crash has been long preceded by the crisis (a historical signof the present situation's gravity), so the same is true of the economicpolicies aimed at confronting this historic crisis of over-production. The NewDeal, state construction projects, reflation through consumption and inflation,in fact everything that is referred to under the heading of Keynesianism -- ie,the state's increasing intervention in the economy, the development of statecapitalism -- are no longer ahead of us, but behind us. The present crisis ismore serious than that of 1929 not only because the mass of accumulatedcontradictions is greater, but because the means adopted to confront, or atleast avoid it, are worn out.
Financial manipulation hasalways been an essential tool of these policies. Today, after years ofexcessive credit, inflation, deficits and speculation, the internationalfinancial system cannot take any more: its very foundations are rotten withdebt, and closer to collapse with each passing day.
Nor would this sketch becomplete if we did not consider the questions of the budget deficit and thearms policy linked to it.
Here again, contrary to the1930's when the still relatively healthy condition of state treasuriesnourished on years of prosperity made possible an illusion of reflation thanksto huge arms production, today it is arms production, which ever since WorldWar II has absorbed a major part of society's creative power, which is one ofthe major causes of national budget deficits, especially in the USA and USSR,and so acts in the present historical situation as an important accelerator onthe world economic crisis (see the article on "War, Militarism..." in thisissue).
The whole world bourgeoisie,especially in Europe, points an accusing finger at the US budget deficit. Andyet the US budget deficit's underlying cause is this gigantic military effort,which nobody opposes, but which all the world bourgeoisie's grumble about paying.
There is no getting around thesefacts, which is why the European bourgeoisie's recriminations are condemned toremain mere gesticulation; essentially they will end up, as usual, signing onthe dotted line. They can't have their cake and eat it.
Whichever way it turns, fromWashington to Moscow, from Peking to Paris, from Tokyo to London, worldcapital is in a jam.
Theperspective of a major acceleration of the world recession
The economic history of the lasttwenty years is nothing other than the history of the world capitalisteconomy's race towards its present dead-end. Several phases can bedistinguished in the period running from 1968 to the present day:
"With the definitive end of the mechanisms of reconstruction in themid-sixties, western capitalism has had to adapt itself to a life of perpetualdownward swings whose scope is increasingly large and violent. Like an enragedanimal striking its head against the bars of its cage, western capitalism hasmore and more violently come up against two dangers: on the one hand deeper anddeeper recessions and on the other hand more and more difficult andinflationary recoveries. The graph (...) which traces the evolution of thegrowth in production for the seven major powers of the western bloc (the US,Japan, West Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy and Canada) shows how theseswings have been more and more drastic, ending in the striking failure ofreflationary policies from 1976 to 1979.
The major stages of thecrisis in the western economy since 1967 can be summarized as follows:
-- in 1967 slowdown in growth,
-- in 1968 recovery,
-- from 1969 to 1971 a new recession, deeper than 1967,
-- from 1972 to the middle of 1973 a second recovery breaking up theinternational monetary system with the devaluation of the dollar in 1971 andthe floating of the major monetary parities; governments financed the generalrecovery with tons of paper money;
-- at the beginning of 1973, the seven major powers had the highestgrowth rate in eighteen years (8-1/3 as an annual base in the first half of1973);
-- the end of 1973 to 1975 a new recession, the third, the longest anddeepest; in the second half of 1973 production increased at the rate of only 2%a year; more than a year later in 1975 it regressed at a rate of more than 4.3%a year;
-- 1976-79, third recovery; but this time despite recourse to theKeynesian policy of reflation through the creation of state budget deficits,despite the new market created by the OPEC countries which due to the rise inoil prices represented a strong demand for manufactured goods from theindustrialized world, despite the enormous deficit in the US balance of tradewhich due to the international role of the dollar, created and maintained anartificial market by importing much more than it exported, despite all thesemethods put into place by governments, economic growth after the economicrecovery in 1976 kept losing ground, slowly but surely..."
"It is clear that both the "budget deficit" remedy and the "US tradedeficit" remedy ("injecting dollars into the economy") have been administeredin massive doses over the past few years. The mediocrity of the resultsobtained proves only one thing: their effectiveness is steadily decreasing. Andthat is the second reason we foreseean exceptionally deep recession for the beginning of the 1980's". (International Review no 20, 1st quarter1980)
These forecasts were made at thebeginning of the 1980's. They have been amply born out.
Today, after capital throughoutthe world has deserted the sphere of industrial production, throwing millionsof workers on the streets, in order to finance the Western bloc's arms effortby financing the US budget deficit, or to feed the speculation in the stockmarket, we have arrived at the present situation, where the deficits are socolossal and the financial machinery and monetary structures have become sofragile, where every branch of the economy -- whether it be agriculture, rawmaterials or manufacturing industry -- is so badly hit by over-production, thata new recession combined with a new period of inflation is inevitable.
The illusion of "liberalization"in the Eastern bloc no longer works: it is too obviously a mere ideologicalcover for a massive reduction in the cost of maintaining the labor force --wages, housing, health, transport.... The riots in Romania bear witness to anunbearable pauperization. The intolerable conditions of wartime are spreadingeverywhere under the pressure of the crisis: rationing and militarization....
What is the choice facing theWestern bourgeoisie, and its American band-leader in particular?:
-- either support the dollar bya policy of high interest rates, given the dollar's weakness they will have tobe correspondingly high, which implies an immediate recessionist storm in theUS, and by extension in the rest of the world;
-- or, let the dollar fallthrough a policy of low interest rates in order to support exports andproduction; this cannot help but provoke a tidal wave of inflation -- all thestronger in that markets and banks, and especially the state with its colossaldebt, are literally starving for lack of currency.
Although uncertainty reigns --and we can be sure that this uncertainty as to which direction to take isessentially due to the size and stubbornness of the problem rather than to anytactical attitude -- for the moment, it seems that the latter option has beenadopted: a fall in both interest rates and the dollar, and therefore in theshort term a policy of inflation. Political analysts attribute this to theelectoral situation in the USA where talk of recession is taboo. To a certainextent, this may well have an effect. But fundamentally, it must be admittedthat the world economy has no choice: room for maneuver is very limited.
Thus, although for the momentthe USA has adopted an inflationist policy, letting the dollar drop thanks tolow interest rates, the other alternative of deep recession is nonetheless onlytoo present. How long can the USA go on letting the dollar drop towards itsreal value?
During the last two years, wehave already seen that a 50% devaluation of the American currency has not madeit possible to correct the US balance of trade. Given the American economy'sdegree of competitivity and its accumulated deficits (ie, the basis of acurrency's value), the dollar is no longer worth very much and the USA cannotallow it to drop too near zero. Nor can they take the risk of this policyprovoking a collapse of the American banking system, already severely weakenedby the pressure of inflation.
Inflation and recession aretherefore immediate, joint, and inevitable perspectives.
In October 87, the gale of thefinancial crisis abruptly swept away the colossal bluff of the "American recovery",the "life-giving return to the fountain-head of market laws". The economicsituation has laid bare for all to see the world economy's total dilapidation.And what is true for the world economy is also true for the condition of theworking class, and especially for unemployment.
Following the unprecedentedexplosion of unemployment to an average 12% of the working population in theindustrialized countries, we have seen, alongside the bluff of the "Americanrecovery", a cosmetic job being done on the general state of what is called the"labor market". First of all in the US, where the pseudo-recovery wasaccompanied by a pseudo-fall in unemployment (though it never, even officially,returned to pre-1980 levels), what lay behind the official figures was anunprecedented pauperization of the working class and sectors of the middleclasses. In figures, jobs seemed to disappear at about the same pace as newones were created; but where once there had been skilled, stable, and more orless "well-paid" industrial employment, now there are unskilled, unstable"service" jobs, paid at half the previous wage. Such is the American miracle.
In Europe, we have been treatedto unbelievable contortions and manipulations of statistics to camouflage the"shame" of unemployment. Better still, the bourgeoisie has combined "the usefuland the agreeable" by creating jobs for young people that are supposedly"useful to the community" (in many European countries), paid four times lessthan the guaranteed minimum wage. As the present crisis develops, the pretenseof "good living conditions for the workers" is going to collapse as wretchedlyas the bluff of "the world economy's new-found health", to reveal the nakedtruth of poverty in this world. And with the new and powerful recessionarywave, this poverty is going to take an unprecedented step forward. Nobody canescape this truth: we can only accept it, and all its economic and militaryconsequences, or we can fight back. We need only remember the impact of the1981-82 recession to imagine the effects of a new recession on the still openscars of the old one.
The 1970's were years ofillusions; the 1980's have been years of truth, masked by an enormous bluff.The years to come will be years of truth that none can escape.
Animmense crisis of overproduction
Most people, if asked, wouldadmit to understanding nothing about the evolution, nonetheless only tooconcrete, of the world economic crisis. True, nothing is being done to helpthem -- and for good reason. But fundamentally, the reasons behind this crisis,which has gone on deepening for years, are much simpler to grasp than all thatis said about them might lead one to suppose. The crisis' very development alsohelps to clarify things.
The immediate cause behind thecollapse of the New York stock exchange, and of all the others in sympathy, wasthe fall of the dollar. At the root of the dollar's fall lie the US trade andbudget deficits. At the root of these deficits, lies world over-production. Thewidespread effect of the collapse is essentially due to the fact that the stockexchange was pumped up by speculation. The main cause of this speculative feverwas the flight of capital from the sphere of production, itself provoked byworld over-production.
Take the problem whichever wayyou like; you always end up with the same essential determining factor: worldover-production. And in the end, compared with the scale of the problemconfronting humanity, the crash of October 87 is a joke.
Society engenders povertybecause it produces "too much". What is expressed in this crisis ofover-production, which would have seemed absurd in other epochs, is the factthat today's so-called "modern" relations of production in reality belong tohuman prehistory. Anachronistic production relations dominated by productionfor profit and as a function of the market; characterized by the producers'separation from the productive forces, ie by the exploitation of labor, thedivision between intellectual and manual labor; production relations that determinethe world's division into nations, a division that ends up tearing humanityapart in world wars.
And what do the ruling classesask of us, in this crisis of over-production where nations confront each other,East and West, if not to serve as soldiers, first in the economic war, and thenin the final, definitive, total war?
From the capitalist viewpointthe overproduction crisis is the war of all against all, war in all its forms:first economic, then military. From our viewpoint -- the viewpoint of thefuture -- the crisis demands mankind's unification and the destruction of allfrontiers. Either we will be capable of setting in motion the vast project ofabolishing all separations, or we will go down the wretched road to the world'send.
Prenat : 30/11/87
At a time when the main governments of the world are making great speeches about arms reductions or even disarmament, what’s going on in the Middle East clearly gives the lie to any illusions about the ‘easing’ of military tensions, and illustrates in a striking manner one of the major components in today’s imperialist rivalries: the offensive of the American bloc, which is aimed at pushing forward the encirclement of the Russian bloc, and which in the first place involves bringing Iran to heel. These events, in which there has been a high level of cooperation between the naval forces of the main Western bloc countries, also underlines the fact that the sharpening of economic rivalries between these same countries doesn’t at all stand in the way of their solidarity as members of the same imperialist bloc. It also shows that the climate of war covering the whole planet doesn’t only take the form of military tensions between the two great blocs but also of confrontations between certain countries linked to the same bloc, as is the case with the Iran-Iraq conflict in which the latter country is being backed by the main Western countries.
All these issues, essential elements for the struggle of the working class and the development of its consciousness, are examined in the article that follows.
From its inception the workers’ movement has paid particular attention to the different wars that have taken place between capitalist nations. To give but one example, we can mention the positions adopted by the first international organisation of the working class, the International Workingmen’s Association, on the American Civil War in 1864 [1] [15] and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 [2] [16]. However, the attitude of the working class towards bourgeois wars has evolved in history, going from a position of support for some of them to a categorical rejection of any participation in them. Thus, last century revolutionaries could call on workers to lend support to this or that belligerent nation (the North against the South in the American Civil War, Germany against France of the Second Empire at the beginning of their conflict in 1870), whereas the basic position of all revolutionaries during the First World War was precisely the rejection and denunciation of any support to either of the two camps. In 1914 it was this change in the position of the working class towards war which marked the point of cleavage within the Socialist parties (and particularly in German social democracy) between those who rejected any participation in the war, the internationalists, and those who referred to the former positions of the workers’ movement to justify their support for their national bourgeoisie [3] [17]. And in fact this change in position corresponded to the change in the very nature of wars brought about by the fundamental shift of capitalism from its ascendant to its decadent period [4] [18].
This transformation of capitalism and, consequently of the nature of war, has been recognised by revolutionaries since the beginning of the century, and particularly during the First World War. It was on the basis of this analysis that the Communist International was able to declare that the proletarian revolution was on the agenda. Since its origins the ICC has adhered to this analysis, in particular to the positions of the Gauche Communiste de France which, in 1945, pronounced itself very clearly on the nature and characteristics of war in the period of the decadence of capitalism:
“In the epoch of ascendant capitalism, wars (national and colonial wars, wars of imperialist conquest) expressed the upward march of the fermentation, reinforcement and expansion of the capitalist economic system. Capitalist production found in war the continuation of its economic policies by other means. Each war could justify itself and repay its costs through the opening up of a new field for greater expansion, thus ensuring the greater development of capitalist production.
“In the epoch of decadent capitalism, war, like peace, expresses this decadence and acts as a powerful acceleration on it.
“It would be a mistake to see war as a phenomenon in itself, negative by definition, a destructive obstacle to the development of society, in contrast to peace, which would then be seen as the normal and positive side of the development of production and society. This would be to introduce a moral concept into an objective, economically determined course.
“War was an indispensable means for capitalism, opening up the possibilities of ulterior development, in the epoch when these possibilities existed and could only be opened up through violent methods. In the same way, the downfall of the capitalist world, which has historically exhausted all the possibilities for development, finds in modern war, imperialist war, the expression of this downfall which, without opening up any possibility for an ulterior development, can only hurl the productive forces into an abyss and pile ruins upon ruins at an ever-increasing pace.
“Under capitalism, there is no fundamental opposition between war and peace, but there is a difference between the ascendant and decadent phases of capitalist society and, consequently, a difference in the function of war (and in the relationship between war and peace) in the two respective phases. While in the first phase war had the function of enlarging the market with a view towards a greater production of consumer goods, in the second phase production is focused essentially on the production of the means of destruction, i.e. with a view towards war. The decadence of capitalist society is strikingly expressed in the fact that whereas in the ascendant period wars led to economic development, in the decadent period economic activity is geared essentially towards war.
“This doesn’t mean war has become the goal of capitalist production, which remains the production of surplus value, but it does mean that war, taking on a permanent character, has become decadent capitalism’s way of life,” (Report to the July 1945 conference of the Gauche Communiste de France, cited in the “Report on the historic course” adopted at the 3rd Congress of the ICC, in International Review n°18).
These lines were written in July 1945 when the world war had barely finished in Europe and was still being fought out in the Far East. And everything that has happened since then has fully confirmed the analysis contained in them, even more than one could have known at the time. Whereas after the First World War there was, up until the beginning of the ‘30s, a certain attenuation in inter-imperialist tensions and a significant reduction in armaments, none of this happened after the Second World War. Since ‘peace’ was re-established there have been about 150 wars in the world [5] [19], killing tens of millions of people, and amply proving that “under capitalism there is no fundamental opposition between war and peace”, and that “war, taking on a permanent character, has become decadent capitalism’s way of life.” And what characterises all these wars, like the two world wars, is that unlike those of the previous century, at no time have they permitted any progress in the development of the productive forces, having had no other result than massive destructions which have bled dry the countries in which they have taken place (not to mention the horrible massacres they have provoked). Among a multitude of examples of the wars that have taken place since 1945, we can take that of Vietnam, which, according to those who in the 1960s and 70s were demonstrating under the flags of the NLF [6] [20], would make it possible to build a new and modern country, whose inhabitants would be freed from the calamities which accompanied the old Saigon regime. Since the reunification of this country in 1975, not only have the Vietnamese population not had any peace (the old ‘armies of liberation’ have been converted into an occupying army in Cambodia), but also their economic situation has got worse and worse to the point where, at its last Congress, the ruling party had to admit that the economy was bankrupt.
However catastrophic they may have been, the destructions provoked by the different wars which have taken place since 1945, and which have mainly affected the weakly developed countries, are obviously on a lesser scale than those caused by the First and above all the Second World Wars, which involved the most developed countries in the world, especially those of Western Europe. These two wars, so different from those of last century – for example the one between France and Germany in 1870 – are indeed in the image of the transformations undergone by capitalism since that time. Thus, the 1870 war, by permitting the reunification of Germany, was for this country a major precondition for the formidable development it went through at the end of the 19th century, while even for the defeated country France, it didn’t really have negative consequences in spite of the 5 million gold francs handed over to Germany for the departure of its troops: it was during the last three decades of the 19th century that France went though its most important industrial development (illustrated in particular by the universal expositions in Paris in 1878, 1889 and 1900).
In contrast to this, the two great wars of this century which, at the beginning, involved the same two antagonists, had as their main consequence not a new step forward in the development of the productive forces, but an unprecedented devastation of the productive forces, and in particular of the most important of them — the working class.
This phenomenon was already flagrant during the First World War. To the extent that it was the main capitalist powers confronting each other, the majority of the soldiers sent to the front were workers in uniform. The bloodbath that the war represented for the working class was in proportion not only to the bitterness of the fighting and the ‘efficiency’ of the new weapons used during the course of the war (armoured cars, gas warfare, etc), but also to the level of mobilisation involved. Contrary to the wars of the past which only threw a small proportion of the male population into combat, practically the entire male population of fighting age was involved in the general mobilisation [7] [21], and more than a third was killed or gravely wounded in the fighting.
At the same time, while on the Western front the world war had a limited territorial extension and thus largely spared the main industrial regions, it caused an almost 30% drop in Europe’s production. This was mainly the consequence of the enormous puncture in the economy made by the requirement to send a major part of the working class and by the use of over 50% of the industrial potential in the production of a arms. This in turn led to a dizzying fall in productive investments and thus to the wearing out, obsolescence, and non-replacement of industrial installations.
An expression of the fact that the capitalist system had sunk deeper into decadence, the destruction caused by the Second World War was on a much wider scale than that caused by the First. While certain countries like France had a smaller number dead than in the First World War owing to the fact that they were defeated right at the beginning of hostilities, the total number of dead was around four times higher (about 50 million). The losses suffered by a country like Germany, the most developed country in Europe, with the most numerous and concentrated proletariat, rose to over 7 million, or three times more than in 1914-18, three million of them being civilians. In its growing barbarism, capitalism was no longer content to devour the workers in uniform – the whole working population was not only mobilised into the war effort (as was the case with the first world conflict) but also had to directly pay the price in blood. In certain countries, the proportion of civilians killed exceeded by far the number of soldiers killed at the front: for example, out of the 6 million lost in Poland (22% of the population), ‘only’ 600,000 were killed in the fighting. In Germany, 135,000 human beings (more than in Hiroshima) were killed in the 14 hour bombardment (in three successive waves) of Dresden on 13th February 1945. Nearly all of them were civilians, and the great majority workers. The working class residential neighbourhoods were greatly favoured by the allied bombardments because this made it possible both to weaken the country’s productive potential at a lesser cost than by attacking industrial installations, which were often underground and well protected by anti-aircraft fire (even though, obviously, these installations weren’t spared either) and, at the same time, to destroy the only force capable of revolting against capitalism at the end of the war, as it did between 1918 and 1923 in this same country.
On the material level, the damage was of course considerable. For example, while France had a ‘limited’ number killed (600,000, of which 400,000 were civilians), its economy was ruined, notably by allied bombing. Industrial production fell by almost a half. A number of urban areas were reduced to ruin: a million buildings were damaged or destroyed. All the ports were systematically bombarded or sabotaged and were obstructed by sunken ships. Of 83,000 kilometres of railway, 37,000 were damaged, as well as 1900 viaducts and 4,000 road bridges. The number of locomotives and coaches was reduced to a quarter of its 1938 total.
Germany also of course found itself in the front line of material destruction: 750 out of 958 river bridges, 2,400 railway bridges and 3,400 kilometres of railway (and that only in the sector occupied by the western Allies); out of 16 million residences, nearly 2,5 million were uninhabitable and 4 million damaged; only a quarter of the city of Berlin was left intact and Hamburg alone suffered more damage than the whole of Britain. In fact, the whole economic life of the country was disrupted, resulting in a situation of material distress which was without precedent:
“… in 1945, the disorganisation was general and dramatic. Any revival was made difficult by the lack of raw materials, the exodus of whole populations, the scarcity of skilled workers, the stopping of transport, the collapse of the administration ... The mark lost all value and there was a return to barter - American cigarettes served as money; under-nourishment was general; the post no longer worked; families lived in ignorance of what was happening to those closest to them; general unemployment made it impossible to find the necessities of life; the winter of 1945-46 was particularly hard, and coal and electricity were often lacking (...) only 39 million tons of coal were dug in 1945 and only 3 million tons of steel produced in 1946; the Ruhr was only working at 12% of its capacity.” (H. Michel, La Seconde Guerre Mondiale).
This very incomplete catalogue of the devastation caused by the two world wars, and particularly the last one, is an illustration of the fundamental changes that have taken place in the nature of war between the 19th and 20th centuries. In the previous century the destruction caused by and the cost of wars were simply the ‘expenses’ of capitalist expansion, expenses which in general were amply recovered by subsequent returns. Since the beginning of this century, they have been a bloodletting which has ruined all the belligerents, the ‘victors’ as well as the ‘vanquished’ [8] [22]. The fact that capitalist relations of production have ceased to be the condition for the development of the productive forces, that they have in fact become heavy fetters on this development, is clearly expressed in the level of the ravages suffered by the economies of both countries which have been at the heart of the historic development of these relations of production: the countries of Western Europe. For these countries in particular, both world wars resulted in a major decrease in their relative importance on a world scale, both on the economic and financial level and on the military level, to the benefit of the USA, on which they have become more and more dependent. In the final analysis, the irony of history is that the two countries which emerged best equipped economically after the Second World War, despite the considerable destruction they went through, were precisely the two main defeated countries: Germany (which moreover had its Eastern provinces amputated) and Japan. There is an explanation for this paradoxical phenomenon which, far from refuting our analysis, fully confirms it.
In the first place, the revival of these countries could only have taken place thanks to the massive economic and financial aid supplied by the US, mainly through the Marshall Plan, this aid being one of the essential means whereby the USA ensured the unfailing loyalty of these countries. By their own forces alone, these countries would have been completely unable to enjoy the economic ‘success’ they did. But this success, particularly for Japan, can above all be explained by the fact that, for a whole period, the military effort of these countries, as ‘vanquished’ countries, was intentionally limited by the ‘victors’ to a level far below their own. Thus the proportion of Japan’s GNP devoted to the arms budget has never gone beyond 1%, which is well below the amount spent by the other main countries.
We see here one of the major characteristics of capitalism in its period of decadence, and this is something which has been analysed by revolutionaries in the past: the enormous economic burden of military expenditure, not only in periods of war but also in periods of ‘peace’. Contrary to what Rosa Luxemburg wrote in The Accumulation of Capital (and this is the only major criticism of this book), militarism does not at all represent a field of accumulation for capitalism. On the contrary: whereas producer goods can be incorporated into the following productive cycle as constant capital or variable capital, armaments constitute pure waste from the standpoint of capital itself, since their only destiny is to go up in smoke (including in the literal sense) when they aren’t responsible for massive destruction. This fact is illustrated in a ‘positive’ way by a country like Japan, which has been able to devote the best part of its production, notably in the high-tech sectors, to developing the foundations of its productive apparatus. It is this (apart from the low wages paid to the workers) which explains the performance of its commodities on the world market. This reality is also demonstrated in a striking manner – but this time in a negative sense – in the case of a country like the USSR, whose backwardness and acute economic difficulties are to a very large extent the result of the enormous hole made in its economy by arms production. When the most modern machines, the most highly qualified workers and engineers are nearly all mobilised for the production of tanks, planes and missiles, there’s not much left for making, for example, components for the huge number of tractors that are immobilised, or for making goods trucks for carrying the harvests which are left to rot while the queues lengthen outside the food shops in the towns. It’s no accident that the USSR today is trying to loosen the vice-like grip of military expenditure by taking the initiative in the negotiations with the USA over arms reduction.
Finally, even the world’s leading power is unable to escape the catastrophic consequences of arms expenditure: the USA’s enormous budget deficit, which hasn’t ceased growing since the beginning of the 1980s (and which, having permitted the much-vaunted ‘recovery of 1983’, can now be seen clearly as one of the factors responsible for aggravating the crisis) has accompanied, in a remarkably parallel manner, the considerable growth in the defence budget since that time. This situation in which the military sector grabs hold of the flower of the productive forces (the industrial and scientific potential) is not unique to the USSR: the position is identical in the USA (the difference being that the level of technology set in motion for the construction of tanks in the USSR is well below that used for building tractors in the USA, and that the computers sold on the mass market in the USA are copied by the USSR for its military needs). In the USA, for example, 60% of public research is officially devoted to armaments (in reality, 95%): the atomic research centre at Los Alamos (where the first A-bomb was made) is systematically the beneficiary of the most powerful computers in the world as soon as they appear (Cray 1 then Cray 2 and Cray 3); the organism known as CODASYL which in the 1960s defined the computer programming language COBOL (one of the most used in the world) was dominated by the representatives of the American army; the new language ADA, which is destined to become one of the ‘standards’ in world computing, was created on direct orders from the Pentagon... Many more examples could be given of the total domination over the key sectors of the economy by the military. All of this is evidence of a considerable sterilisation of the productive forces, particularly those with the highest performance, both in the USA and in other countries [9] [23].
These facts about the world’s number one power are only an illustration of one of the major phenomena of the life of capitalism in its decadent phase: even in periods of ‘peace’ the system is being eaten away by the cancer of militarism. On a world scale, according to the UN’s estimate, 50 million people have jobs involved with the defence sector, among them 500,000 scientists. In 1985, some $820 billion was spent on war across the world (or nearly the equivalent of the Third World’s debt).
And this madness can only grow from year to year: since the beginning of the century military expenditure has multiplied 35 times (in ‘real’ terms at constant prices).
This permanent progression in the arms sector is concretised in particular by the fact that, at present, Europe – which would constitute the main theatre for a third world war – harbours a destructive potential incomparably greater than at the outbreak of the Second World War: 215 divisions (as opposed to 140), 11,500 planes and 5,200 helicopters (as opposed to 8,700 planes), 41,000 combat tanks (as opposed to 6,000), to which must be added 8,600 armoured vehicles of all kinds. Without counting naval forces, we can then add 31,000 artillery pieces, 3,200 anti-tank weapons and all kinds of missiles, ‘conventional’ and nuclear. Nuclear arms themselves will not disappear when and if the recent agreement between America and Russia to scrap intermediate range missiles is carried out. Alongside all the bombs carried by planes and short range missiles, Europe will continue to be threatened by some 20,000 ‘strategic’ warheads transported by submarines and intercontinental missiles as well as by tens of thousands of nuclear shells and mines. If a war broke out in Europe, even if it didn’t take a nuclear form, it would result in the most terrifying ravages (notably through the use of combat gas and the new ‘quasi-nuclear’ explosives which are far more devastating than classical explosives). It would also annihilate all the economic activity which depends on transport and the distribution of electricity, which would be paralysed: the populations spared from the bombing and the gas would die of hunger!
Germany, in particular, would constitute the main theatre for the fighting and as a consequence would virtually be wiped out. But such a war would not stop at the use of conventional weapons alone: as soon as one of the two camps saw that its situation was deteriorating, it would first of all start using its own nuclear arsenal (artillery with nuclear shells and short-range nuclear missiles with ‘low-level’ warheads) and then, after an equivalent response from the other side, it would turn to its ‘strategic’ arsenal of tens of thousands of high level nuclear warheads: this would mean, purely and simply, the destruction of humanity [10] [24].
Such a scenario, however insane it might seem, is by far the most
probable if war broke out in Europe: it’s what NATO has in mind if its forces
are overrun by the Warsaw Pact in conventional confrontations in this part of
the world (this strategic concept is known as ‘graduated response’). We can
have no illusions in the possibility of the two blocs ‘controlling’ such an
escalation: the two world wars, and particularly the last one, which ended with
the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have already shown
that the total absurdity of the capitalist mode of production is expressed not
only by the increasingly crushing weight of militarism on the economy, nor by
the fact that war has lost any real economic rationality, but also by the
incapacity of the ruling class to control the juggernaut hurtling towards total
war. But while this tendency is not new, its full development, which
corresponds to capitalism’s continuing plunge into decadence, introduces a new
element: the threat of the total destruction of humanity, which only the
struggle of the proletariat can prevent.
The second part of this article will attempt to draw out the present characteristics of the inter—imperialist confrontations and in particular the significance of the deployment of the western armada in the Persian Gulf.
FM, 30/11/87.
[1] [25] See the address sent on November 29, 1864 by the General Council of the IWO to Abraham Lincoln on the occasion of his re-election and the Address to president Andrew Johnson on 13 May, 1865.
[2] [26] See the two addresses of the general council on the Franco-German war (July 23 and September 9 1870).
[3] [27] The official social democratic press in Germany welcomed the war against Russia as follows: “The German Social Democracy has always hated Czarism as the bloody guardian of European reaction: from the time that Marx and Engels followed, with far-seeing eyes, every movement of this barbarian governments down to the present day. . . The time has come when we must square accounts with these terrible scoundrels, under the German flag of war,” (Frankfurter Volksstimme, July 31, cited by Rosa Luxemburg in The Crisis in the German Social Democracy, in the Merlin Press edition of The Junius Pamphlet.
Rosa Luxemburg replied as follows: “After the Social Democratic group had stamped the war as a war of defence for the German nation and European culture, the Social Democratic press proceded to hail it as the ‘saviour of the oppressed nation’. Hindenburg became the executor of Marx and Engels” (ibid).
Similarly, Lenin wrote in 1915: “The Russian social-chauvinists (headed by Plekhanov), refer to Marx’s tactics in the war of 1870; the German (of the type of Lensch, David and Go) to Engels’ statement in 1891 that in the event of war against Russia and France together, it would be the duty of German socialists to defend their fatherland (…) All these references are outrageous distortions of the views of Marx and Engels in the interest of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists... .Whoever refers today to Marx’s attitude towards the wars of the epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie and forgets Marx’s statement that ‘the workers have no fatherland’, a statement that applies precisely to the epoch of the reactionary, obsolete bourgeoisie, to the epoch of the socialist revolution, shamelessly distorts Marx and substitutes the bourgeois for the socialist point of view,” (Socialism and War, Peking, p.16-17).
[4] [28] This is why certain political currents, like Bordigism or the GCI, who are today incapable of understanding the decadent character of the capitalist mode of production, are unable to explain why, from an equally proletarian point of view, Marx could support Germany against France at the beginning of the 1870 war (as long as Napoleon III had not been overthrown and Germany had not invaded France), while Lenin denounced any participation in the First World War.
[5] [29] The list of all these wars would take up a whole page of the Review. As an illustration we will cite only the most important and murderous ones: the wars in Indochina and north Africa between 1945 and 1962 which resulted in France’s departure from these regions; the 5 wars involving Israel and the Arab countries (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982); the Vietnam and Cambodia wars between 1963 and 1975 (in the latter country, after the intervention of Vietnam at the end of 1978, the war is still going on); the brief but very bloody war between China and Vietnam at the beginning of 1979; the war in Afghanistan which has lasted 8 years and the one between Iran and Iraq which is also into its eighth year. We can add the numerous conflicts in which India has been involved since its independence, which was won under the leadership of the ‘non-violent’ Gandhi (wars against Pakistan in Kashmir and in Bangladesh) and, most recently, the war against the Tamils in Sri Lanka. To this list must be adjoined the dozens of wars which have ravaged and continue to ravage black Africa and North East Africa: Angola, Mozambique, Uganda, Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, etc, and, obviously, Chad.
[6] [30] National Liberation Front: the movement led by Ho Chi Minh, which was to take power in Vietnam when the Americans left the country.
[7] [31] For example, the Napoleonic wars, which were the most important in the 19th century, never involved, on the French side, more than 500,000 men out of a total population of 30 million, whereas during the First World War over 5 million French soldiers were mobilised, from a population of 39.2 million.
[8] [32] Both in the first and the second world wars, the only country that can be seen as a ‘victor’ was the USA, whose level of production after the conflicts was well above its pre-war level. But this country, for all its importance in these two wars, especially the second, was granted a privilege denied to the countries at the origin of the conflict: its territory was a thousand miles from the combat zones, which enabled it to escape both civilian losses and the destruction of its industrial and agricultural potential. The other ‘victor’ in the second war, the USSR, which emerged from it as a world power, mainly by establishing its domination over Eastern Europe and part of the Far East, paid a heavy price for its ‘victory’: 20 million dead and considerable material destruction, which played a large role in keeping its economy at a level of development well behind that of Western Europe and even most of its ‘satellites’.
[9] [33] The theory of the ‘positive feedback’ which military research gives to the economy and the civilian sector is a vast hoax, immediately refuted when you compare the civilian technological competitiveness of Japan and West Germany (which devote 0.01% and 0.1% respectively of their GBP to military research) to that of France and Britain (0.46% and 0.63%).
[10] [34] Studies of the consequences of a generalised nuclear conflict show that the 3 (out of 5) billion human beings spared the first day would not survive the calamities of the days that followed: radioactive fallout, deadly ultra—violet rays following the disappearance of the ozone layer, glaciation resulting from a dust-cloud that would plunge the earth into a night lasting several years. The only form of life that would survive would be bacteria, at best some insects.
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[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/52_militarism#_ftn1
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[25] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/52_militarism#_ftnref1
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/52_militarism#_ftnref2
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/52_militarism#_ftnref3
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/52_militarism#_ftnref4
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/52_militarism#_ftnref5
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/52_militarism#_ftnref6
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[32] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/52_militarism#_ftnref8
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/52_militarism#_ftnref9
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[35] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/343/militarism-and-decadence