Against all forms of nationalism, in the face of the deepening world crisis, communists must affirm the internationalist tasks of the revolutionary working class.
Whether in the advanced countries or the Third World, the only way forward for the working class today is to wage an intransigent, autonomous class struggle. This implies not only an independence from all those forces which attempt to divert the struggle of the class and to tie it to one capitalist faction – whether trade unions, leftist parties, or national liberation fronts – but also a fierce struggle against all these forces, against frontisms of all kinds. The workers must fight not simply against one imperialist bloc and its local agents, but against all imperialisms and all their agents. The only front open to the working class today is the international proletarian front against capital.
To those who try to terrorise the proletariat into allying itself with some ‘more progressive’ or ‘less evil’ bourgeois faction by advertising the extreme murderousness of another rival faction, communists can only reply by pointing out how little such alliances can in fact protect workers from bloodshed and massacre. Far from defending workers against a ‘greater evil’, such alliances have only served to disarm the class, leaving it helpless against the attacks of its erstwhile ‘allies’ when the latter attempted to ‘restore order’ and set up their own regime. This is the lesson of China in 1927, and the working class has paid heavily for not assimilating that lesson since then. The workers of Barcelona in May 1937 were shot down by the Popular Front, which was supposed to save them from the ‘greater evil’ of fascism. Likewise in 1943, the Allied bombers taught a salutary lesson to the Italian workers whose strikes and uprisings against the fascist administration threatened to get out of hand. For the proletariat there are no ‘lesser evils’ in capitalism. The working class cannot rely on its deadly enemy, the bourgeoisie, for protection. Even in the epoch of genuine bourgeois revolutions, Marx insisted that the workers should retain their arms and independent organs of struggle throughout the revolution, to defend themselves against the inevitable bourgeois backlash against the threat to capitalist order (the lesson of the Paris insurrections of 1848). In the era of capitalist decay, when the bourgeoisie in all its colours can only advance by attacking and massacring the working class, the only possible defence of the proletariat is its independent action against all bourgeois factions, leading to their eventual overthrow by the armed workers’ councils.
In the rising wave of class struggle since 1968, the workers of the Third World have shown a capacity for autonomous class struggle no smaller than that of their brothers in the more industrialised countries. In Argentina, Venezuela, India, Burma, Thailand, Angola, China, South Africa, Egypt, Israel, and elsewhere, massive strikes and even semi-insurrectional struggles have hurled the workers into direct confrontation with the police, the unions, the ‘workers parties’, and with governments of ‘national liberation’. As in the advanced capitals, workers in these countries have organized themselves in autonomous general assemblies and wildcat strike committees to direct their struggle. In Argentina in 1969 the workers defended their neighbourhoods against the army with Molotov cocktails and guns, organising committees to co-ordinate their fight, which can be seen to be the direct precursors of the workers’ councils.
Just as the capitalist crisis is international, so the response of the working class is also international in scale. The deepening of the crisis opens up the possibility of a growing unification of workers’ struggles all over the world. It is in this process of deepening and ever-widening class struggle that the working class will develop the consciousness and capacity to mount a revolutionary offensive against the capitalist state in all countries.There are those who justify support for national liberation fronts by saying that any other policy must condemn the proletariat of the Third World to wait impotently until the proletariat in the advanced countries breaks the imperialist chain at its centre. Others, not wanting to sully their hands with supporting bourgeois factions, simply dismiss the revolutionary potential of the working class in the underdeveloped countries, and say that nothing can be done until there is a revolution in the advanced countries.
Both these viewpoints betray an inability to comprehend capital as a global social relation and the working class as one world class. By its own struggles the proletariat in the Third World has shown that it has no intention of passively enduring until the revolution breaks put in a major imperialist centre. While we have no intention of ‘predicting’ where the revolution will break out, there is no a priori reason why a revolutionary impetus might not begin in a Third World country or continent. Of course, the revolution could not maintain itself there for long, but, in the end, this is no less true for America than it is for Venezuela or Vietnam. It is the global nature of the crisis that opens up the possibility of the worldwide generalisation of the revolution, just as it was in 1917 when the revolutionary wave began in ‘backward’ Russia. (It is important to point out that many parts of the Third World – Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, India, Egypt, South Korea, Taiwan, etc – are characterized by important industrial centres and a highly concentrated proletariat, as was Russia on the eve of the October revolution. Even in those countries that lack significant industrial centres there is a large agricultural proletariat as well as dockers, transportation workers, construction workers, etc. who could be the basis of the revolutionary thrust. However, it is undeniable that the chances of a revolutionary impetus beginning from this second category of Third World countries are somewhat remote.)
Unquestionably the problems faced by a proletarian dictatorship in the Third World would be immense. The proletariat in such a region would be faced with the need to feed thousands of lumpenproletarians and landless peasants; it would be confronted with a peasantry attached to the idea of its own property and to subsistence agriculture; it would be threatened with immediate attack by one of the large imperialisms and probably also by their local client states. Clearly in such a situation the only way forward would be to attempt to spread the revolution as quickly as possible towards the advanced capitals, whose material resources and proletarian concentration are absolutely indispensable for the success of the revolution and the creation of socialism. Only if this outward movement is maintained will it be possible for the proletariat to defend its power in a sea of peasants and other non-proletarian strata. In all probability the workers would be forced to make various concessions to the peasants and there would be all kinds of dangers inherent in such concessions. A great deal can be learned from the (negative) experience of the Bolsheviks in this respect. Thus the workers would have to encourage collectivisation rather than the dividing up of the land, and instead of proclaiming a ‘workers’ and peasants’ government’ the workers would have to prevent the peasants from attempting to ‘share power’ with the proletariat. (Political representation of strata such as the peasantry would be through territorial councils, which would represent the peasants as individuals, not as a whole social class with its own soviet power.) But in any case, any measures the workers took to counterbalance unavoidable concessions could only serve to maintain the balance of forces in favour of the working class if the revolution continued to spread. There can be no solution to the problem of other social strata within a single country. Only the worldwide proletarian dictatorship can really achieve the integration of all classes into the communist association of mankind.
It is vital to understand the problems that a Third World bastion would face and to recognise the central role of the proletariat of the advanced countries. But communists must be aware of the strengths of the proletariat as well as its weaknesses. In the underdeveloped countries the proletariat may constitute a small minority of the population, but as Lenin recognized in 1919:
“The strength of the proletariat in any capitalist country is infinitely larger than its proportion in the total population. This is because the proletariat has economic command of the centre and the nervous system of the capitalist economy, and also because in the political and economic sphere, the proletariat expresses, under capitalist domination, the real interests of the vast majority of the toiling population.” (Lenin, Works, vol.16)
Moreover, the weakness and incompetence of the bourgeoisie in many backward countries may make the actual seizure of power by the working class easier than in the advanced capitalisms where the bourgeoisie is much more experienced and much better equipped to deal with civil disorder. On the global scale, the intervention of the major imperialisms against a revolution in the Third World may be delayed or obstructed by the depth of the crisis and the class struggle in the advanced capitals. The American or Russian bourgeoisie might simply be unable to mobilise ‘their’ workers against a workers’ bastion, even though the workers of the former countries had not yet taken power. In any case, the interdependent nature of the world economy makes the revolution itself no less interdependent. Workers of the advanced countries need the revolution in the backward countries just as the latter require the overthrow of the major powers. There is only one revolution.
Whether the proletarian revolution breaks out in the advanced countries or in the Third World, one thing is certain; the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship anywhere opens the phase of the worldwide civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
The world civil war does not mean that a single proletarian bastion has the ‘messianic’ task of spreading the revolution entirely on its own, of taking on the whole world bourgeoisie in a direct military confrontation. Apart from the fact that this is a strategic utopia, the impossibility of ‘exporting revolution’ by simply invading neighbouring capitalist countries was demonstrated in 1920, when the Red Army’s advance on Warsaw only succeeded in driving the Polish workers into the arms of their own bourgeoisie. A single proletarian bastion will undoubtedly have to conduct a holding operation in military terms; defending what territory it can while attempting to spread the revolution by other means.
The words ‘civil war’ mean that as soon as the question of power is concretely posed, the proletariat has begun a fight to the death with capital. And this is true not just for, the section of the proletariat that has seized power, but for the entire world class. For the proletariat of the workers’ bastion it means that their bastion cannot survive indefinitely within the world capitalist system. Either it remains an expression of the continuous revolutionary struggle of the working class, or it will, succumb at the hand of the counter-revolution, both from within and from without.
For this reason, all the efforts of the workers in their bastion must be geared to the extension of the revolution to the worldwide conquest of power by the working class. The necessary measures of socialisation that the proletariat in power in one area will take are, at this stage, fundamentally means to this end.
The principle vehicle for the extension of the revolution, the proletariat’s main weapon in the civil war, is the class consciousness of the world proletariat. It follows that the main strategy of the proletariat in power in one region is to generalise the political conditions for revolution. It must appeal to the workers of the whole world to come to its aid by making the revolution in their own countries. It must actively assist and arm revolutionary workers everywhere. It must help conduct a massive campaign of agitation and propaganda within the world class, and help provide the organisational means for communist intervention in all countries. (The greatest contribution of the Bolsheviks to the extension of the revolution was the foundation of the 3rd International.)
It is within an overall framework of political considerations that the proletariat must approach the question of the military extension of the revolution. There will certainly be military advances by the proletarian dictatorships, but these offensives will be subordinate to political criteria as well as purely military ones: the degree of revolutionary maturation in the proletariat of other countries, the strength of the bourgeoisie or of nationalist ideology, etc. Needless to say, such offensives will bear no resemblance to the barbaric methods of imperialist plunder. At all times the proletariat in arms will seek to win over the workers of other countries to the revolutionary fight; it cannot terrorize them into joining the revolution and can only reject with contempt all methods aimed at subjugating civilian populations by brute force – bombing and shelling of residential districts, mass reprisals, etc. Under no circumstances can it employ nuclear weapons or bacteriological warfare or any other nightmarish technique of mass murder concocted by decadent capitalism.
But while the proletarian power cannot attempt to incorporate countries into its jurisdiction by sheer force of arms, it cannot for that reason refrain from sending its armed detachments into this or that region out of respect for any
‘national rights’, if the situation demands such action. During the period of the civil war, of the extension of the revolution, there can be no concessions to nationalism or any pretended right to national self-determination. Instead of applying the disastrous Bolshevik policy of atomising the proletariat into enclaves at the mercy of the so-called ‘oppressed’ bourgeoisie, the proletarian power will have to make every effort to unify the class by calling for each fraction of the world proletariat to rise against its own bourgeoisie and to participate in the establishment of the international power of the workers’ councils. If this or that fraction of the proletariat retains nationalist illusions these must not be strengthened by promises of national independence but fought every inch of the way. The proletarian bastion will have to give the maximum aid and encouragement to those workers who have broken from nationalism, and will in general appeal to the class interests of all the workers. Nation or class? Capitalist slavery or communist revolution? These are the only alternatives the most resolute fractions of the working class can offer to their class brothers.There can be no more talk in the workers’ movement of any right to national self-determination either before, during, or after the victory of the proletarian revolution. The extension of the revolution means the speediest possible destruction of national frontiers, the establishment of the power of the workers’ councils over wider and wider areas of the globe. The real creation of communist social relations can only take place on a world scale.
In the old workers’ movement it was possible to have the confused idea that socialism was to some extent realisable behind national frontiers, that the world community could be created by a process of gradual fusion of ‘socialist economies’. But the experience of Russia has shown that not only is the construction of socialism difficult in one country, it is actually impossible. As long as global capital exists, it will continue to dominate all the rhythms of production and consumption everywhere. No matter how far the workers in one country go towards the elimination of the forms of capitalist exploitation in one area, they continue to be exploited by world capital. Before communism can be definitively created, capitalism must be definitively destroyed everywhere. Communism cannot be built ‘within’ capitalism.
Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin could speak of national self-determination under socialism and still remain revolutionaries. Today those who use the same terms are advocates of the capitalist counter-revolution. This applies to the Stalinists with their socialism in one country; to the Trotskyists with their fantasy of ‘workers’ states’ happily co-existing on a near-eternal world market. It also applies to libertarians and anarchists who favour ‘self-management in one country’. The retention of the nation state means national frontiers, international exchange, international competition – in short, capitalism. The construction of socialism/communism is nothing less than the construction of the world human community. It is the liberation of the productive forces from the fetters imposed by national divisions and commodity exchange. It is the worldwide, socialisation of production and consumption. It is the proletariat’s abolition of itself as an exploited class and the integration of all classes into a real social humanity that will appear for the first time.
In the transition period between capitalism and the classless society, the immense social dislocation and suffering bequeathed to the working class by capitalism can only begin to be abolished through the worldwide generalization of communist relations of production. On this basis alone can the problems that ravage the Third World and humanity as a whole be resolved. Unemployment, starvation, destruction and pillage of the natural environment, imbalance of the international industrial infrastructure – these fundamental problems are integral to the capitalist mode of production and can only be eliminated through the conscious planning of the world’s productive activity by the producers themselves.
In the reconstruction and transformation of a world ravaged by decades of capitalist decay, the proletariat will inevitably confront problems of national, racial, and cultural divisions within its own ranks and within humanity as a whole. All these divisions will have to be faced, and discussed freely and openly within the workers’ councils and the territorial councils through which the proletarian power will deal with the rest of the population. But the final liquidation of these divisions can only be achieved by the continuous revolutionizing of the social fabric, which will undermine the material basis of such divisions and render them obsolete. As it moves towards the human community, the proletariat will initiate the fusion of all existing cultures into a truly universal culture, a higher synthesis of every previous human cultural achievement into the new culture of communism. With the emergence of this universal culture, the ‘tribal’ phase of human prehistory ends, and the real history of humanity begins.
C.D. Ward