Like the last two issues of the Review, this one continues the celebration of centenaries of the historic events of the world-wide revolutionary wave of 1917-23.

Thus, after the revolution in Russia in 1917 (International Review nº 160), the revolutionary attempts in Germany in 1918-19 (International Review nº 161), this issue celebrates the foundation of the Communist International. All these experiences are essential parts of the political heritage of the world proletariat, which the bourgeoisie does everything it can to disfigure (as in the case of the revolutions in Russia or Germany) or simply  to consign them to oblivion, as is the case with the foundation of the Communist International. The proletariat has to re-appropriate these experiences so that the next attempt at world revolution will be victorious.

This relates in particular to the following questions, some of which are dealt with in this Review:

• The world-wide revolutionary wave of 1917-23 was the response of the international working class to the First World War, to four years of butchery and military confrontations between capitalist states with the aim of re-dividing the world.
• The foundation of the Communist International (CI) in 1919 was the culminating point of this first revolutionary wave.
• The foundation of the CI made concrete, first and foremost, the necessity for revolutionaries who remained loyal  to the principle of internationalism, which had been betrayed by the right wing of the Social Democratic parties (the majority in most of these parties), to work for the construction of a new International. At the forefront of this effort, this perspective, were the left currents in the Social Democratic parties, grouped around Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Pannekoek and Gorter in Holland, and of course the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian party around Lenin. It was on the initiative of the Communist Party of Russia (Bolshevik) and the Communist Party of Germany (the KPD, formerly the Spartacus League) that the First Congress of the International was called in Moscow on 2 March 1919.
• The foundation of the new party, the world party of the revolution, was already late in that the majority of revolutionary uprisings by the proletariat in Europe had been violently suppressed. The mission of the CI was to provide a clear political orientation to the working class: the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the destruction of its state and the construction of a new world without war or exploitation.
• The platform of the CI reflected the profound change in historical period opened by the First World War: “A new epoch is born! The epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner disintegration. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat" (Platform of the CI). The only alternative for society was now world proletarian revolution or the destruction of humanity; socialism or barbarism.

All these aspects of the foundation of the CI are developed in two articles in the present Review, the first in particular: “1919: the International of Revolutionary Action”. The second article, “Centenary of the foundation of the Communist International: what lessons can we draw for future combats?”, develops an idea already raised in the first article: because of the urgency of the situation, the main parties that founded the International, notably the Bolshevik party and the KPD, were not able to clarify their divergences and confusions in advance.

Moreover, the method employed in the foundation of the new party would not arm it for the future. A large part of the revolutionary vanguard put quantity, in terms of the number adhering to the new parties, above a prior clarification of programmatic and organisational principles. Such an approach turned its back on the very conceptions elaborated and developed by the Bolsheviks during their existence as a fraction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

This lack of clarification was an important factor, in the context of the reflux of the revolutionary wave, in the development of opportunism in the International. This was to be at the root of a process of degeneration which led to the eventual bankruptcy of the CI, just as had been the case with the IInd International. This new International was also to succumb through the abandonment of internationalism by the right wing of the Communist Parties. Following that, in the 1930s, in the name of defending the “Socialist Fatherland”, the Communist Parties in all countries trampled on the flag of the International by calling on workers to slaughter each other once again, on the battlefields of the Second World War.

Against this process of degeneration, the CI, like the IInd International, gave rise to left wing minorities which remained loyal to internationalism and to the slogan “The workers have no country, workers of the world unite!”. One of these fractions, the Italian Fraction of the Communist left, and then the French Fraction which subsequently became the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) carried out a whole balance sheet of the revolutionary wave. We are publishing two chapters from nº 7 (January-February 1946) of the review Internationalisme, dealing with the question of the role of the fractions which come out of a degenerating party (“The Left Fraction”) and their contribution to the formation of the future party, in particular the method that has to be applied to this task (“Method for forming the party”).

These revolutionary minorities, more and more reduced in size, had to work in the context of a deepening counter-revolution, illustrated in particular by the absence of revolutionary uprisings at the end of the Second World War – in contrast to what happened at the end of the previous war. Thus this new world conflict was a moment of truth for the weak forces which remained on a class terrain after the CPs had betrayed the case of the proletarian International. The Trotskyist current in turn betrayed, although its passage into the enemy camp engendered proletarian reactions from within it.

Internationalisme nº 43 (June-July 1949) contained an article “Welcome to Socialisme ou Barbarie” (republished in International Review nº 161 as part of the article “Castoriadis, Munis and the problem of breaking with Trotskyism”). The article by Internationalisme took a clear position on the nature of the Trotskyist movement, which had abandoned proletarian positions by participating in the Second World War. The article is a good example of the method used by the GCF in its relations with those who had escaped the shipwreck of Trotskyism in the wake of the war. In the second part of “Castoriadis, Munis and the problem of breaking with Trotskyism”, published in this issue of the Review, it is shown how difficult it was, for those who had grown up in the corrupted milieu of Trotskyism, to make a profound break with its basic ideas and attitudes. This reality is illustrated by the trajectory of two militants, Castoriadis and Munis, who, without doubt, at the end of the 40s and beginning of the 50s, were militants of the working class. Munis remained as such for his whole life, but this wasn’t the case with Castoriadis who deserted the workers’ movement.

With regard to Munis, our article demonstrates his difficulty in breaking with Trotskyism: “Underlying this refusal to analyse the economic dimension of capitalism’s decadence there lies an unresolved voluntarism, the theoretical foundations of which can be traced back to the letter announcing his break from the Trotskyist organisation in France, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste,  where he steadfastly maintains Trotsky’s notion, presented in the opening lines of the Transitional Programme, that the crisis of humanity is the crisis of revolutionary leadership.”

On Castoriadis, it is underlined that “In reality, this ‘radicalism’ that makes highbrow journalists drool so much was a fig leaf covering the fact that Castoriadis' message was extremely useful to the ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie. Thus, his declaration that marxism had been pulverised (The rise of Insignificance, 1996) gave its ‘radical’ backing to the whole campaign about the death of communism which developed after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of the eastern bloc in 1989”. He was, in a sense, one of the founding fathers of what we have called the “modernist” current

Also in this issue of the Review we continue the denunciation, begun in nº 160, of the union of all the national sectors and parties of the world bourgeoisie against the Russian revolution, to block the revolutionary wave and prevent its spread to the main industrial countries of Western Europe. Faced with the revolutionary attempts in Germany, the SPD played a key role in butchering these uprisings, and the campaigns of slander it used to justify this bloody repression, organised from the very summit of the state, were truly disgusting. Later on, Stalinism also took up its post as the butcher of the revolution, through the imposition of state terror and the liquidation of the Bolshevik Old Guard. From the moment that the USSR became a bourgeois imperialist state, the great democracies became its accomplice in the physical and ideological liquidation of October 1917. This ideological and political alliance was to last for many years and was to be re-launched, stronger than ever, when the collapse of the Eastern bloc and of Stalinism, a particular form of state capitalism, was falsely presented as the failure of communism.

This Review doesn’t contain an article on the burning questions of the current world situation. However our readers can find such articles on our website and the next issue of the Review will accord the necessary importance to these questions

14.5.19

100 years ago, in March 1919, the first congress of the Communist International (CI) was held: the founding congress of the Third International.

If revolutionary organisations did not have the will to celebrate this event, the foundation of the International would be relegated to the oblivion of history. Indeed, the bourgeoisie is interested in keeping silent about this event, while it continues to shower us with celebrations of all kinds such as the centenary of the end of the First World War. The ruling class does not want the working class to remember its first great international revolutionary experience of 1917-1923. The bourgeoisie would like to be able to finally bury the spectre of the revolutionary wave which gave birth to the CI. This revolutionary wave was the international proletariat's response to the First World War, four years of slaughter and military clashes between the capitalist states to carve up the world.

The revolutionary wave began with the victory of the Russian revolution in October 1917. It manifested itself in the mutinies of soldiers in the trenches and the proletarian uprising in Germany in 1918.

The wave spread throughout Europe, it even reached the countries of the Asian continent (especially China in 1927). The countries of the Americas, such as Canada and the United States to Latin America, were also shaken by this global revolutionary upheaval.

We must not forget that it was fear of the international expansion of the Russian revolution that forced the bourgeoisie of the great European powers to sign the armistice to end the First World War.

In this context, the founding of the Communist International in 1919 represented the culmination of this first revolutionary wave.

The Communist International was founded to give a clear political orientation to the working masses. Its objective was to show the proletariat the way to overthrow the bourgeois state and build a new world without war and exploitation. We can recall here what the Statutes of the CI affirmed (adopted at its Second Congress in July 1920):

"The Communist International was formed after the conclusion of the imperialist war of 1914-18, in which the imperialist bourgeoisie of the different countries sacrificed 20 million men.

'Remember the imperialist war!' These are the first words addressed by the Communist International to every working man and woman; wherever they live and whatever language they speak. Remember that because of the existence of capitalist society a handful of imperialists were able to force the workers of the different countries for four long years to cut each other's throats. Remember that the war of the bourgeoisie conjured up in Europe and throughout the world the most frightful famine and the most appalling misery. Remember, that without the overthrow of capitalism the repetition of such robber wars is not only possible, but inevitable."

The foundation of the CI expressed first and foremost the need for revolutionaries to come together to defend the principle of proletarian internationalism. A basic principle of the workers' movement that the revolutionaries had to preserve and defend against wind and tide!

To understand the importance of the foundation of the CI, we must first recall that the Third International was in historical continuity with the First International (the IWMA) and the Second International (the International of social democratic parties). This is why the Manifesto of the CI stated:

“In rejecting the timidity, the lies, and the corruption of the obsolete official socialist parties, we communists, united in the Third International, consider that we are carrying on in direct succession the heroic endeavours and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations from Babeuf to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. If the First International predicted the future course of development and indicated the roads it would take, if the Second International rallied and organised millions of proletarians, then the Third International is the International of open mass struggle, the International of revolutionary realisation, the International of action.”

It is therefore clear that the CI did not come from nowhere. Its principles and revolutionary programme were the emanation of the whole history of the workers' movement, especially since the Communist League and the publication of the Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. It was in the Communist Manifesto they put forward the famous slogan of the workers’ movement: "The proletarians have no country. Proletarians of all countries, unite!"

To understand the historical significance of the founding of the CI, we must remember that the Second International died in 1914. Why? Because the main parties of this Second International, the Socialist parties, had betrayed proletarian internationalism. The leaders of these treacherous parties voted for war credits in parliament. In each country, they called the proletarians to join the "Union Sacrée" with their own exploiters. They called on them to kill each other in the world butchery in the name of defending the homeland, when the Communist Manifesto affirmed that "the proletarians have no country"!

Faced with the shameful collapse of the Second International, only a few social democratic parties were able to weather the storm, including the Italian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Russian parties. In other countries, only a small minority of militants, often isolated, remained faithful to proletarian internationalism. They denounced the bloody orgy of war and tried to regroup. In Europe, it was this minority of internationalist revolutionaries who would represent the left, especially around Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Pannekoek and Gorter in Holland and of course the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian party around Lenin.

From the death of the Second International in 1914 to the founding of the CI in 1919

Two years before the war, in 1912 the Basle congress of the Second International was held. With the threat of a world war in the heart of Europe looming, this congress adopted a resolution on the issue of war and proletarian revolution. This affirmed:

“Let the governments remember that with the present condition of Europe and the mood of the working class, they cannot unleash a war without danger to themselves. Let them remember that the Franco-German War was followed by the revolutionary outbreak of the Commune, that the Russo-Japanese War set into motion the revolutionary energies of the peoples of the Russian Empire (…) The proletarians consider it a crime to fire at each other for the profits of the capitalists, the ambitions of dynasties, or the greater glory of secret diplomatic treaties.”

It was also in the Second International that the most consistent marxist theorists, particularly Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, were able to analyse the change in the historic period in the life of capitalism. Luxemburg and Lenin had in fact clearly demonstrated that the capitalist mode of production had reached its peak in the early twentieth century.. They understood that the imperialist war in Europe could now have only one goal:  the division of the world between the main rival powers in the race for colonies. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg understood that the outbreak of the First World War marked the entry of capitalism into its period of decadence and historical decline. But already, well before the outbreak of war, the left wing of the Second International had to fight hard against the right, against the reformists, centrists and opportunists. These future renegades theorised that capitalism still had good days ahead of it and that, ultimately, the proletariat did not need to make the revolution or overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie.

The fight of the left for the construction of a new International

In September 1915, at the initiative of the Bolsheviks, the Zimmerwald International Socialist Conference was held in Switzerland. It was followed by a second conference in April 1916 in Kienthal, Switzerland. Despite the very difficult conditions of war and repression, delegates from eleven countries participated (Germany, Italy, Russia, France, etc.). But the majority of the delegates were pacifists and refused to break with the social chauvinists who had passed into the bourgeoisie's camp by voting for war credits in 1914.

So there was also at the Zimmerwald Conference a left wing united behind the delegates of the Bolshevik fraction, Lenin and Zinoviev. This "Zimmerwald left" defended the need to break with the social democratic party traitors. This left highlighted the need to build a new International. Against the pacifists, it argued, in Lenin's words, that "the struggle for peace without revolutionary action is a hollow and untrue phrase". The left of Zimmerwald had taken up Lenin's slogan: "Turn the imperialist war into a civil war!" A watchword that was already contained in the resolutions of the Second International passed at the Stuttgart Congress in 1907 and especially the Basle Congress in 1912.

The Zimmerwald left would therefore constitute the "first nucleus of the Third International in formation" (as Lenin's companion, Zinoviev, would say in March 1918). The new parties that were created, breaking with social democracy, then began to take the name of "communist party". It was the revolutionary wave opened up by the Russian revolution of October 1917 that gave a vigorous impetus to the revolutionary militants for the founding of the CI. The revolutionaries had indeed understood that it was absolutely vital to found a world party of the proletariat for the victory of the revolution on a world scale.

It was at the initiative of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Russia and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD, formerly the Spartacus League) that the first congress of the International was convened in Moscow on 2 March 1919.

The political programme of the Communist International

The platform of the CI was based on the programme of the two main communist parties, the Bolshevik Party and the Communist Party of Germany (founded on 29 December 1918).

This CI platform began by stating clearly that “A new epoch is born! The epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner disintegration. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat". By taking up the speech on the founding programme of the German Communist Party by Rosa Luxemburg, the International made it clear that " the dilemma faced by humanity today is as follows: fall into barbarism, or salvation through socialism.” In other words, we had entered the "era of wars and revolutions". The only alternative for society was now: world proletarian revolution or destruction of humanity; socialism or barbarism. This position was strongly affirmed in the first point of the Letter of Invitation to the founding congress of the Communist International (written in January 1919 by Trotsky).

For the International, the entry of capitalism into its period of decadence meant that the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat took on a new form. This was the period in which the mass strike was developing, the period when the workers' councils were the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as announced by the appearance of the soviets in Russia in 1905 and 1917.

But one of the fundamental contributions of the International was the understanding that the proletariat must destroy the bourgeois state in order to build a new society. It is from this question that the First Congress of the International adopted its Theses on bourgeois democracy and proletarian dictatorship (drafted by Lenin). These theses began by denouncing the false opposition between democracy and dictatorship "because, in no civilized capitalist country, is there "democracy in general", but only a bourgeois democracy". The International thus affirmed that to defend "pure" democracy in capitalism was, in fact, to defend bourgeois democracy, the form par excellence of the dictatorship of capital. Against the dictatorship of capital, the International affirmed that only the dictatorship of the proletariat on a world scale could overthrow capitalism, abolish social classes, and offer a future to humanity.

The world party of the proletariat therefore had to give a clear orientation to the proletarian masses to enable them to achieve their ultimate goal. It had to defend everywhere the slogan of the Bolsheviks in 1917: "All power to the soviets". This was the "dictatorship" of the proletariat: the power of the soviets or workers' councils.

From the difficulties of the Third International to its bankruptcy

In March 1919, the International was unfortunately founded too late, at a time when most of the revolutionary uprisings of the proletariat in Europe had been violently repressed. In fact the CI was founded two months after the bloody repression of the German proletariat in Berlin. The Communist Party of Germany had just lost its principal leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, savagely murdered by the social democratic government during the bloody week in Berlin in January 1919. So at the moment when it was constituted the International had suffered its first defeat. With the crushing of the revolution in Germany, this defeat was also and above all a terrible defeat for the international proletariat.

It must be recognised that revolutionaries at the time were facing a terribly urgent situation when they founded the International. The Russian revolution was completely isolated, suffocated and encircled by the bourgeoisie of all countries (not to mention the counter-revolutionary exactions of the White Armies inside Russia). The revolutionaries were caught by the throat and it was necessary to act quickly to build the world party. It is because of this urgency that the main founding parties of the International, including the Bolshevik Party and the KPD, had not been able to clarify their differences and confusions. This lack of clarification was an important factor in the development of opportunism in the International with the reflux of the revolutionary wave.

Subsequently, because of the gangrene of opportunism, this new International died in its turn. It also succumbed to the betrayal of the principle of internationalism by the right wing of the Communist parties. In particular, the main party of the International, the Bolshevik Party, after the death of Lenin had begun to defend the theory of "building socialism in one country". Stalin, taking the head of the Bolshevik Party, was the mastermind of the repression of the proletariat which had made the revolution in Russia, imposing a ferocious dictatorship against Lenin's old comrades who fought against the degeneration of the International and denounced what they saw as the return of capitalism to Russia.

Subsequently, in the 1930s, it was in the name of defending the "Soviet Fatherland" that the Communist parties in all countries trampled the flag of the International in calling on proletarians, again, to kill each other on the battlefields of the Second World War. Just like the Second International in 1914, the CI had become bankrupt. Just like the International in 1914, the CI was also a victim of the gangrene of opportunism and a process of degeneration. But like the Second International, the CI also secreted a left minority, militants who remained loyal to internationalism and the slogan “The proletarians have no country. Proletarians of all countries unite!” These left-wing minorities (in Germany, France, Italy, Holland ...) waged a political fight within the degenerating International to try to save it. But Stalin eventually excluded these militants from the International. He hunted them, persecuted them and liquidated them physically (we recall the Moscow trials, the assassination of Trotsky by GPU agents and also the Stalinist Gulags).

The revolutionaries excluded from the Third International also sought to regroup, despite all the difficulties of war and repression. Despite their scattering in different countries, these tiny minorities of internationalist militants were able to make a balance sheet (bilan) of the revolutionary wave of 1917-1923 in order to identify the main lessons for the future.

The revolutionaries who fought Stalinism did not seek to found a new International, before, during or after the Second World War. They understood that it was "midnight in the century": the proletariat had been physically crushed, massively mobilised behind the national flags of anti-fascism and the victim of the deepest counter-revolution in history. The historic situation was no longer favourable to the emergence of a new revolutionary wave against the World War.

Nevertheless, throughout this long period of counter-revolution, the revolutionary minorities continued to carry out an activity, often in hiding, to prepare for the future by maintaining confidence in the capacity of the proletariat to raise its head and one day overthrow capitalism. .

We want to recall that the ICC reclaims the contribution of the Communist International. Our organisation also considers itself in political continuity with the left fractions excluded from the International in the 1920s and 30s, especially the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. This centenary is therefore both an opportunity to salute the invaluable contribution of the CI in the history of the workers' movement, but also to learn from this experience in order to arm the proletariat for its future revolutionary struggles.

Once again, we must fully understand the importance of the founding of the Communist International as the first attempt to constitute the world party of the proletariat. Above all, we must emphasise the importance of the historical continuity, of the common thread which connects the revolutionaries of today and those of the past, of all those militants who, because of their fidelity to the principles of the proletariat, were persecuted and savagely murdered by the bourgeoisie, and especially by their old comrades who became traitors: Noske, Ebert, Scheidemann, Stalin. We must also pay tribute to all those exemplary militants  (Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Leo Jogiches , Trotsky and many others) who paid with their lives for their loyalty to internationalism.

To be able to build the future world party of the proletariat, without which the overthrow of capitalism will be impossible, revolutionary minorities must regroup, today as in the past. They must clarify their differences through the confrontation of positions, collective reflection and the widest possible discussion. They must be able to learn from the past in order to understand the present historical situation and to allow new generations to open the doors of the future.

Faced with the decomposition of capitalist society, the barbarism of war, the exploitation and growing misery of proletarians, today the alternative remains the one that the Communist International clearly identified 100 years ago: socialism or barbarism, world proletarian revolution or destruction of humanity in an increasingly bloody chaos.

ICC

 

A century ago a wind of hope blew for humanity: in Russia first of all the working class had just taken power. In Germany, Hungary and then in Italy it fought courageously to follow the Russian example with a single agenda: the abolition of the capitalist mode of production whose contradictions had plunged civilisation into four years of war. Four years of unprecedented barbarity that confirmed the entry of capitalism into its phase of decadence.

In these conditions, acknowledging the bankruptcy of the Second International and basing itself on all the work of the reconstruction of international unity started at Zimmerwald in September 1915, then Kienthal in 1916, the Third, Communist International (CI) was founded on March 4 1919 in Moscow. In his April Thesis of 1917, Lenin had already called for the foundation of a new world party. For Lenin a decisive step was taken during the terrible days of January 1919 in Germany, during the course of which the German Communist Party (KPD) was founded.  In a "Letter to the workers of Europe and America" dated January 26, Lenin wrote: "When the Spartacus League became the German Communist Party, then the founding of the 3rd International became a fact. Formally this foundation hadn't yet been decided upon, but in reality the 3rd International exists from now". Leaving aside the excessive enthusiasm of such a judgment, as we will see later, revolutionaries at the time understood that it was now indispensable to forge the party for the victory of the revolution at the world level. After several weeks of preparation, 51 delegates met up from March 2 to March 6 1919, in order to lay out the organisational and programmatic markers which would allow the world proletariat to continue to advance the struggle against all the forces of the bourgeoisie.

The ICC lays claim to the contributions of the Communist International. This centenary is thus an occasion to salute and underline the inestimable work of the CI in the history of the revolutionary movement, but equally to draw the lessons of this experience and draw out its weaknesses in order to arm the proletariat of today for its future battles.

Defending the struggle of the working class in the heat of revolution

As Trotsky's "Letter of invitation to the congress" confirmed: "The undersigned parties and organisations consider that the convening of the first congress of the new revolutionary International is urgently necessary (...) The very rapid rise of the world revolution, which constantly poses new problems, the danger of strangulation of this revolution under the hypocritical banner of the ‘League of Nations’, the attempts of the social-traitor parties to join together and further help their governments and their bourgeoisies in order to betray the working class after granting each other a mutual ‘amnesty’, and finally, the extremely rich revolutionary experience already acquired and the world-wide character of the whole revolutionary movement – all these circumstances compel us to place on the agenda of the discussion the question of the convening of an international congress of proletarian-revolutionary parties".

In the image of the first appeal launched by the Bolsheviks, the foundation of the CI expressed the will for the regroupment of revolutionary forces throughout the world. But it equally expressed the defence of proletarian internationalism which had been trampled underfoot by the great majority of the social democratic parties who made up the 2nd International. After four years of atrocious war which had divided and decimated millions of proletarians on the field of battle, the emergence of a new world party was witness to the will to deepen the work begun by the organisations who remained faithful to internationalism. In this the CI was the expression of the political strength of the proletariat, which again manifested itself after the profound defeat caused by the war, and also of the responsibility of revolutionaries to continue to defend the interests of the working class and the world revolution.

During the course of the congress it was said many times that the CI was the party of revolutionary action. As it affirms in its Manifesto, the CI saw the light of day at the moment that capitalism had clearly demonstrated its obsolescence. From here on humanity entered "the era of wars and revolutions". In other words, the abolition of capitalism became an extreme necessity for the future of civilisation. It was with this new understanding of the historic evolution of capitalism that the CI tirelessly defended the workers' councils and the dictatorship of the proletariat: "The new apparatus of power must represent the dictatorship of the working class (...) it must, that is to say, be the instrument for the systematic overthrow of the exploiting class and its expropriation (...) The power of the workers' councils or the workers' organisations is its concrete form"  (Letter of invitation to the congress). These orientations were defended throughout the congress. Moreover, the "Theses on Bourgeois Democracy", written by Lenin and adopted by the congress, focussed on denouncing the mystification of democracy, on warning the proletariat about the danger that it posed in its struggle against bourgeois society.  From the outset the CI placed itself resolutely in the proletarian camp by defending the principles and methods of working class struggle, while energetically denouncing the call from the centrist current for an impossible unity between the social-aitors and the communists: "the unity of communist workers with the assassins of the leading communists Liebknecht and Luxemburg", according the terms of the "Resolution of the first congress of the CI on the position towards the socialist currents and the Berne Conference". This resolution was evidence of the intransigent defence of proletarian principles and was voted on unanimously by the congress. It was adopted in reaction to the recent meeting held by the majority of the social democratic parties of the 2nd International [1] which had taken up a certain number of orientations openly aimed against the revolutionary wave. The resolution ended with these words: "The congress invites the workers of every country to begin the most energetic struggle against the yellow international and to warn the widest numbers of the proletariat about this International of lies and betrayal".

The foundation of the CI turned out to be a vital stage for advancing the historical struggle of the proletariat. It took up the best contributions of the 2nd International while discarding those positions and analyses which no longer corresponded to the historic period which had just opened up[2]. Whereas the former world party had betrayed proletarian internationalism in the name of the Sacred Union on the eve of the First World War, the foundation of the new party strengthened the unity of the working class, arming it for the bitter struggle that it had to undertake across the planet for the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. Thus, despite the unfavourable circumstances and the errors committed - as we will see - we salute and support such an enterprise. Revolutionaries of that time took up their responsibilities; it had to be done and they did it!

A foundation in unfavourable circumstances 
Revolutionaries faced with a massive surge from the world proletariat

The year 1919 was the culminating point of the revolutionary wave. After the victory of the revolution in Russia in October 1917, the abdication of Wilhelm II and the precipitous signing of the armistice faced with mutinies and revolts of masses of workers in Germany, workers' insurrections broke out in numerous places, most notably with the setting up of republics of councils in Bavaria and Hungary. There were also mutinies in the fleets and among French troops, as well as in British military units, refusing to intervene against soviet Russia. In 1919 a wave of strikes hit Britain (Sheffield, the Clyde, South Wales and Kent). But in March 1919, at the moment the CI appeared in Moscow, the great majority of uprisings had been suppressed or were on course to be.

There is no doubt that revolutionaries of that time found themselves in a situation of urgency and they were obliged to act in the fire of revolutionary battle. As the French Fraction of the Communist Left (FFCL) underlined in 1948: "revolutionaries tried to fill the gap between the maturity of the objective situation and the immaturity of the subjective factor (the absence of the party) by a gathering in numbers of politically heterogeneous groups and currents and called this coming together the new Party".[3]

It's not a question here of discussing the validity or not of the foundation of the new party, of the International. It was an absolute necessity. On the other hand we want to point to a certain number of errors in the way in which it was realised.

An overestimation of the situation in which the party was founded

Even though the majority of reports submitted by the different delegates on the situation of the class struggle in each country took into account the reaction of the bourgeoisie faced with the advance of the revolution (a resolution the White Terror was voted on at the end of the congress), it's striking to see to what point this aspect was largely underestimated during these five days of work. Already, some days after the news of the foundation of the KPD, which followed the founding of the communist parties of Austria (November 1918) and Poland (December 1918), Lenin considered that the die was already cast: "When the German Spartacus League, led by its illustrious leaders known the world over, these loyal partisans of the class struggle such as Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Franz Mehring, definitively broke all links with socialists such as Scheidemann (...) when the Spartacus League became the German Communist Party, then the foundation of the 3rd International, the Communist International, truly proletarian, truly international, truly revolutionary, became a fact. This foundation wasn't formally sanctified, but, in reality, the 3rd International now exists" [4]. To add a significant anecdote here: this text was finished and drafted on January 21 1919, the date on which Lenin was told about the assassination of Karl Liebknecht. And yet an unwavering certainty ran through the congress and Lenin announced it with: "The bourgeoisie can unleash its terror, it may assassinate millions of workers, but victory is ours, the victory of the world communist revolution is assured". Consequently all the reporters of the situation overflowed with the same optimism; like comrade Albert, a young member of the KPD who on March 2 expressed himself to the congress in these words: "I'm not expressing an exaggerated optimism by affirming that the German and Russian communist parties continue the struggle, firmly hoping that the German proletariat will also lead the revolution to the final victory and the dictatorship of the proletariat will equally be established in Germany, despite all the national assemblies, despite all the Scheidemanns and despite the national bourgeoisie (...) It is this which motivated me to accept your invitation with joy, convinced that after a short delay we will struggle side by side with the proletariat of other countries, particularly France and Britain, for the world revolution in order to realise the objectives of the revolution in Germany". A few days later, between March 6 and 9, a terrible repression struck Berlin, killing 3000 workers including 28 sailors imprisoned and then executed by firing squad in the tradition of Versailles! On March 10, Leo Jogisches was assassinated and Heinrich Dorrenbach[5] met the same fate on May 19.

However, the last words of Lenin of the closing speech of the congress showed that it hadn't moved one iota on the relationship of force between the two classes. Without hesitation it affirmed: "The victory of the proletarian revolution is assured throughout the entire world. The foundation of the International Republic of Councils is underway."

But as Amedeo Bordiga noted a year later: "After the slogan ‘Soviet regimes’ was launched onto the world by the Russian and international proletariat we first of all saw the revolutionary wave resurface after the end of the war and the proletariat of the entire world move into action. In every country we saw the old socialist parties filtered out and the communist parties were born, engaging in the revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie. Unfortunately the period which followed has been a period of check because the German, Bavarian and Hungarian revolutions have all been wiped out by the bourgeoisie."

In fact, important weaknesses of consciousness in the working class constituted a major hindrance to a revolutionary development:

* the difficulties of these movements to overcome the struggle against war alone and go towards the higher level of proletarian revolution. This revolutionary wave was above all built up around the struggle against the war;

* the development of the mass strike through the unification of political and economic demands remained very fragile and thus did little to push it onto a higher level of consciousness;

* the revolutionary peak was on the point of being reached. The movement no longer had the same dynamic after the defeat of the struggles in Germany and Central Europe. Even if the wave continued it had lost the force it had from 1919-1920;

* the Soviet Republic in Russia remained cruelly isolated. It was the sole revolutionary bastion with all that this implied in favour of a regression in consciousness both within Russia and the rest of the world.

A foundation in an urgent situation which opened the door to opportunism 
The revolutionary milieu came out of the war in a weakened state

"The workers' movement on the eve of the first imperialist world war was in a state of extreme division. The imperialist war had broken the formal unity of the political organisations that claimed to be part of the proletariat. The crisis of the workers’ movement, which already existed beforehand, reached its culminating point because of the fact of the world war and the positions to take up in response to it. All the marxist, anarchist and trade union parties and organizations were violently shaken by it. Splits multiplied. New groups arose. A political delimitation was produced.  The revolutionary minority of the 2nd International represented by the Bolsheviks, the German left around Luxemburg and the Dutch Tribunists, who already were not very homogeneous, did not simply face a single opportunist bloc. Between them and the opportunists there was a whole rainbow of political groups and tendencies, more or less confused, more or less centrist, more or less revolutionary, representing the general shift of the masses who were breaking with the war, with the Sacred Union, with the treason of the old parties of social democracy. We see here a process of the liquidation of the old parties whose downfall gave rise to a multitude of groups. These groups expressed less the process of the constitution of the new party than the dislocation m the liquidation, the death of the old party. These groups certainly contained elements for the constitution of the new party but in no way formed the basis for it. These currents essentially expressed the negation of the past and not the positive affirmation of the future. The basis for the new class party can only reside in the former left, in its critical and constructive work, in the theoretical positions and programmatic principles which the left had been elaborating for the 20 years of ITS FRACTIONAL EXISTENCE AND STRUGGLE inside the old party." [6]

Thus the revolutionary milieu was broken apart, composed of groups lacking clarity and displaying a good deal of immaturity. Only the left fractions of the 2nd International, the Bolsheviks, the Tribunists, the Spartacists (in part only because they were also heterogeneous or even divided) were up to it and were based on solid ground for the foundation of the new party.

Moreover a good number of militants lacked political experience. Among the 43 delegates to the founding congress whose ages were known, five were in their twenties, 24 their thirties and only one was older than fifty[7]. Out of the 42 delegates whose political trajectory could be traced, 17 had joined social democratic parties before the Russian revolution of 1905, whereas 8 only became active socialists after 1914[8].

Despite their passion and enthusiasm, the indispensable experience in such circumstances was very much lacking amongst them.

Disagreements among the proletariat's avant-garde

As the FFCL already underlined in 1946, "It is undeniable that one of the historic causes of the victory of the revolution in Russia and its defeat in Germany, Hungary and Italy resides in the existence of the revolutionary Party at a decisive moment in the former and its absence or its incompletion in the latter." The foundation of the 3rd International was deferred for a long time by the various divisions inside the proletarian camp during the episode of revolution. In 1918-19, and quite conscious that the absence of the party was an irredeemable weakness for the victory of the world revolution, the avant-garde of the proletariat was unanimous on the imperious necessity to set up a new party. However, there was no agreement on when to do it and above all on the approach to adopt. While the great majority of communist organisations and groups were favorable to the briefest delay, the KPD and particularly Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches opted for an adjournment, considering that the situation was premature, that the communist consciousness of the masses remained weak and that the revolutionary milieu also lacked clarity[9]. The KPD delegate to the congress, comrade Albert, was thus mandated to defend this position and not to vote for the immediate foundation of the Communist International.

"When it was said to us that the proletariat needed a political centre in its struggle, we could say that this centre already existed and that all the elements which were found at the base of the system of councils had already broken with elements of the working class which went towards the democratic bourgeoisie: we noted that everywhere a rupture was being prepared and it is about to be realised. But a Third International must not only be a political centre, an institution in which the theoreticians discuss with one another with warm words, it must be the basis of an organisational power. If we want to make the Third International an efficient instrument of struggle, if we want to make it a means for combat, then the necessary conditions have to exist. Thus, in our opinion, the question mustn't be approached and discussed from an intellectual point of view; we have to ask if the basics of the organisation concretely exist. I've always had the feeling that the comrades who are pushing so strongly for its foundation have been greatly influenced by the evolution of the 2nd International and that they wanted, after the Berne Conference, to impose it on the current enterprise. That seems less important to us and when it's said that clarification is necessary, otherwise indecisive elements will rally to the Yellow International, I say that the founding of the 3rd International will not bring back the elements who are re-joining today's 2nd, and that if they go there despite everything, then that's their place."[10]

As we see, the German delegate warned of the danger of founding a party by compromising on principles and on programmatic and organisational clarification. Although the Bolsheviks took the concerns of the KPD very seriously, it was in no doubt that they were caught up in a race against time. From Lenin to Zinoviev, through to Trotsky and Rakovsky, all insisted on the importance of making all the parties, groups, organisations or individuals who claimed to be more or less close to communism and the soviets join the new International. As noted in a biography of Rosa Luxemburg: "Lenin saw in the International the means to help various communist parties to set themselves up and strengthen themselves"[11] through the decantation produced by the struggle against centrism and opportunism. For the KPD, it was first of all a question of forming "solid" communist parties which had the masses behind them before endorsing the creation of the new party.

A method of foundation which did not arm the new party

The composition of the congress is both the illustration of the precipitation and the difficulties that it imposed on revolutionary organisations at the time. Out of 51 delegates taking part in the work, taking account of lateness, early departures and brief absences, around forty were Bolshevik militants from the Russian party but also the Latvian, Lithuanian, Byelorussian, Armenian and eastern Russian parties. Outside of the Bolshevik Party, only the communist parties of Germany, Poland, Austria and Hungary had a real existence.

The other forces invited to the congress were a multitude of organisations, groups or elements that were not openly "communist" but products of a process of decantation within social democracy and the trade unions. The letter of invitation to the congress appealed to all the forces, near or far, which supported the Russian revolution and seemed to have the will to work for the victory of the world revolution:

"10. It is necessary to ally ourselves with these elements of the revolutionary movement which, although they did not belong to the socialist parties before, today placed themselves on the whole on the terrain of the dictatorship of the proletariat under the form of the power of the councils. In the first place we refer here to the syndicalist elements of the workers' movement.

* 11. Finally, it’s necessary to win over all the proletarian groups and organisations that, without openly rallying to the revolutionary current, show a tendency in this direction."[12]

This approach led to several anomalies which exposed a lack of representation of a part of the congress. For example, the American Boris Reinstein didn't have a mandate from his Socialist Labour Party. S. J. Rutgers from Holland represented a league for socialist propaganda. Christian Rakovsky [13] was supposed to represent the Balkan Federation, the Bulgarian “Narrows” and the Romanian CP. But he'd had no contact with these three organisations since 1915-16[14]. Consequently, despite appearances, this founding congress was at root perfectly representative of the lack of consciousness within the world working class.

All these elements show that a large part of the revolutionary avant-garde's objective was quantity to the detriment of a prior clarification on organisational principles. This approach turned on its head the conception which the Bolsheviks had developed over the last fifteen years. And this is what the FFCL had already noted in 1946: "As much as the "strict" method of selection on the most precise principled bases, without taking into account immediate numerical success, allowed the Bolsheviks to build a Party which, at a decisive moment, was able to integrate and assimilate into itself all the energies and revolutionary militants of other currents and finally lead the proletariat to victory, so the "loose" method, immediately concerned above all with bringing together the largest numbers at the expense of programmatic precision and principles, had to lead to the constitution of the mass party, a real colossus with feet of clay which fell to its defeat under the domination of opportunism. The formation of the class party turns out to be infinitely more difficult in the advanced capitalist countries - where the bourgeoisie possesses numerous means to corrupt the consciousness of the proletariat – than was the case in Russia."

Blinded by the certitude of the imminent victory of the proletariat, the revolutionary avant-garde enormously underestimated the objective difficulties which stood in front of them. This euphoria led them to compromise the "strict" method for the construction of the organisation that the Bolsheviks in Russia and in part the Spartacists in Germany had defended before everything. They considered that the priority of work had to be given to a great revolutionary coming-together, countering on the way the Yellow International which a few weeks before had re-formed in Berne. This "loose" method relegated the clarification of organisational principles to the status of an annex. Little importance was given to the confusions that could be brought in by groups integrated into the new party; the struggle would take place within it. For now, the priority was given to the regroupment of the greatest numbers.

This "loose" method turned out to be heavy with consequences since it weakened the CI in the organisational struggles to come. In fact the programmatic clarity of the first congress was circumvented by the opportunist push in the context of the weakening and the degeneration of the revolutionary wave. Within the CI fractions of the left emerged which criticised the insufficiencies of the rupture with the 2nd International. As we will see in a following piece, the positions defended and elaborated by these groups responded to the problems raised in the CI by the new period of the decadence of capitalism.

(to be continued)

Narek, March 4, 2019.

Introduction

The 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Communist International reminds us that the October revolution in Russia had placed the world proletarian revolution on the immediate agenda. The German revolution in particular was already underway and was crucial both to the survival of soviet power in Russia and to the extension of the revolution to the main centres of capitalism. At this moment, all the different groups and tendencies which had remained loyal to revolutionary marxism were convinced that the formation and action of the class party were indispensable to the victory of the revolution. But with hindsight we can say that the late formation of the CI –almost two years after the seizure of power in Russia, and several months after the outbreak of the revolution in Germany- as well as its ambiguities and errors on vital programmatic and organisational questions, was also an element in the defeat of the international revolutionary upsurge.

We need to bear this in mind when we look back at another anniversary: May 68 in France and the ensuing wave of class movements. In the two previous articles in this series, we have looked at the historic significance of these movements, expressions of the reawakening of the class struggle after decades of counter-revolution - the counter-revolution ushered in by the dashing of the revolutionary hopes of 1917-23. We have tried to understand both the origins of the events of May 68 and the course of the class struggle over the next five decades, focusing in particular on the difficulties facing the class in re-appropriating the perspective of the communist revolution.

In this article we want to look specifically at the evolution of the proletarian political milieu since 1968, and to understand why, despite considerable advances at the theoretical and programmatic level since the first revolutionary wave, and despite the fact that the most advanced proletarian groups have understood that it is necessary to take the essential steps towards the formation of a new world party in advance of decisive confrontations with the capitalist system, this horizon still seems to be very far away and sometimes seems to have disappeared from sight altogether.

1968-80: The development of a new revolutionary milieu meets the problems of sectarianism and opportunism

The global revival of the class struggle at the end of the 1960s brought with it a global revival of the proletarian political movement, a blossoming of new groups seeking to re-learn what had been obliterated by the Stalinist counter-revolution, as well as a certain reanimation of the rare organisations which had survived this dark period.

We can get an idea of the components of this milieu if we look at the very diverse list of groups contacted by the comrades of Internationalism in the US with the aim of setting up an International Correspondence Network[1]:

• USA: Internationalism and Philadelphia Solidarity
• Britain: Workers Voice, Solidarity
• France: Révolution Internationale, Groupe de Liaison Pour l’Action des Travailleurs, Le Mouvement Communiste
• Spain: Fomento Obrero Revolucionario
• Italy Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista)
• Germany Gruppe Soziale Revolution; Arbeiterpolitik; Revolutionärer Kampf
• Denmark: Proletarisk Socialistisk Arbejdsgruppe, Koministisk Program
• Sweden: Komunismen
• Netherlands: Spartacus; Daad en Gedachte
• Belgium: Lutte de Classe, groupe “Bilan”
• Venzuela; Internacionalismo

In their introduction Internationalism added that a number of other groups had contacted them asking to take part: World Revolution, which had meanwhile split from the Solidarity group in the UK; Pour le Pouvoir Internationale des Conseils Ouvrières and Les Amis de 4 Millions de Jeunes Travailleurs (France); Internationell Arbetarkamp, (Sweden), and Rivoluzione Comunista and Iniziativa Comunista (Italy).

Not all of these currents were a direct product of the open struggles of the late 60s and early 70s: many of them had preceded them, as in the case of Battaglia Comunista in Italy and the Internacialismo group in Venezuela. Some other groups which had developed in advance of the struggles reached their pinnacle in 68 or thereabouts and afterwards declined rapidly – the most obvious example being the Situationists. Nevertheless the emergence of this new milieu of elements searching for communist positions was the expression of a deep process of “underground” growth, of a mounting disaffection with capitalist society which affected both the proletariat (and this also took the form of open struggles like the strike movements in Spain and France prior to 68) and wide layers of a petty bourgeoisie which was itself already in the process of being proletarianised. Indeed the rebellion of the latter strata in particular had already taken on an open form prior to 68 – notably the revolt in the universities and the closely linked protests against war and racism which reached the most spectacular levels in the USA and Germany, and of course in France where the student revolt played an evident role in the outbreak of the explicitly working class movement in May 68. The massive re-emergence of the working class after 68, however, gave a clear answer to those, like Marcuse, who had begun theorising about the integration of the working class into capitalist society and its replacement as a revolutionary vanguard by other layers such as the students. It reaffirmed that the keys to the future of humanity lay in the hands of the exploited class just as it had in 1919, and convinced many young rebels and seekers, whatever their sociological background, that their own political future lay in the workers’ struggle and in the organised political movement of the working class. 

The profound connection between the resurgence of the class struggle and this newly politicised layer was a confirmation of the materialist analysis developed in the 30s by the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. The class party does not exist outside the life of the class. It is certainly a vital, active factor in the development of class consciousness, but it is also a product of that development, and it cannot exist in periods when the class has experienced a world-historic defeat as it had in the 20s and 30s. The comrades of the Italian left had experienced this truth in their own flesh and blood since they had lived through a period which had seen the degeneration of the Communist parties and their recuperation by the bourgeoisie, and the shrinking of genuine communist forces to small, beleaguered groups such as their own. They drew the conclusion that the party could only re-appear when the class as a whole had recovered from its defeat on an international scale and was once again posing the question of revolution: the principal task of the fraction was thus to defend the principles of communism, draw the lessons of past defeats, and to act as a bridge to the new party that would be formed when the course of the class struggle had profoundly altered.  And when a number of comrades of the Italian left forgot this essential lesson and rushed back to Italy to form a new party in 1943 when, despite certain important expressions of proletarian revolt against the war, above all in Italy, the counter-revolution still reigned supreme, the comrades of the French communist left took up the torch abandoned by an Italian Fraction which precipitously dissolved itself into the Italian party.

But since, at the end of 60s and the early 70s, the class was finally throwing off the shackles of the counter-revolution, since new proletarian groups were appearing around the world, and since there was a dynamic towards debate, confrontation, and regroupment among these new currents, the perspective of the formation of the party – not in the immediate, to be sure – was once again being posed on a serious basis.

The dynamic towards the unification of proletarian forces took various forms, from the initial travels of Mark Chirik and others from the Internacialismo group in Venezuela to revive discussion with the groups of the Italian left, the conferences organised by the French group Information et Correspondence Ouvrières, or the international correspondence network initiated by Internationalism. The latter was concretised by the Liverpool and London meetings of different groups in the UK (Workers Voice, World Revolution, Revolutionary Perspectives, which had also split from Solidarity and was the precursor of today’s Communist Workers Organisation), along with RI and the GLAT from France.

This process of confrontation and debate was not always smooth by any means: the existence of two groups of the communist left in Britain today – a situation which many searching for class politics find extremely confusing -  can be traced to the immature and failed process of regroupment following the conferences in the UK. Some of the divisions that took place at the time had little justification in that they were provoked by secondary differences – for example, the group that formed Pour une Intervention Communiste in France split from RI over exactly when to produce a leaflet about the military coup in Chile. Neverthleless, a real process of decantation and regroupment was taking place. The comrades of RI in France intervened energetically in the ICO conferences to insist on the necessity for a political organisation based on a clear platform in contrast to the workerist, councilist and “anti-Leninist” notions that were extremely influential at the time, and this activity accelerated their unification with groups in Marseille and Clermont Ferrand. The RI group was also extremely active at the international level and its growing convergence with WR, Internationalism, Internacialismo and new groups in Italy and Spain led to the formation of the ICC in 1975, showing the possibility of organising on a centralised international scale. The ICC saw itself, like the GCF in 40s, as one expression of a wider movement and didn’t see its formation as the end-point of the more general process of regroupment. The name “Current” expresses this approach: we were not a fraction of an old organisation, though carrying on much of the work of the old fractions, and were part of a broader stream heading towards the party of the future.

The prospects for the ICC seemed very optimistic: there was a successful unification of three groups in Belgium which drew lessons from the recent failure in the UK, and some ICC sections (especially France and UK) grew considerably in numbers. WR for example quadrupled in numbers from its original nucleus and RI at one point had sufficient members to set up separate local sections in the north and south of Paris.  Of course we are still talking about very small numbers but nevertheless this was a significant expression of a real development in class consciousness. Meanwhile the Bordigist International Communist Party established sections in a number of new countries and quickly became the largest organisation of the communist left.

 And of particular importance in this process was the development of the international conferences of the communist left, initially called by Battaglia and supported enthusiastically by the ICC even though we were critical of the original basis for the appeal for the conferences (to discuss the phenomenon of “Eurocommunism”, what Battaglia called the “social democratisation” of the Communist parties).

For three years or so, the conferences offered a pole of reference, an organised framework for debate which drew towards it a number of groups from diverse backgrounds[2]. The texts and proceedings of the meetings were published in a series of pamphlets; the criteria for participation in the conferences were more clearly defined than in the original invitation and the subjects under debate became more focused on crucial questions such as the capitalist crisis, the role of revolutionaries, the question of national struggles, and so on. The debates also allowed groups who shared common perspectives to move closer together (as in the case of the CWO and Battaglia and the ICC and För Kommunismen in Sweden). 

Despite these positive developments, however, the renascent revolutionary movement was burdened with many weaknesses inherited from the long period of counter-revolution.

For one thing, large numbers of those who could have been won to revolutionary politics were absorbed by the apparatus of leftism, which had also grown considerably in the wake of the class movements after 68. The Maoist and particularly the Trotskyist organizations were already formed and offered an apparently radical alternative to the ‘official’ Stalinist parties whose strike-breaking role in the Events of 68 and afterwards had been plain. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, “Danny the Red”, the feted student leader of 68, had written a book attacking the Communist Party’s function and proposing a “left wing alternative” which referred approvingly to the communist left of the 1920s and to councilist groups like ICO in the present[3]. But like so many others Cohn-Bendit lost patience with remaining in the small world of genuine revolutionaries and went off in search of more immediate solutions that also conveniently offered the possibility of a career, and today is a member of the German Greens who has served his party at the heart of the bourgeois state. His trajectory – from potentially revolutionary ideas to the dead-end of leftism – was followed by many thousands.

But some of biggest problems faced by the emerging milieu were “internal”, even if they ultimately reflected the pressure of bourgeois ideology on the proletarian political vanguard.

The groups which had maintained an organised existence during the period of counter-revolution – largely the groups of the Italian left – had become more or less sclerotic. The Bordigists of the various International Communist Parties[4] in particular had protected themselves against the perpetual rain of new theories that “transcended marxism” by turning marxism itself into an dogma, incapable of responding to new developments, as shown in their reaction to the class movements after 68 - essentially the one which Marx already derided in his letter to Ruge in 1843: here is the truth (the party), down on your knees!  Inseparable from the Bordigist notion of the “invariance” of marxism was an extreme sectarianism[5] which rejected any notion of debate with other proletarian groups, an attitude concretised in the flat refusal of any of the Bordigist groups to engage with the international conferences of the communist left. But while the appeal by Battaglia was a small step away from the attitude of seeing your own small group as the sole guardian of revolutionary politics, it was by no means free of sectarianism itself: its invitation initially excluded the Bordigist groups and it was not sent to the ICC as a whole but to its section in France, betraying an unspoken idea that the revolutionary movement is made up of separate “franchises” in different countries (with Battaglia holding the Italian franchise of course).

Moreover sectarianism was not limited to the heirs of the Italian left. The discussions around regroupment in the UK were torpedoed by it. In particular, Workers Voice, frightened of losing its identity as a locally based group in Liverpool, broke off relations with the international tendency around RI and WR around the question of the state in the period of transition, which could only be an open question for revolutionaries who agreed on the essential class parameters of the debate. The same search for an excuse to break off discussions was subsequently adopted by RP and the CWO (product of a short-lived fusion of RP and WV) who declared the ICC to be counter-revolutionary because it did not accept that the Bolshevik party and the CI had lost all proletarian life from 1921 and not a moment later. The ICC was better armed against sectarianism because it traced its origins in the Italian Fraction and the GCF, who had always seen themselves as part of a wider proletarian political movement and not as the sole repository of truth. But the calling of the conferences had also exposed elements of sectarianism in its own ranks; some comrades initially responded to the appeal by declaring that the Bordigists and even Battaglia were not proletarian groups because of their ambiguities on the national question. Significantly, the subsequent debate about proletarian groups which led to a great deal of clarification in the ICC[6] was launched by a text by Marc Chirik who had been “trained” in the Italian and French left to understand that proletarian class consciousness is by no means homogeneous, even among the more politically advanced minorities, and that you could not determine the class nature of an organisation in isolation from its history and its response to major historical events, in particular world war and revolution.

With the new groups, these sect-like attitudes were less the product of a long process of sclerosis than of immaturity and the break in continuity with the traditions and organisations of the past.  These groups were faced with the need to define themselves against the prevailing atmosphere of leftism, so that a kind of rigidity of thought often appeared to be a means of defence against the danger of being sucked under by the much larger organisations of the bourgeois left. And yet, at the same time, the rejection of Stalinism and Trotskyism often took the form of a flight into anarchist and councilist attitudes – manifested not only the tendency to reject the whole Bolshevik experience but also in a widespread suspicion of any talk about forming a proletarian party. More concretely, such approaches favoured federalist conceptions of organising, the equation of centralized forms of organization with bureaucracy and even Stalinism. The fact that many adherents of the new groups had come out of a student movement much more marked by the petty bourgeoisie than the student milieu of today reinforced these democratist and individualist ideas, most clearly expressed in the neo-Situationist slogan “militantism: the highest stage of alienation”[7].  The result of all this is that the revolutionary movement has spent decades struggling to understand the organisation question, and this lack of understanding has been at the heart of many conflicts and splits in the movement. Of course, the organisation question has of necessity been a constant battleground within the workers’ movement (witness the split between Marxists and Bakuninists in the First International, or between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in Russia). But the problem in the re-emerging revolutionary movement at the end of the 60s was exacerbated by the long break in continuity with the organisations of the past, so that many of the lessons bequeathed by previous organisational struggles had to be re-learned almost from scratch.

It was essentially the inability of the milieu as a whole to overcome sectarianism that led to the blockage and eventual sabotage of the conferences[8]. From the beginning, the ICC had insisted that the conferences should not remain dumb but should, where possible, issue a minimum of joint statements, to make clear to the rest of the movement what points of agreement and disagreement had been reached, but also – faced with major international events like the class movement in Poland or the Russian invasion of Afghanistan – to make a common public statements around questions which were already essential criteria for the conferences, such as opposition to imperialist war. These proposals, supported by some, were rejected by Battaglia and the CWO on the grounds that it was “opportunist” to make joint statements when other differences remained. Similarly, when Munis and the FOR walked out of the second conference because they refused to discuss the question of the capitalist crisis, and in response to the ICC’s proposal to issue a joint criticism of the FOR’s sectarianism, BC simply rejected the idea that sectarianism was a problem: the FOR had left because it had different positions, so what’s the problem?

Clearly, underneath these divisions there were quite profound disagreements about what a proletarian culture of debate should be like, and matters reached a head when BC and the CWO suddenly introduced a new criterion for participation in the conferences – a formulation about the role of the party which contained ambiguities about its relationship to political power which they knew would not be acceptable to the ICC and which effectively excluded it.  This exclusion was itself a concentrated expression of sectarianism, but it also showed that the other side of the coin of sectarianism is opportunism: on the one hand, because the new “hard” definition of the party did not prevent BC and the CWO holding a farcical 4th conference attended only by themselves and the Iranian leftists of the Unity of  Communist Militants[9]; and on the other hand because, with the rapprochement between BC and the CWO, BC probably calculated that it had gained all it could from the conferences, a classic case of sacrificing  the future of the movement for immediate gain. And the consequences of the break-up of the conferences have indeed been heavy – the loss of any organised framework for debate, for mutual solidarity, and an eventual common practice between the organisations of the communist left, which has never been restored despite occasional efforts towards joint work in subsequent years

The 1980s: crises in the milieu

The collapse of the conferences was soon revealed to be one aspect of a wider crisis in the proletarian milieu, expressed most clearly by the implosion of the Bordigist ICP  and the “Chenier affair” in the ICC, which led to a number of members leaving the organisation, particularly in the UK.

The evolution of the main Bordigist organization, which published Programma Comunista in Italy and Le Proletaire in France (among others) confirmed the dangers of opportunism in the proletarian camp. The ICP had been growing steadily throughout the 70s and had probably become the largest left communist group in the world. And yet its growth had to a great extent been assured through the integration of a number of elements who had never really broken with leftism and nationalism. Certainly, the profound confusions of the ICP on the national question were not new: it claimed to defend the theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International on solidarity with revolts and bourgeois revolutions in the colonial regions. The CI theses would soon reveal themselves to be fatally flawed in themselves, but they did contain certain stipulations aimed at preserving the independence of communists in the face of rebellions led by national bourgeoisies in the colonies. The ICP had already taken some dangerous steps away from such safeguards, for example when it hailed the Stalinist terror in Cambodia as an example of the necessary vigour of a bourgeois revolution[10]. But the sections in North Africa organised around the paper El Oumami went even further than this, since in the face of the military conflicts in the Middle East it openly called for defence of the Syrian state against Israel. This was the first time that any Bordigist group had brazenly called for participation in a war between capitalist states. It is significant that there were strong reactions within the ICP against these positions, testifying to the fact that the organisation retained its proletarian character, but the end result was further splits, the departure of whole sections and of many individual militants, reducing the survivors of the shipwreck to small nuclei who have never been able to draw all the lessons from these events.

But an opportunist tendency also appeared in the ICC at the time – a grouping which, in response to the class struggles of the late 70s and early 80s, began to make serious concessions to rank and file trade unionism. But the problem posed by this grouping was situated above all at the organisational level, since it began to question the centralised nature of the ICC and to argue that central organs should function mainly as letter boxes rather than as bodies elected to provide political orientation in between general meetings and congresses. This did not imply that the grouping was held together by a deep programmatic unity. In reality it was held together by affiliations based on personal relationships and common resentments against the organisation – in other words, it was a secretive “clan” rather than a real tendency, and in an immature organisation it gave rise to a “counter-clan” in the UK section, with disastrous results. And stirring up these resentments and conflicts was the dubious element Chenier, who had a past history of travelling through revolutionary organisations and fomenting crises, and who engaged in the most shameful manipulation of those around him. The crisis came to a head in the summer of 1981 when members of the “tendency” entered a comrade’s house when he was away and stole equipment from the organisation on the spurious grounds that they were only cashing in the investment they had made in the organisation. The tendency formed a new group which folded after a single issue, and Chenier “returned” to the Socialist Party and the CFDT, for whom he had probably been working all along, most likely in the “Secteur des Associations” which monitors the development of currents to the left of the PS. 

This split was met with a very uneven response from the ICC as a whole, especially after the organisation made a determined attempt to get its stolen equipment back by visiting the houses of those suspected of being involved in the thefts and demanding the equipment be returned. A number of comrades in the UK simply left the organisation, unable to cope with the realisation that a revolutionary organisation has to defend itself in this society, and that this can include physical action as well as political propaganda. The Aberdeen/Edinburgh sections not only quickly departed, but publicly denounced the ICC’s actions and threatened to call the police if they were subject to any visits themselves (since they also retained a certain amount of material belonging to the organisation, even though to our knowledge they had not been directly involved in the initial thefts). And when the ICC issued a very necessary public warning about the activities of Chenier, they rushed to defend his honour. This was the inglorious beginning of the Communist Bulletin group, whose publications were largely dedicated to attacks on the Stalinism and even the insanity of the ICC. In short, this was an early example of political parasitism which was to become a significant phenomenon in the subsequent decades[11]. Within the wider proletarian milieu, there were few if any expressions of solidarity with the ICC. On the contrary, the CBG’s version of the events is still circulating on the internet and has a strong influence, on the anarchist milieu in particular.

We can point to further expressions of crisis in the years that followed. The balance sheet of the groups who took part in the international conferences is mainly negative: disappearance of groups that had only recently broken with leftism (L’Eveil Internationaliste, the OCRIA, Marxist Workers Group in the USA)) Others were pulled in the opposite direction: the NCI, a split with the Bordigists which had shown a certain level of maturity on organisational questions during the conferences, fused with the Il Leninsta group and followed it to abandon internationalism and adopt a more or less open form of leftism (the OCI)[12]. The Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, which had come to the third conference merely to denounce it, already expressing its destructive and parasitic character, began to adopt openly reactionary positions (support for Peruvian Maoists and El Salvador guerillas, culminating in a grotesque justification for the actions of the “centrist” al Qaida and physical threats against the ICC in Mexico[13]). The GCI, whatever its motivations, is a group which essentially does the work of the police, not only by threatening violence against proletarian organisations, but also by giving the impression that there is a link between authentic communist groups and the shady milieu of terrorism.

In 1984 we also saw the formation of International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, a coming together of the CWO and Battaglia. The IBRP (now the ICT) has maintained itself on an internationalist terrain, but the regroupment was in our view achieved on an opportunist basis – a federalist conception of national groups, a lack of open debate about the differences between them, and series of hasty attempts to integrate new sections which would in most cases end in failure.[14]

1984-5 saw the split in the ICC which gave rise to the “External Fraction of the ICC”. The EFICC initially claimed to be the true defenders of the ICC’s platform against alleged deviations on class consciousness, the existence of opportunism in the workers’ movement, the alleged monolithism and even “Stalinism” of our central organs etc. In reality, the whole approach of the ICC was jettisoned very rapidly, showing that the EFICC was not what it thought it was: a real fraction fighting the degeneration of the original organisation. In our view, this was another clan formation which put personal links above the needs of the organisation, and whose activity once leaving the ICC provided another example of political parasitism[15].

 The proletariat, according to Marx, is a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society – part of capitalism and yet in a sense alien to it[16]. And the proletarian organisation, which above all embodies the communist future of the working class, is no less a foreign body for being part of the proletariat. Like the proletariat as a whole, it is subject to the constant pressure of bourgeois ideology, and it is this pressure, or rather the temptation to adapt to it, to conciliate with it, which is the source of opportunism. It is also the reason why revolutionary organisations cannot live a “peaceful” life within capitalist society and are inevitably doomed to go through crises and splits, as conflicts break out between the proletarian “soul” of the organization and those who have succumbed to the ideologies of other social classes. The history of Bolshevism, for example, is also a history of organisational struggles. Revolutionaries do not seek or advocate crises, but when they do break out, it is essential to mobilise its forces to defend its central principles if they are being undermined, and to fight for clarification of the divergences and their roots instead of running away from these obligations. And of course it is vital to learn the lessons that these crises inevitably bring with them, in order to make the organisation more resistant in the future.

For the ICC, crises have been frequent and sometimes very damaging, but they have not always been entirely negative. Thus the 1981 crisis, following an extraordinary conference in 1982, led to the elaboration of fundamental texts on both the function and the mode of functioning of revolutionary organisations in this epoch[17], and brought vital lessons on the permanent necessity for a revolutionary organisation to defend itself, not only against the direct repression of the bourgeois state, but also against dubious or hostile elements who pose as part of the revolutionary movement and may even infiltrate its organisations. 

Similarly the crisis that led to the departure of the EFICC saw a maturation of the ICC on a range of key issues: the real existence of opportunism and centrism as diseases of the workers’ movement; the rejection of councilist visions of class consciousness as being purely a product of the immediate struggle (and hence the necessity for the revolutionary organisation as the main expression of the historic, depth dimension of class consciousness); and, linked to this, the understanding of the revolutionary organisation as an organisation of combat, capable of intervening in the class at several levels: not only theoretical and propagandistic, but also agitational, providing orientations for the extension and self-organisation of the struggle, participating actively in general assemblies and struggle groups. 

Despite the clarifications that the ICC made by responding to its internal crises, they did not guarantee that the organisation problem, in particular, was now solved and that there would be no more cases of falling back into error. But at the very least, the ICC recognized that the question of organisation was a political question in its own right. On the other hand, the milieu in general didn’t see the importance of the organisational issue. “Anti-Leninists” of various stripes (anarchists, councilists, modernists, etc) saw the very attempt to maintain a centralised organization as inherently Stalinist, while the Bordigists made the fatal mistake of thinking that the last word had been said on the question and that there was nothing further to discuss. The IBRP was less dogmatic but tended to treat the organisation question as secondary. For example, in their response to the crisis which hit the ICC in the mid-90s, they did not deal with the organisational issues at all but argued that they were essentially a by-product of the ICC’s mistaken evaluation of the balance of class forces.

There is no doubt that an incorrect appreciation of the world situation can be an important  factor in organisational crises: in the history of the communist left, for example, we can point to the adoption, by a majority of the Italian Fraction, of Vercesi’s theory of the war economy, which considered that the accelerating march towards war in the late 30s was proof that the revolution was imminent.  The outbreak of the imperialist war thus saw a total disarray in the Fraction.

Similarly, the tendency of the groups coming out of the 68 upsurge to overestimate the class struggle, to see the revolution as “just around the corner”, meant that the growth of revolutionary forces in the 70s was extremely fragile: many of those who joined the ICC at that time did not have the patience and conviction to last the course when it became clear that the struggle for revolution was one posed in the long term and that the revolutionary organisation would be engaged in a permanent struggle for survival, even when the class struggle was globally following an upward course. But the difficulties resulting from this immediatist vision of world events also had a major organisational element: not only in the fact that during that period members were often integrated in a hasty, superficial manner, but above all in the fact that they were integrated into an organisation which did not yet have a clear vision of its function, which was not to act as if it was already a kind of mini-party but was above all to see itself as a bridge to the future communist party. The revolutionary organisation in the period that began in 1968 thus retained many features of a communist fraction even if it had no direct organic continuity with the parties or fractions of the past.  This does not at all mean that we should have renounced the task of direct intervention in the class struggle. On the contrary, we have already argued that one of the key components in the debate with the tendency that formed the “External Fraction” was precisely the insistence on the need for a communist intervention in the struggles of the class – a task which may vary in scope and intensity, but which never disappears, in different phases of the class struggle. But it does mean that the largest part of our energies have necessarily been focused on the defence and construction of the organisation, to analysing a rapidly evolving world situation and both preserving and elaborating our theoretical acquisitions. This focus would become even more important in the conditions of the phase of social decomposition from the 1990s onwards, which have powerfully increased the pressures and dangers confronting revolutionary organisations, We will examine the impact of this phase in the second part this article.

Amos

Annex

Introductory note to the pamphlets containing the texts and proceedings of the Second International Conference of Groups of the Communist Left, 1978, written by the international technical committee:

“With this first pamphlet we are beginning the publication of the texts of the Second International Conference of the groups of the Communist left, held in Paris on 11 and 12 November 1978 on the initiative of the Internationalist Communist Party, Battaglia Comunista. The texts of the First International Conference, held in Milan on 30 April and I May 1977, were published in Italian under the responsibility of the ICP/BC and in French and English under the responsibility of the ICC.

On 30 June, 1977, the ICP/BC, in accordance with what had been decided at the Milan Conference and subsequent contacts with the ICC and CWO, sent out a circular letter inviting the following groups to a new conference to be held in Paris:

International Communist Current (France, Belgium, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany. Holland, USA, Venezuela)

Communist Workers Organisation (Britain)

International Communist Party (Communist Programme: Italy, France, etc)

Il Leninista (Italy)

Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista (Italy)

Iniziativa Comunista (Italy)

Fomento Obrero Revolucionario (France, Spain)

Pour Une Intervention Communiste (France)

Forbundet Arbetarmakt (Sweden)

För Komunismen (Sweden)

Organisation Communiste Revolutionaire Internationalise d’Algerie

Kakamaru Ha (Japan)

Partito Comunista Internazionale/Il Partito Comunista (Italy)

Spartakusbond (Holland)

In volume II we will publish this letter

Of the groups invited, Spartakusbond and Kakamaru Ha didn’t reply

Communist Programme and Il Partito Comunista refused to participate in articles appearing in their respective publications. Both rejected the spirit of the initiative as well as the political content of the work itself (particularly on the party and national liberation wars)

The PIC refused with a letter-document to participate in a meeting based on a recognition of the first two congresses of the Third International, which they see as being essentially social democratic from the beginning (see Vol II).

Forbundet Arbetarmakt rejected the invitation since it doubted that it could recognize the criteria for participation (see Vol II)

Iniziativa Comunista gave no written response, and at the last minute – after having agreed to come to a joint meeting of Battaglia and Il Leninista – refused to participate in the conference, justifying its attitude in the issue of its bulletin which appeared after the Paris conference.

Il Leninista. Although it confirmed its agreement to participate, was unable to attend due to technical problems at the time they set off for the meeting

The OCRIA of the Algerian immigrants in France was unable to participate physically in the meeting for security reasons, but asked to be considered as a participating group

The FOR, although it had participated at the beginning of the conference – to which it presented itself as an observer at the sidelines – quickly dissociated itself from the conference, saying that its presence was incompatible with groups who recognize that there is now a structural crisis of capital (see vol II)……”

In between the second and third conferences, the Swedish group För Komunismen had become the ICC section in Sweden and Il Nucleo and Il Leninista had fused to become a single organsiation, Il Nuclei Leninisti

The list of participating groups was:

ICC, Battaglia, CWO, Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, L’Éveil Internationaliste, Il Nuclei Leninisti OCRIA, which sent written contributions. The American Marxist Workers’ Group associated itself to the conference and would have sent a delegate, but was prevented from doing so at the last minute.

---

In the first part of this article we looked at some of the most important developments in the international proletarian milieu after the events of May 68 in France. We noted that, while the resurgence of the class struggle gave a significant impetus to the revival of the proletarian political movement, and thus to the regroupment of its forces, this dynamic had begun to run into difficulties by the beginning of the 80s. We take up the story from this point. This “history” by no means claims to be exhaustive and we make no apology for the fact that it is presented from the ICC’s “partisan” point of view. It can be supplemented in future by contributions from those who may have different experiences and perspectives.

The mass strike in Poland in 1980 demonstrated the capacity of the working class to organise itself independently of the capitalist state, to unify its struggles across an entire country, to unite economic with political demands. But as we said at the time: as in Russia in 1917, the problem could be posed in Poland, but it could only be resolved on an international scale. The working class of Western Europe in particular had been issued a challenge: faced with the irreversible deepening of the capitalist crisis, it would be necessary to attain the same heights of self-organisation and unification of its struggles, but at the same time to go beyond the movement in Poland at the level of politicisation. The Polish workers, fighting a brutal regime which claimed that the sacrifices it demanded were all steps on the way to a communist future, had, at the political level, not been able to reject a whole series of bourgeois political mystifications, in particular the idea that their conditions could best be improved by installing a democratic regime which allowed “free trade unions” to organise the working class. It was the specific task of the workers in the west, who had been through many years of bitter experience of the fraud of parliamentary democracy and the sabotaging role of trade unions that were formally separate from the capitalist state, to develop a genuinely proletarian perspective: the mass strike maturing into a direct confrontation with the capitalist system, the goal of an authentically communist society.

And there is no doubt that the workers in the west did take up the challenge in the sense of fighting back against a whole new round of attacks on their living standards, masterminded largely by right wing regimes in power prepared to force through massive levels of unemployment in order to “trim down” the bloated economic apparatus inherited from the post-war Keynesian period. In Belgium in 1983 the workers took important steps towards the extension of the struggle – relying not on the deliberations of union officials but sending massive delegations to other sectors to call on them to join the movement. In the following two years, the strikes by car workers, steel workers, printers and above all miners in the UK were the response of the proletariat to the new “Thatcherite” regime. They contained a real potential for unification if only they could rid themselves of the obsolete trade unionist notion that you can defeat the capitalist enemy by holding out for as long as possible in the confines of a single sector. Elsewhere in Europe – among the railway and the health workers in France, or the education workers in Italy – workers went further in trying to break away from the numbing grip of the trade unions, organising themselves in general assemblies with elected and revocable strike committees, and making tentative efforts towards coordinating these committees.

As we argued in the first part of this article, it was absolutely necessary for the small revolutionary organisations which existed at that time, even with their limited means, to participate in these struggles, to make their voices heard through the press, through leaflets, through speaking up at demonstrations, at picket lines and in general assemblies, to make concrete proposals for the extension and self-organisation of the struggle, to play a part in the formation of groups of militant workers seeking to stimulate the struggle and draw out its most important lessons. The ICC devoted a good deal of its resources in the 1980s to carrying out these tasks, and we produced a number of polemics with other proletarian organisations which, in our view, had not sufficiently grasped the potential of these struggles, above all because they lacked a general, historic vision of the “line of march” of the class movement. [1]

And yet, as we have also accepted elsewhere[2], we ourselves were less clear about the growing difficulties of the struggle. We tended to underestimate the significance of the heavy defeats suffered by emblematic sectors like the miners in the UK and the real hesitation of the class to reject trade union methods and ideology. Even when there was a strong tendency to organise outside the trade unions, the extreme left wing of the bourgeoisie set up false rank and file unions, even extra-union “co-ordinations”, to keep the struggle inside the bounds of sectionalism and ultimately of trade unionism. Above all, despite the determination and militancy of these struggles, there was not much progress towards the elaboration of a revolutionary perspective. The politicisation of the movement remained at best embryonic.

Since the end of the 1980s we have been arguing that this situation – of a working class strong enough to resist the drive towards another world war, and yet not capable of offering humanity the perspective of a new form of social organisation – constituted a kind of social stalemate which opened up what we call the phase of social decomposition. The collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989, which marked the definitive onset of this new phase in the decline of capitalism, was like an alarm bell which made us reflect deeply on the destiny of the international class movement which had appeared in successive waves since 1968. We began to understand that the new period would pose considerable difficulties for the working class, not least (but not only) because of the furious ideological assault of the bourgeoisie which proclaimed the death of communism and the final refutation of marxism.

In the first part of this article we noted that, already at the beginning of the 80s, the proletarian political milieu had gone through a major crisis, signalled by the collapse of the international conferences of the communist left, the splits in the ICC and the implosion of the Bordigist International Communist Party (Communist Program). The main political organisations of the working class thus entered this new and uncertain period in a weakened, dispersed condition. The overall failure of the class to politicise its struggles also meant that the very noticeable growth of the proletarian political milieu in the late 60s and 70s had begun to slow down or stagnate. Furthermore, in our view, none of the existing organisations apart from the ICC had the theoretical framework which would enable them to understand the characteristics of the new phase of decadence: some of them, such as the Bordigists, more or less rejected the concept of decadence altogether, while others, like Battaglia and the Communist Workers Organisation (now regrouped as the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party) had a concept of decadence but no interest in gauging the historic balance of forces between the classes (what we referred to as the question of the “historic course”). The idea of a social stalemate thus had no meaning for them.

The impact of decomposition

The principal danger of decomposition for the working class is that it gradually undermines the very basis of its revolutionary nature: its capacity, indeed its fundamental need, for association. The tendency towards “every man for himself” is inherent in the capitalist mode of production, but it takes on a new intensity, even a new quality, in this final phase of capitalist decay. This tendency may be driven by both material and ideological factors - by the physical dispersal of proletarian concentrations as a result of mass lay-offs and relocations, and by the deliberate stirring up of divisions between workers (national, racial, religious etc); by competition over employment or social benefits and by ideological campaigns about the ‘joys’ of consumerism or democracy. But its overall effect is to gnaw away at the capacity of the proletariat to see itself as a class with distinct interests, to come together as a class against capital. This is intimately linked to the actual diminution of working class struggles in the past three decades.

The revolutionary minority, as a part of the class, is not spared the pressures of a disintegrating social system which clearly has no future. For revolutionaries, the principle of association is expressed in the formation of revolutionary organisations and the commitment to organised militant activity. The counter-tendency is the flight into individual solutions, towards a loss of confidence in collective activity, distrust in revolutionary organisations and despair about the future. When the eastern bloc fell and the prospect of a profound retreat in the class struggle began to reveal itself, our comrade Marc Chirik, who had experienced the full force of the counter-revolution and had resisted its impact through his militant activity in the fractions of the communist left, said once that “now we will see who the real militants are”. Unfortunately, Marc, who died in 1990, would not be around in person to help us adapt to conditions where we would often be swimming against the tide, although he had certainly done all he could to transmit the principles of organisation which would serve as our best means of defence against the coming storms.

In part one of this article we already explained that crises are an inevitable product of the situation of revolutionary organisations in capitalist society, of the ceaseless bombardment of bourgeois ideology in its various forms. The ICC has always been open about its own difficulties and internal differences, even if it aims to present them in a coherent manner rather than simply “putting everything on the table”. And we also insisted that crises should always oblige the organisation to learn from them and thus strengthen its own political armoury.

The advancing decomposition of capitalist society tends to make such crises more frequent and more dangerous. This was certainly the case in the ICC in the 90s and at the turn of the century. Between 1993 and 1995, we were faced with the necessity to confront the activities of a clan that had become deeply entrenched in the international central organ of the ICC, an “organisation within the organisation” that bore a strange resemblance to the International Brotherhood of the Bakuninists inside the First International, including the leading role played by a political adventurer, JJ, steeped in the manipulative practises of freemasonry.  Such predilections for occultism were already an expression of the powerful tide of irrationality that tends to sweep across society in this period. At the same time, the formation of clans inside a revolutionary organisation, whatever their specific ideology, parallels the search for false communities which is a much broader social characteristic of this period.

The ICC’s response to these phenomena was to bring them into the light of day and to deepen its knowledge of the way the marxist movement in had defended itself against them. We thus produced an orientation text on functioning which rooted itself in the organisational battles in the First International and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party[3], and a series of articles on the historical fight against sectarianism, adventurism, freemasonry, and political parasitism[4].  In particular, the series identified Bakunin as an example of the declassed adventurer who uses the workers’ movement as a springboard for his own personal ambitions, and the International Brotherhood as an early example of political parasitism – of a form of political activity which, while superficially working for the revolutionary cause, carries out a work of denigration and destruction which can only serve the class enemy.

The aim of these texts was not only to arm the ICC against being infected by the morality and methods of classes alien to the proletariat, but to stimulate a debate in the whole proletarian milieu around these questions. Unfortunately, we received little or no response to these contributions from the serious groups of the milieu, such as the IBRP, who tended to see them as no more than strange hobbyhorses of the ICC. Those who were already overtly hostile to the ICC – such as the remnants of the Communist Bulletin Group – seized on them as final proof that the ICC had degenerated into a bizarre cult that should be avoided at all cost[5]. Our efforts to provide a clear framework for understanding the growing phenomenon of political parasitism – the Theses on Parasitism published in 1998[6] - met with the same kind of reaction. And very quickly, the milieu’s lack of understanding of these problems did not merely result in an attitude of neutrality towards elements who can only play a destructive role towards the revolutionary movement. As we shall see, it led from “neutrality” to tolerance and then to active cooperation with such elements. 

The growth of political parasitism

At the beginning of the 2000s the ICC was again faced with a grave internal crisis. A certain number of militants of the organisation, again members of the international central organ, who had played an active part in exposing the activities of the JJ clan, coalesced into a new clan which took up some of the same themes as the previous one – particularly their targeting of comrades who had stood most firmly for the defence of organisational principles, even spreading the rumour that one of them was a police agent who was manipulating the others. 

The “Internal Fraction of the International Communist Current” has since amply demonstrated that there is often a thin line between the activity of a clan inside the organisation and of a fully fledged parasitic organisation. The elements who made up the IFICC were excluded from the ICC for actions unworthy of communist militants, which included theft from the organisation’s funds and the publication of sensitive internal information that could have put our militants in danger from the police. Since then, this group, which has subsequently changed its name to the International Group of the Communist Left, has given further evidence that it embodies a form of parasitism so rabid that it is indistinguishable from the activities of the political police. In 2014 we were obliged to publish a denunciation of this group which had again managed to steal internal material from the ICC and was seeking to use it to denigrate our organisation and its militants[7].

Clearly a group which behaves in this manner is a danger to all revolutionaries, regardless of the formally correct political positions it defends. The response of a communist milieu which understood the need for solidarity between its organisations would be to exclude such practises, and those who engage in them, from the proletarian camp; at the very least, it would have to renew the traditions of the workers’ movement which held that behaviour of this sort, or accusations against the probity of a revolutionary militant or organisation, required the formation of a “Jury of Honour” to establish the truth about such forms of conduct or such accusations[8]. In 2004, however, a series of events which we have referred to as the “Circulo” affair showed how far today’s proletarian political movement has strayed from these traditions. 

In 2003, the ICC entered into contact with a new group in Argentina, the Nucleo Comunista Internationalista. After intensive discussions with the ICC, there was a definite movement towards the positions of our organisation and the question of eventually forming an ICC section in Argentina was posed. However, a member of this group, who we have called “B”, held a monopoly of the computer equipment available to the comrades and thus of communication with other groups and individuals, and it had become clear during the course of our discussions that this individual regarded himself as a kind of political guru who had arrogated to himself the task of representing the NCI as a whole. During the visit of the ICC’s delegation in 2004, B demanded that the group should immediately be integrated into the ICC. Our response was that that we were interested above all in political clarity and not in the foundation of commercial franchises and that a good deal of discussion was still necessary before such a step could be taken. His ambition to use the ICC as a springboard for his personal prestige thus thwarted, B then made an abrupt volte face: unbeknown to the other members of the NCI, he had entered into contact with the IFICC and with their support suddenly declared that the entire NCI had broken with the ICC because of its Stalinist methods and had formed a new group, the Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas. Jubilation from the IFICC who happily published this great news in their bulletin. But the worst of this was that the IBRP – who had also entered into contact with the IFICC, no doubt flattered by the IFICC’s declaration that the IBRP, “now that the ICC had thoroughly degenerated”, was now the true pole of regroupment for revolutionaries – also published the Circulo’s statement on their website, in three languages. 

The ICC’s response to this lamentable affair was very thorough. Having established the facts of the matter – that the new group was in fact a pure invention of B, and that the other members of the NCI had known nothing of the alleged split with the ICC – we wrote a series of articles denouncing the adventurist behaviour of B, the parasitic activity of the IFICC and the opportunism of the IBRP, which was prepared to take a whole heap of slanders against the ICC at face value, without any attempt at investigation, with the idea of demonstrating that “something was moving in Argentina” … away from the ICC and towards themselves. It was only when the ICC proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that B was indeed a political imposter, and when the NCI comrades themselves made a statement denying that they had broken with the ICC, that the IBRP quietly deleted the offending Circulo material from their website, without offering any explanation and still less any self-criticism. A similarly ambiguous attitude was exhibited around the same time when it became evident that the IBRP had made use of a list of ICC contact addresses stolen by the IFICC when they were expelled from the ICC to advertise an IBRP public meeting in Paris[9].

This affair demonstrates that the problem of political parasitism is not a mere invention of the ICC, and still less a means of shutting up those who oppose our analyses, as some people have claimed. It is a real danger for the health of the proletarian milieu and serious obstacle to the formation of the future class party. And thus our theses on parasitism conclude that:

“What was valid in the time of the IWA remains valid today. The struggle against parasitism constitutes one of the essential responsibilities of the communist left and is part of the tradition of its bitter struggles against opportunism. Today it is one of the basic components in the preparation of the party of tomorrow, and in fact is one of the determining factors both of the moment when the party can arise and its capacity to play its role in the decisive battles of the proletariat”.

The parasitic groups have the function of sowing divisions in the proletarian camp by spreading rumours and slanders, introducing into it practices which are alien to proletarian morality, such as theft and behind-the-scenes manoeuvres. The fact that their principal aim has been to build a wall around the ICC, to isolate it from other communist groups and turn newly emerging elements away from engaging with us does not mean that they are only damaging the ICC – the whole milieu and its capacity to cooperate with a view to the formation of the party of the future is weakened by their activity. Furthermore, since their nihilistic and destructive attitudes are a direct reflection of the growing weight of social decomposition, we can expect them to have a growing presence in the coming period, above all if the proletarian milieu remains blithely ignorant of the danger they represent.

2004-2011: the emergence of new political forces, and the difficulties they encountered

The article on our experience with the NCI talks about revival of class struggle and appearance of new political forces. The ICC had noted signs of this recovery in 2003, but the clearest proof that something was shifting was provided by the struggle of students against the Contrat Première Embauche (CPE) legislation in France in 2006, a movement which showed a real capacity for self-organisation in assemblies and which threatened to spread to the employed sectors, thus obliging the government to cancel the CPE. In the same year the assembly form was adopted by the steel workers of Vigo who also showed a real will to incorporate other sectors into the movement. And in the wake of the financial crash of 2008, in 2010, we saw a significant struggle by university and college students around fees and grants in the UK, and a movement against pension “reforms” in France. The next year, 2011, saw the outbreak of the “Arab spring”, a wave of social revolts where the influence of the proletariat varied from country to country but which in Egypt, Israel and elsewhere provided the world with the example of the occupation of public squares and the holding of regular assemblies - an example taken up by the Occupy movement in the US, by assemblies in Greece and most importantly by the Indignados movement in Spain. The latter in particular provided the basis for a definite degree of politicisation through animated debates about the obsolescence of capitalism and the need for a new form of society.

This politicisation at a more general level was accompanied by the appearance of new forces looking for revolutionary answers to the impasse of the social order.  A number of these forces were oriented towards the positions and organisations of the communist left. Two different groups from South Korea were invited to ICC congresses during this period, as well as the EKS group in Turkey and new contacts from the USA. Discussions began with groups or discussion circles in South America, the Balkans and Australia; some of these groups and circles became new sections of the ICC (Turkey, Philippines, Ecuador, Peru). The ICT has also gained new forces since this period

There was also a sizeable development of an internationalist current in anarchism, which could be seen for example in the discussions on the libcom internet forum, and in the growth of new anarcho-syndicalist groups which were critical of the “institutionalised” syndicalism of organisations like the CNT. 

The ICC responded to these developments as widely as possible, and this was absolutely necessary: without passing on the heritage of the communist left to a new generation, there can be no hope of a movement towards the party of the future.

But there were important weaknesses in our intervention. When we say that opportunism and sectarianism are diseases of the workers’ movement, the result of the constant pressure of the ideology of other classes on the proletariat and its political organisations, we do not use this merely as a means for criticising other organisation, but as a yardstick for assessing our own capacity to resist this pressure and hold onto the methods and acquisitions of the working class in all areas of our activity.

The Turkish section of the ICC, integrated in 2009, left the ICC in 2015 to form a short-lived group, Pale Blue Jadal. In our attempt to draw a balance sheet of this failure, we turned the light on our own opportunist errors in the process of their integration:

 “Our integration of the EKS group as the ICC’s Turkish section was a process infested with opportunism. We do not propose here to go into the reasons for this: suffice it to say that we tried to force the pace of history, and this is a classic recipe for opportunism.

‘Forcing the pace’, of course, was at our own small level; principally, it meant the decision to ‘fast-track’ the discussions with the EKS group which was to become our section in Turkey. In particular we decided:

1. To drastically reduce the time spent on organisational discussion with the members of EKS before their integration, on the grounds that the art of building an organisation is learnt essentially from experience.
2. To integrate EKS as a group, not as individuals. Although our statutes provide for this, it holds the danger that the new militants will see themselves, not first and foremost as individual militants of an international organisation but as members of their original group”[10].

As we argued in the first part of this article, opportunism and sectarianism often go together. And some retrospective elements of our response to the Circulo affair can certainly be seen as sectarian. Given the rise of new political forces on the one hand, given the latest evidence of the difficulty of the ICT in behaving in a principled manner, and the unalterably rigid sectarianism of the Bordigists, there was a certain tendency in the ICC to conclude that the “old milieu” was already washed up and that our hopes for the future would have to reside in the new forces we were beginning to encounter.

This was the sectarian side of our reaction. But again, it also had an opportunist side. In order to convince the new milieu that we were not sectarian, in 2012 we made fresh overtures to the ICT, arguing for a resumption of discussions and common work that had been disrupted ever since the collapse of the international conferences at the beginning of the 80s. This was correct in itself, and was a continuation of a policy we had, without much success, carried on throughout the 80s and 90s[11]. But in order to get this process underway, we accepted at face value the ICT’s explanation for their behaviour over the Circulo affair: that it had essentially been the work of one comrade who had subsequently died. Apart from the dubious morality of such an approach on their part, it brought absolutely no clarification by the ICT about their willingness to form an alliance with elements who really had no place in the proletarian milieu. And in the end the discussions we started with the ICT soon foundered on this so far unbridgeable gap on the question of parasitism – the question of which groups and elements can be considered as legitimate components of the communist left. And this was not the only example of a tendency on the ICC’s part to push to one side this vital question because it was decidedly unpopular in the proletarian milieu. It also included the integration of the EKS who never agreed with us on the question of parasitism, and approaches to groups which we ourselves considered to be parasitic, such as the CBG (approaches which led nowhere).

The ICC’s articles during this period show an understandable optimism about the potential contained in the new forces (see for example the article on our 18th congress[12]). But there was at the same a time an underestimation of many of the difficulties facing these new elements who had appeared in the phase of decomposition.

As we have said, a number of the elements coming from this upsurge came towards the communist left and some integrated into its main organisations. At the same time, many of these elements did not survive for very long – not only the ICC’s Turkish section, but also the NCI, the discussion group formed in Australia[13], and a number of contacts who appeared in the US. More generally, there was a very pervasive influence of anarchism on this new wave of “seekers” – to some extent an expression of the fact that the trauma of Stalinism and the impact it has had on the notion of the revolutionary political organisation was still an operative factor in the second decade after the collapse of the Russian bloc.

The development of the anarchist milieu in this period was not wholly negative. For example, the internet forum libcom, which was a focus for a lot of international political debate in the first decade of its existence, was run by a collective which tended to reject leftist and life-stylist forms of anarchism and to defend some of the basics of internationalism. Some of them had come through the superficial activism of the “anti-capitalist” milieu of the 1990s and had begun to look to the working class as the force for social change. But this quest was to a large extent blocked by the development of anarcho-syndicalism, which reduces the entirely valid recognition of the revolutionary role of the working class to an economist outlook unable to integrate the political dimension of the class struggle, and which replaces activism limited to the street to activism in the workplace (the notion of training “organisers” and forming “revolutionary unions”). Paradoxical as it may seem, this milieu was also influenced by the theories of “communisation”, which is a very explicit expression of a loss of conviction that communism can only come about through the struggle of the working class. But the paradox is more apparent than real, since both syndicalism and communisation reflect an attempt to by-pass the reality that a revolutionary struggle is also a struggle for political power, and demands the formation of a proletarian political organisation. More recently, libcom and other expressions of the anarchist movement have been sucked into various forms of identity politics, which continues the slide away from a proletarian standpoint[14] . Meanwhile, other sectors of the anarchist movement were completely suckered by the claims of Kurdish nationalism to have established some kind of revolutionary Commune in Rojava.

It must also be said that the new milieu - and even the established revolutionary groups – had few defences against the noxious moral atmosphere of decomposition and in particular the verbal aggression and posturing that often infests the internet. On libcom, for example, members and sympathisers of left communist groups, and the ICC in particular, had to fight hard to get through a wall of hostility in which the slanders of parasitic groups like the CBG were usually taken as read. And while some progress at the level of the culture of debate seemed to be taking place in libcom’s early years, the atmosphere took a definite turn for the worse following the entanglement of the libcom collective in the scandal of “Aufhebengate”, in which the majority of the collective adopted a cliquish stance of defending one of their friends in the Aufheben group who had been clearly shown to be cooperating with police strategies against street protests[15].

Other examples of this kind of moral decay among those professing the cause of communism could be given – the member of the Greek communisation group Blaumachen who became a minister in the Syriza government being perhaps one of the most evident[16]. But the groups of the communist left were not spared from such difficulties either: we have already mentioned the dubious alliances the ICT has established with certain parasitic groups. And more recently, the ICT was first compelled to dissolve its section in Canada which had adopted an apologetic attitude to one of its members who had engaged in sexual abuse, while a group of Greek sympathisers lapsed into the most rabid nationalism in the face of the immigration crisis[17]. And the ICC itself experienced what we called a “moral and intellectual crisis” when one of our comrades, most vociferous in opposing the opportunist policies we had adopted in certain of our activities (and who had previously been the target of the clans from the 90s) was subjected to a campaign of scapegoating[18]. A “Jury of Honour” established within the organisation found all the charges against her to be null and void. These events demonstrate that the question of behaviour, of ethics and morality, has always been a key element in the construction of a revolutionary organisation worth its name. The revolutionary movement will not be able to overcome its divisions without confronting this question.

Contemporary problems and future perspectives

The signs of a revival of the class struggle which appeared in 2006-2011 have largely been eclipsed by a wave of reaction which has taken the form of the rise of populism and the installation of a series of authoritarian regimes, notably in a country like Egypt which was at the centre of the “Arab Spring”. The resurgence of chauvinism and xenophobia has affected some of the very areas where, in 2011, the first shoots of a new internationalist flowering seemed to be appearing – most notably, the wave of nationalism in Catalonia, which had previously been at the heart of the Indignados movement. And while the growth of nationalism highlights the danger of bloody imperialist conflicts in the period ahead, it also underlines the total incapacity of the existing system, riven by rivalry and competition, to address the mounting threat of environmental destruction. All of this contributes to widespread moods either of denial about the apocalyptic future capitalism has in store for us, or of nihilism and despair.

In short, the sombre social and political atmosphere does not seem to be propitious for the development of a new revolutionary movement, which can only be presaged on a conviction that an alternative future is possible.

And again, little progress has been made towards improving relations between the existing communist groups, where it seems to be a case of one step forwards, two steps back: thus, while in November 2017 the CWO accepted the ICC’s invitation to make a presentation at our day of discussion on the October revolution, since then they have consistently rejected any further initiatives of this type.

Does this mean, as a member of the CWO recently claimed, that the ICC has lapsed into demoralisation and pessimism about the future of the class struggle and the potential for the formation of the party of tomorrow?[19]

We certainly see no sense in denying the very real difficulties facing the working class and in developing a communist presence within it. A class which has increasingly lost a sense of its own existence as a class will not easily accept the arguments of those who, against all the odds, continue to insist that the proletariat not only exists but holds the key to the survival of humanity. 

And yet, despite the very tangible dangers of this last phase of capitalist decadence, we do not think that the working class has said its last word. There remain a number of elements pointing to the possibilities of an eventual recovery of class identity and class consciousness among new generations of the proletariat, as we argued at our 22nd Congress in our resolution on the international class struggle[20]. And we are also seeing a renewed process of communist politicisation in a small but significant minority of this new generation, often taking the form of a direct inter-action with the communist left. Individuals searching for clarification as well as new groups and circles have appeared in the USA in particular, but also in Australia, Britain, South America… This is a real testimony to the fact that Marx’s “old mole” continues to burrow away beneath the surface of events.

Like the new elements who appeared a decade or so ago, this emerging milieu is faced by many dangers, not least from the diplomatic offensive towards them of certain parasitic groups and the indulgence shown towards the latter by proletarian organisations like the ICT. It is especially hard for many of these young comrades to understand the necessarily long-term character of revolutionary commitment and the need to avoid impatience and precipitation. If their appearance expresses a potential that still resides deep in the entrails of the working class, it is vital for them to recognise that their current debates and activities only make sense as part of a work towards the future. We will return to this question in subsequent articles.

Evidently, the existing organisations of the communist left have a key role in the fight for the long-term future of these new comrades. And they themselves are not immune from dangers, as we have already mentioned with regard to the previous wave of “searching elements”. In particular, they must avoid courting any facile popularity by avoiding discussion about difficult questions or watering down their positions with the aim of “gaining a wider audience”. A central task of the existing communist organisations is basically the same as it was for the fractions which detached themselves from the degenerating Communist International in order to lay the bases for a new party when the evolution of the objective, and above all the subjective, conditions placed this on the agenda: an intransigent combat against opportunism in all its forms, and for the maximum rigour in the process of political clarification.

Amos

 

Introduction

To stimulate discussion around the formation of the future world party of the revolution, we are publishing two chapters of an article from Internationalisme no. 7 from January 1946, entitled “On the First Congress of the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy”. The review Internationalisme was the theoretical organ of the French Fraction of the Communist Left (FFCL), the group that was politically the most clear in the period immediately after the Second World War. In 1945 the Fraction transformed itself into the Gauche Communiste de France in order to avoid confusion following a split by militants in France who took the same name for their group as the French Fraction

This article (which we will be publishing in full on our website), basing itself on the lessons of the degeneration of the Third International, develops on the criteria which have to apply to the constitution of a future world party. The two chapters published in this Review – the first, “The Left Fraction” and the sixth, “Method for forming the party” – look at the political questions posed since the foundation of the Third International and provide a coherent argument for understanding them. They build a bridge between the post World War One period and the period of the Second World War, on the basis of the balance sheet drawn up by the Italian Fraction in the 1930s, whereas the other chapters are more devoted to a polemic with specific currents of the 1940s, such as the RKD (Revolutionäre Kommunisten Deutschlands, a group of former Trotskyists from Austria) and Vercesi. These chapters are also very interesting but would not fit into a printed Review.

Summarised briefly, the criteria for the formation of the party are, on the one hand, a course open to the revival and offensive struggle of the proletariat, and, on the other hand, the existence of a solid programmatic basis for the new party.

At that moment, after the first congress of the Internationalist Communist Party, held at the end of December 1945 in Turin, the GCF considered that the first condition – a new favourable course – had been satisfied. Thus, on this basis, they saluted the transformation of the Italian Fraction “by giving birth to a new party of the proletariat” . It was only later, in 1946, that the GCF recognised that the period of counter-revolution was not over and that the objective conditions for the formation of the party were absent. Consequently it stopped publication of its agitational paper L’Etincelle, considering that the perspective for a historical resurgence of class struggle was not on the agenda. The last issue of L’Etincelle came out in November 1946.

At the same time, the GCF severely criticised the method used for the constitution of the Italian party, via “an addition of currents and tendencies” on a heterogeneous basis (“Method for forming the party”), in the same way as it criticised, in the same chapter, the method for forming the CI, an “amalgamation around a programme that had deliberately been left incomplete”. And such a programme could only be an opportunist one[1], which turned its back on the method which had been applied to the construction of the Bolshevik Party.

The merit of this article in Internationalisme is that it insists on the rigour needed around the adoption of a programme, which did not exist in the party that had just been formed in Italy. This article – written about a quarter of a century after the foundation of the Comintern, and a few weeks after the congress of the Internationalist Communist Party – was certainly the most consistent critique of the way the foundation of the Communist International went against the methods of the Bolshevik Party. Internationalisme was also the only publication of the milieu of the communist left at that time to highlight the opportunist approach of the Internationalist CP.

In this sense, the GCF is an illustration of the continuity with the method of Marx and Engels in the foundation of the German Social Democratic Party at Gotha in 1875 (cf The Critique of the Gotha Programme), when they rejected the confused and opportunist basis on which the SAPD was founded. Continuity also with the attitude of Rosa Luxemburg faced with the opportunism of the revisionist Bernstein the German Social Democracy 25 years later, but also with that of Lenin on organisational principles against the Mensheviks. Continuity, finally, with the attitude of Bilan faced with the opportunism of the Trotskyist current in the 1930s. It was thanks to this intransigence in the defence of programmatic positions and organisational principles that elements coming out of the current around Trotsky (such as the RKD) were able to move towards the defence of internationalism during and after the Second World War. Holding high the banner of internationalism against the “partisans”, intransigently defending internationalism against opportunism was thus a condition for the internationalist forces to find a political compass.

In this presentation we should make more precise a formulation concerning the Spartakusbund during the First World War:

“The experience of the Spartakusbund is highly edifying on this point. The latter’s fusion with the Independents did not, as they hoped, lead to the creation of a strong class party but resulted in the Spartakusbund being swamped by the Independents and to the weakening of the German proletariat. Before her murder, Rosa Luxemburg and other Spartakusbund leaders recognized the error of fusing with the Independents and tried to correct it. But this error was not only maintained by the CI in Germany, but it became the practical method for forming Communist Parties in all countries, imposed by the CI”.  

It’s not quite right to talk about the fusion of the Spartakusbund with the USPD. The USPD was formed by the SAG (Sozialistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft – Socialist Working Group); the Internationale group (the Spartakusbund) was integrated into it. But this was not strictly speaking a fusion, which would imply the dissolution of the organisation that has fused with another. In fact the Spartakusbund maintained their organisational independence and their capacity for action while giving themselves the objective of drawing this formation towards their positions as a left wing inside it. Very different was the approach of the CI through the fusion of different groups within a single party, abandoning the necessary process of selection through an addition, with “principles sacrificed t numerical mass”.
We should also rectify a factual error in this article where it says “In Britain, the CI demanded that the communist groups join the Independent Labour Party to form a mass revolutionary opposition inside this reformist party”.

In fact, the CI called for integration of communists into the Labour Party itself! This error of detail in no way alters the basic argument of Internationalisme.

14.5.19

Introduction

In the first part of this article[1] we highlighted the response of all the great imperialist powers to stem the revolutionary wave and prevent it from spreading in the major industrialised countries of Western Europe. Having fought each other for four years the bourgeoisies of Europe now made common cause against their historic enemy: the world proletariat. Among the many forces that the ruling class committed to the preservation of its system was social democracy (whose leadership and right wing had voted for war credits in 1914, thus consecrating their long-standing opportunism and leading them to definitively pass into the camp of the bourgeoisie), which was to play a decisive role in the repression and the mystification of the world revolution. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) placed itself in the forefront of this offensive since it was the true executioner of the German revolution in January 1919. As Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg had foreseen,[2] the impossibility of the extension of the revolution in the great industrial centers of Western Europe led to the isolation and degeneration of the Soviet Republic and the victory of the Stalinist counter-revolution, which still weighs heavily in the ranks of the world working class.

I - The treason of social democracy

A - The rejection of solidarity with the Russian proletariat

During the revolutionary wave that reached Germany in November 1918, social democracy played the role of the bridgehead of the bourgeoisie in order to isolate the working class of Russia.

When the revolution broke out in Germany, Soviet diplomats were expelled by Scheidemann (under-secretary of state without portfolio in the cabinet of Max Von Baden). At that time, the working masses had not really perceived the progressive abandonment of marxism by the SPD. On the eve of the First World War, hundreds of thousands of workers in Germany were still members. But its dissociation from the Russian revolution confirmed its betrayal and passage into the bourgeois camp.

After the mutiny of sailors in Kiel, Haase transmitted a teletype message to the People's Commissars of the Soviet government, thanking them for sending grain; but, after a pause, the message continued: "Knowing that Russia is oppressed by hunger, we ask you to distribute to the starving Russian people the grain that you intend to sacrifice for the German revolution. The President of the American Republic Wilson guarantees us the sending of flour and bacon necessary to the German population to get through the winter."

As Karl Radek later said, "the outstretched hand hung in the void"! The "socialist" government preferred the aid of a capitalist power rather than that of the Russian workers. Instead, the German government accepted American flour and bacon, huge quantities of luxury items, and other superfluous goods that drained the German Treasury dry. On 14 November, the government sent a telegram to US President Wilson: "The German Government asks the United States Government to telegraph the Chancellor of the Reich (Ebert) to say if it can count on the supply of foodstuffs. on the part of the United States Government, so that the German Government can guarantee domestic order and pay fairly for such supplies."

In Germany, the telegram was widely broadcast to convey the following message to the workers: "renounce the revolution and destroying capitalism, and you will have bread and bacon!" But no condition of this kind had been imposed by the Americans. So, social democracy not only blackmailed the workers but brazenly lied to them that these conditions had been imposed by Wilson himself.[3]

B - Social democracy at the forefront of the counter-revolution

In these conditions, there was no doubt that German social democracy was at the forefront of the counter-revolution. On 10 November 1918, the Berlin Workers' and Soldiers' Council, the supreme body recognised by the new government, decided to immediately re-establish diplomatic relations with the Russian government pending the arrival of its representatives in Berlin.

This resolution was an order that the Peoples’ Commissars should have respected but they did not do it. Although they had defended themselves from the charge in the publication of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), the betrayal and sale of the revolution to the imperialist powers was accepted by the Independents, as proved by the minutes of the meeting of the Council of the Peoples’ Commissars of 19 November 1918: "Following discussion on relations between Germany and the Republic of the Soviets, Haase advises adopting a delaying policy (...) Kautsky agrees with Haase: the decision must be deferred. The Soviet government cannot survive long; in a few weeks, it will not exist (...)"[4] However, while the right wing of this centrist party was gradually moving towards the counter-revolution, the left wing was moving more clearly towards the defence of proletarian interests.

But the zeal of the "socialist" government did not stop there. Faced with the irritation of the Entente with the slowness with which the German troops were withdrawing from the Eastern territories, the German government responded with a diplomatic dispatch which, although sent after the expulsion of the Independent Social Democrats from the government, had been developed with them. This is what was stated:

"The Entente's conviction that German troops would support Bolshevism, either on their own initiative or by higher order, directly or by obstructing anti-Bolshevik measures, does not correspond to reality. We Germans, and therefore our troops, remember that Bolshevism represents an extremely serious threat that must be contained by all means."[5]

If the SPD illustrates in the most extreme way the passage of social democracy into the camp of the bourgeoisie, especially in its open struggle against the revolution in Russia, most of the other major socialist parties in the world were not left out. The tactics of the Italian Socialist Party were, throughout the war, to curb the class struggle under the guise of a falsely neutral position in the world conflict, illustrated by the hypocritical slogan "neither sabotage nor participate", which amounted to trampling on the principle of proletarian internationalism. In France, alongside the fraction that passed bag and baggage into the camp of the bourgeoisie through the vote of the war credits, the socialist movement remained gangrenous with centrism, which only encouraged hostility towards the October revolution and the Bolshevik party.

Nevertheless, a left-wing current began to emerge at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919. Even as the bourgeoisie surfed the wave of victory to strengthen patriotic sentiment, the French proletariat paid mainly for the absence of a true marxist party. This is what Lenin pointed out very lucidly: “The transformation of the old type of European parliamentary party, reformist in its work and slightly coloured with a revolutionary tinge, into a truly communist party, is an extraordinarily difficult thing, and it is certainly in France that this difficulty appears most clearly."[6]

C - Social democracy sabotages and torpedoes the workers' councils[7]

In Russia, as in all countries in which soviets were hatching, the socialist parties played a double game. On the one hand, they gave the impression that they favoured the development of the emancipatory struggle of the workers through the soviets. On the other, they did everything possible to sterilise these organs of self-organisation of the class. It was in Germany that this enterprise took on the greatest importance. Apparently favourable to the workers' councils, the socialists proved to be fiercely hostile to them. In this way, their destructive action within the soviets shows that they behaved like true guard dogs of the bourgeoisie. The tactic was simple; it was to undermine the movement from within, to empty the councils of their revolutionary content. The intention was to sterilise the soviets by subordinating them to the bourgeois state and ensuring that they conceived themselves merely as transitional organs until the holding of elections to the National Assembly. The councils should also be open to all layers of the population. In Germany for example, the SPD created "Committees of Public Safety" welcoming all social strata with identical rights.

Moreover, the leaders of the SPD/USPD sabotaged the work of the soviets through the Council of People's Commissars[8] by imposing instructions other than those given by the Executive Council (EC), which was an emanation of the workers' councils, or by ensuring that the EC did not have its own press. Under an SPD majority, the EC even took a position against the strikes of November and December 1918. This demolition job on the self-organisation of the class also took place in Italy between 1919 and 1920 during the great strike wave, since the PSI did everything possible to turn the factory councils into vulgar works committees incorporated into the state and calling for the self-management of production. The left of the party led the fight against this illusion, which could only lock the struggle of the workers inside the narrow perimeters of the factory:

"We want to prevent the absorption by the working class of the idea that it is enough to develop the Councils solely to take hold of the factories and eliminate the capitalists. This would be an extremely dangerous illusion (...) If the conquest of political power has not taken place, the Royal Guard and the carabinieri will be in place to see to the dissipation of all such illusions, with all the mechanisms of oppression, all the forces which the bourgeoisie wields through its apparatus of political power." (Bordiga)[9]

But German social democracy showed its new, true face when it directly assumed the repression of the workers' strikes. The deployment of an intense ideological campaign in favour of the Republic, universal suffrage, the unity of the people, was not enough to destroy the fighting spirit and the consciousness of the proletariat. Thus, now in the service of the bourgeois state, the traitors of the SPD made an alliance with the army to suppress in blood the mass movement which was in continuity with the one born in Russia and which endangered one of the most developed imperialist powers of the world. The commander-in-chief of the army, General Groener, who had collaborated daily with the SPD and the unions during the war as head of armaments projects, explained:

“We allied ourselves to fight Bolshevism. It was impossible to restore the monarchy (...) I had advised the Feldmarschall not to combat the revolution by force, because given the state of mind of the troops, it was to be feared that such a method would end in failure. I proposed that the military high command should ally with the SPD, since there was no party with enough influence among the people, and the masses, to rebuild a governmental force with the military command. The parties of the right had completely disappeared, and it was out of the question to work with the radical extremists. In the first place, we had to snatch power from the hands of the Berlin workers' and soldiers' councils. An undertaking was planned with this aim in view. Ten divisions were to enter Berlin. Ebert agreed (...) We had worked out a program which planned, after the arrival of the troops, to clean up Berlin and disarm the Spartakists. This was also agreed with Ebert, to whom I was especially grateful for his absolute love for the fatherland (...) This alliance was sealed against the Bolshevik danger and the system of councils." (October-November 1925, Zeugenaussage)[10].

The social democratic government also did not hesitate to appeal to the Western European bourgeoisie in the operation to maintain order during the crucial days of January 1919. For all, it was a point of honour to occupy Berlin if the revolution emerged victorious.

On March 26 1919, the English Prime Minister Lloyd George wrote in a memorandum addressed to Clemenceau and Wilson: "The greatest danger in the current situation lies, in my opinion, in the fact that Germany could turn to Bolshevism. If we are wise, we will offer peace to Germany, which, because it is fair, will be better for all reasonable people to the alternative of Bolshevism."[11] Faced with the danger of the "Bolshevisation of Germany ", the main political leaders of the bourgeoisie did not show themselves eager to disarm the enemy of yesterday. During a debate in the Senate on the issue in October 1919, Clemenceau did not hide the reasons: “Because Germany needs to defend itself and we have no interest in having a second Bolshevik Russia in the centre of Europe; one is enough".[12]

While the armistice had just been signed, the Ebert-Noske-Scheidemann-Erzberger government sealed the peace with Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson by a military pact directed against the German proletariat. Subsequently, the violence with which the bloodhound Noske and his freikorps unleashed during the "bloody week " from January 6 to 13, 1919, was matched only by the terrible repression the Versaillese waged against the Communards during the bloody week of May 21 to 28, 1871. Like 38 years earlier, the proletariat was subjected to the "unmasked savagery and lawless revenge" (Karl Marx) of the bourgeoisie. But the bloodshed of January 1919 was only the prologue to a much more terrible punishment, which subsequently fell on the workers of the Ruhr, Central Germany, Bavaria ...

D- The democratic mystification in the "victor" countries

In the main allied countries, the victory over the forces of the Triple Alliance did not prevent the reaction of the working class to the barbarism experienced by Europe between 1914 and 1918. But despite the resounding echo of October 1917 in the proletariat of Western Europe, the Entente bourgeoisie used the outcome of the war to channel the development of the proletarian struggles between 1917 and 1927. While the imperialist war was the expression of the general crisis of capitalism, the bourgeoisie managed to push the lie that it was just an anomaly of history; that it was "the war to end wars", that society would recover stability and that the revolution had no place in it. In the most modern countries of capitalism, the bourgeoisie hammered home the argument that from now on all classes should participate in the construction of democracy. The time was for so-called reconciliation and not social confrontations. With this in mind, in February 1918 the British parliament adopted the Representation of the People Act, which enlarged the electoral population and granted the right to vote to women over thirty. In a context where social struggles were raging in Great Britain, the most experienced bourgeoisie in the world, with great skill, was trying to divert the working class from its class terrain. As Sylvia Pankhurst said at the time, this clever manoeuvre was motivated by the threat of the spread of the October Revolution to the western countries:

“Those events in Russia evoked a response throughout the world not only amongst the minority who welcomed the idea of Soviet Communism, but also amongst the upholders of reaction. The latter were by no means oblivious to the growth of Sovietism when they decided to popularise the old Parliamentary machine by giving to some women both votes and the right to be elected.” (Workers’ Dreadnought, 15th December 1923)[13]

Moreover, the bourgeoisie was very good at using the outcome of the war by playing on the division between the ‘victorious’ and ‘vanquished’ nations in order to break the dynamic of generalisation of the struggles. For example, following the dislocation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the proletariat of the various territorial entities was subjected to the propaganda of national liberation struggles. In the same way, while in the vanquished countries the proletariat was steered towards gaining "revenge", in the conquering countries, where the proletariat aspired most for peace after four years of war, the news from Russia provoked a new wave of class militancy, particularly in France and Great Britain. This momentum was channelled into chauvinism and the hype of the victory of civilisation against the "dirty boches".

Faced with the deterioration of living conditions, following the worsening of the crisis from the 1920s, workers’ struggles erupted in England, France, Germany and Poland. But these movements, in many cases violently repressed, were in fact the last gasps of the revolutionary wave which reached its final convulsions during the terrible repression of workers in Shanghai and Canton in 1927.[14] The bourgeoisie had thus succeeded in coordinating its forces in order to finish stifling and repressing the last bastions of the revolutionary wave. Thus, as we have already shown, it must be recognised that war does not create the most favourable conditions for the generalisation of the revolution. In fact the global economic crisis as it has unfolded since the 1960s appears as a much more valid material base for the world revolution, since it affects all countries without exception and cannot be stopped unlike the imperialist war. The socialist parties had a central role in promoting democracy, and the republican and parliamentary system was presented as a step forward on the road to revolution. In Italy, as early as 1919, the PSI unambiguously advocated the recognition of the democratic system by pushing the masses to vote in the 1919 elections. An aggravating circumstance was that the electoral success that followed was approved by the Communist International. However, once in command, the socialists ran the state just like any bourgeois faction. In the following years, the antifascist theses propagated by Gramsci and the Ordinovists led the Italian working class no more and no less towards inter-classism. Arguing that fascism expressed a peculiarity of Italian history, Gramsci advocated the establishment of the Constituent Assembly as an intermediate step between Italian capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. According to him, "a class of an international character must, in a certain sense, become nationalised". It was therefore necessary that the proletariat make an alliance with the bourgeoisie in a constituent national assembly where the deputies of "all the democratic classes of the country", elected by universal vote, would elaborate the future Italian constitution. At the 5th world congress, Bordiga responded to these mistakes that led the proletariat to leave its class terrain in the name of democratic illusions:

"We must reject the illusion that a transitional government would be naive enough to allow a situation to occur in which, through legal means, parliamentary manoeuvres and more or less skilful expediency, we could lay siege to the bourgeoisie, ie legally deprive them of their whole technical and military apparatus, and quietly distribute arms to the workers. This is a truly infantile conception! Making' a revolution is not that simple!"[15]

II. Campaigns of slander accompany the bloody repression

 Propaganda organised at the highest levels of the state  

“Parallel to the military preparation of the civil war against the working class, they proceeded with the ideological preparation" (Paul Frölich). Indeed, very early on, in the weeks and months following the revolution in Russia, the bourgeoisie worked to reduce this event to the seizure of power by a minority who had hijacked the will of the masses and led society into disorder and chaos. But this intense anti-Bolshevik and anti-Spartacist propaganda campaign was not the product of a few zealous individuals determined to act as the guard dogs of the ruling class but a policy of all the main bourgeois factions directed from the highest levels of the state apparatus. As we developed in an article of International Review No. 155, the First World War was a defining moment in the state's massive takeover of control of information through propaganda and censorship. The goal was clear; to put ideological pressure on the population to ensure victory in this total war. With the opening of the revolutionary period, the goal of state propaganda was equally clear: to pressure the masses to ensure that they moved away from the organisations of the proletariat and ensure the victory of the counter-revolution. The great German industrialists were the most determined and broke their piggy banks for the "good cause" of the bourgeois order. Thanks to the donation of a few thousand marks from the banker Helfferich and the politician Friedrich Naumann, a "General Secretariat on the study of and fight against Bolshevism" was founded on 1 December 1918 in Berlin. On 10 January its founder, a certain Stadtler, brought together nearly 50 German industrialists to hear their views. Immediately after, Hugo Stinnes, one of the biggest magnates of German industry, rallied the top-hatted troops:

"I am of the opinion that after this presentation all discussion is superfluous, I fully share the speaker's point of view. If the world of industry, commerce and banking does not have the will and is not able to pay an insurance premium of 500 million marks to guard against the danger just revealed to us, we do not deserve to be considered as representatives of the German economy. I ask that we close this meeting and ask Messrs. Mankiewitz, Borsig, Siemens, Deutsch, etc., etc. (he quoted about eight names) to go with me to the next room for us to agree immediately on a method of apportioning this contribution."[16]

With these hundreds of millions of marks of subsidies, several offices could be created to carry out the anti-revolutionary campaign. The Anti-Bolshevik League (formerly the Reich Association against Social Democracy) was certainly the most active in spitting venom on the revolutionaries of Russia and Germany by distributing millions of leaflets, posters, leaflets and posters or organisation of meetings. This first office was part of one of the two counter-revolutionary centres with the Bürgerrat and the Hotel Eden, where the headquarters of the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division were located.

The propaganda organisation "Building and becoming, society for the education of the people and the improvement of national labour forces", founded by Karl Erdmann, was directly financed by Ernst Von Borsig and Hugo Stinnes. The latter also subsidised the nationalist press and far-right parties to carry out propaganda against the Spartacists and Bolsheviks.

But in most cases, social democracy was the mastermind in manipulating opinion within the working class. As Paul Frölich relates:

“It began with the dissemination of insipid speeches celebrating the victory of the November Revolution. Promises, lies, reprimands and threats followed. The Heimatdienst, an institution created during the war to manipulate public opinion, disseminated hundreds of millions of leaflets, pamphlets and posters, most often written by the Social Democrats, in support of the reaction. Shamelessly distorting the meaning of previous revolutions and the teachings of Marx, Kautsky proclaimed his indignation at the ‘prolongation of the revolution’. They made ‘Bolshevism’ a scarecrow for children. This concert was also led by the Social Democrats, the same gentlemen who during the war had acclaimed the Bolsheviks (described as faithful followers of Marx's thought) in the columns of their newspapers because they thought that the struggles of Russian revolutionaries would help Ludendorff and company to definitively defeat the Western powers. Now, on the contrary, they spread terrible stories about the Bolsheviks, going so far as to circulate fake ‘official documents’ according to which the Russian revolutionaries had made women common property.”[17]

Revolutionaries reduced to the level of bloody savages

From then on, the revolutionary forces defending proletarian internationalism were the main targets, especially after the Russian workers seized power in October 1917. Aware of the danger that the extension of the revolution posed to world capital, the most developed states carried out a veritable campaign of slander against the Bolsheviks in order to prevent any feeling of sympathy or attempt at fraternisation. During the 1919 elections, the French bourgeoisie took the opportunity to focus the campaign on the "red peril" by fuelling the demonisation of the revolution and the Bolsheviks. Georges Clemenceau, one of the great actors of the counter-revolution, was particularly active since he campaigned on the theme of "national unity" and the "threat of Bolshevism". A booklet and a famous poster titled "How to fight against Bolshevism?" even painted a portrait of the Bolshevik like a beast, with shaggy hair and a knife between his teeth. All this helped to portray the proletarian revolution as a barbaric and bloodthirsty enterprise. At the founding congress of the Communist International, George Sadoul reported on the extent of the slanders poured out by the French bourgeoisie:

“When I left Paris in September of 1917, just a few weeks before the October revolution, public perception of Bolshevism in France was that of a hideous caricature of socialism. Bolshevik leaders were viewed as criminals or madmen; their army was depicted as a horde of several thousand fanatics or outlaws (…) I am ashamed to confess that nine-tenths of both the majority and the minority Socialists held the same view. In our defence we can only point to mitigating circumstances: we were not the least bit informed about the situation in Russia and, further, newspapers of every stripe printed fabrications and falsified documents to prove the corruption, cruelty, and unscrupulousness of the Bolsheviks. The theme of a seizure of power by this ‘gang of bandits’ had a major impact in France. The slanders hiding the true face of Russian communism became even more vicious with the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace. Anti-Bolshevik agitation reached a fever pitch.”[18]

Although the governments of the Triple Entente were able to play on the momentum of victory to calm discontent within the working class, they still had to divert all its revolutionary inclinations towards the ballot box. Here the bourgeoisie showed its true face; vile, manipulative, lying! The anti-Bolshevism spread by the press, the media and the academic world for several decades therefore took root very early, during the revolutionary wave, in the highest circles of the state apparatus. The military offensive on the Russian frontiers and the bloody repression of the German working class in January 1919 had to be accompanied by an intense propaganda campaign in order to deflect the growing sympathy for the proletarian revolution among exploited strata around the world. Among the many counterrevolutionary propaganda posters produced in France, England and Germany, the main targets remained the political organisations of the proletariat, who were made out to be responsible for unemployment, war and hunger, and regularly accused of sowing disorder and crime.[19] As Paul Frölich sums it up, "the posters in the street represented Bolshevism as a wild beast with a jaws wide open, ready to bite".

The call to kill the vanguard of the proletariat

By November 1918, the German bourgeoisie had made Spartacus the main target. To neutralise the influence of the organisation with the masses it tried to accuse it of all evils; Spartacus became the scapegoat, a real plague for social order and German capital, to be done away with. The picture portrayed by Frölich, ten years after the events, is edifying:

“Every crime committed in the big cities had only one culprit: Spartacus! The Spartacists were accused of all robberies. Delinquents in uniform, protected by official documents, true or false, rushed into houses, smashing and pillaging everything: it was Spartacus who sent them! All suffering, all menacing danger had only one origin: Spartacus! Spartacus, it’s anarchy, Spartacus, it’s famine, Spartacus, it’s terror!"[20]

The ignominy of social democracy and the entire German bourgeoisie went even further, as Vorwärts[21] organised a campaign of denigration and hatred against Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and other influential activists of the Spartacus League: "Karl Liebknecht, a certain Paul Levi and the impetuous Rosa Luxemburg, who have never worked at a vice or lathe, are ruining our dreams and those of our fathers (...) If the Spartacist clique wants to ban us, we and our future, then Karl Liebknecht and company are also banned!”

Hate speech succeeded in organising a real witch hunt for revolutionaries. The League for the Fight against Bolshevism promised to offer 10,000 marks for the capture of Karl Radek or for information that could lead to his arrest. But the main targets remained Liebknecht and Luxemburg. In December 1918, a manifesto placed on the walls of Berlin called for nothing less than their murder. Its contents set the tone of the degree of violence which social democracy unleashed on Spartacus: "Worker, citizen! The homeland is on the brink of ruin. Save it! The threat does not come from outside, but from within: the Spartacus group. Strike their leader! Kill Liebknecht! And you will have peace, work and bread! The soldiers of the front." A month before, the soldiers' council of Steglitz (a small town in Brandenburg) had threatened that soldiers would shoot Liebknecht and Luxemburg on sight if they went to a barracks to give "incendiary speeches". The bourgeois press was in reality spreading a real pogrom atmosphere, "it sang of walls splattered with the brains of those shot, transforming the entire bourgeoisie into a bloodthirsty horde, drunk with denunciations, dragging the suspects (revolutionaries and others, perfectly harmless) before the rifles of the firing squads, and all these howls culminated in a single murderous cry: Liebknecht, Luxemburg! "[22] The prize for ignominy can be awarded to Vorwärts which, on 13 January, published a poem that made the main members of Spartacus out to be deserters and cowards who had betrayed the German proletariat and deserved only death:

                                            “Many hundred corpses in a row—
                                             Proletarians!
                                             Karl, Radek, Rosa and Co —
                                             Not one of them is there, not one of them is there!
                                             Proletarians!”

We all know that these calumnies had tragic results since on 15 January 1919, Karl and Rosa, these two great militants of the revolutionary cause were murdered by the freikorps. The completely false account that Vorwärts gave of these crimes alone illustrated the mentality of the bourgeoisie, this "pitiful and cowardly" class as already emphasised by Karl Marx in the 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. According to the newspapers on the evening of 16 January, Liebknecht was killed during an escape attempt and Rosa Luxemburg lynched by the crowd. As reported by Paul Frölich, the commander of the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division, whose members carried out the two murders, issued a statement completely falsifying the events which was repeated by the entire press, all this "giving vent to a web of lies, cover-ups and law-breaking that provided the backdrop for a shameful series of comedies as interpreted by the judiciary."[23]

After considerable labours, all these fabrications were exposed by Leo Jogiches who, in collaboration with a commission of inquiry created by the central council and the executive council of Berlin, restored the truth by bringing to light the unfolding of these crimes and publishing the photograph of the murderers’ feast after their crimes. He thus signed his own death warrant! On March 10, 1919, he was arrested and murdered in the prison of the Berlin Police Headquarters. As for the culprits, they escaped with acquittals or short prison sentences.

Yesterday, Rosa Luxemburg was this red witch devouring "good little Germans", today she is the "good democrat”, "the anti-Lenin" – who is still generally presented as a "dangerous revolutionary" and “inventor of totalitarianism". The ruling class is full of contradictions, but it must be said, the two sides of this treatment of Rosa Luxemburg are not strictly speaking in contradiction. They are a new illustration of what the bourgeoisie does with the memory of great people who dared to challenge their world "without heart and without spirit":

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the workers’ movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism.” (Lenin, The State and Revolution).

III - Stalinism, true executioner of the revolution

The failure of the revolutionary wave makes a bed for Stalin

The bloody crushing of the revolution in Germany was a terrible blow to the world proletariat. As Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg affirmed, the salvation of the revolution on a world scale depended on the ability of the workers of the great capitalist powers to seize power in their own countries. In other words, the future of humanity depended on the extension of the revolutionary wave that began in Russia. But this did not take place. The failure of the proletariat in Germany, Hungary and Italy sounded the death knell of the revolution in Russia, a death by asphyxiation because it no longer had sufficient breath within it to give impetus to the workers of the whole world. It was in this agony "precisely that Stalinism intervened, in total rupture with the revolution when after the death of Lenin, Stalin seized the reins of power and, from 1925, put forward his thesis of ‘the construction of socialism in one country’, through which the counter-revolution was installed in all its horror".[24]

And now, for decades, historians, journalists and other commentators of all kinds falsify history by trying to find a continuity between Lenin and Stalin, and feed the lie that communism is equal to Stalinism. In fact, there is an abyss between Lenin and the Bolsheviks on the one side and Stalinism on the other.

The state that emerged after the revolution more and more escaped from the working class and gradually absorbed the Bolshevik Party, where the weight of the bureaucrats had become preponderant. Stalin was the representative of this new layer of rulers whose interests were in total opposition to the salvation of the world revolution. The thesis of "socialism in one country" served precisely to justify the policy of this new bourgeois class in Russia to fall back on the national economy and the state as guarantor of the status quo and the capitalist mode of production. Lenin never defended such positions. On the contrary, he always defended proletarian internationalism, considering this principle as a compass preventing the proletariat from straying onto the bourgeoisie's terrain. Although he could not anticipate what Stalinism would do, in the last years of his life Lenin was aware of some of the dangers threatening the revolution and in particular struggled against the conservative attraction of the state for the revolutionary forces. Although he was unable to prevent this, he warned against the bureaucratic gangrene without finding a solution to the problem. Similarly, Lenin was very suspicious of Stalin and was opposed to him receiving any significant responsibilities. In his "testament" of 4 January 1923, he even tried to remove him from the post of secretary general of the party where Stalin was "concentrating a huge power which he abuses brutally". A vain attempt since Stalin already controlled the situation.[25]

As we highlighted in our pamphlet, The Collapse of Stalinism:

“It was on the ruins of the 1917 revolution that Stalinism was able to establish its domination, thanks to the most radical negation of communism constituted by the monstrous doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’, totally alien to the proletariat and to Lenin; that the USSR became again not only a capitalist state in its own right but also a state where the proletariat has been subjected more brutally and more ferociously than elsewhere to the interests of national capital renamed ‘the interests of the socialist fatherland’."

The USSR: an imperialist bourgeois state against the working class

Once in power, Stalin wanted to stay there. By the end of the 1920s he had in his hands all the control levers of the soviet state apparatus. We have shown, in one of the first texts we produced on the revolution in Russia, the process that led to the degeneration of the revolution and the emergence of a new ruling class making this country a capitalist state in its own right.[26]

Thus, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was "Soviet" only in name!

"Not only was the slogan of the entire revolutionary period – ‘All power to the soviets’ - abandoned and banned, but the dictatorship of the proletariat, through which the power of the workers' councils had been the driving force and soul of the revolution and which so revolts and upsets our dear "democrats" today, (...) was totally destroyed and became an empty shell devoid of meaning, leaving room in its place for an implacable dictatorship of the party-state over the proletariat."[27]

Since Stalinism was the product of the degeneration of the revolution, it never belonged to any other camp than that of the counter-revolution. Moreover, it found its full and complete place in the great concert of bourgeois nations precisely for this reason. It was a masterful force for mystifying the working class and making it believe that communism did indeed exist in Eastern Europe, that its progress was momentarily slowed down, and that its total victory rested on the support of the workers of the whole world for the political line decided by Moscow. This great illusion was of course maintained by all the communist parties around the world. In order to spread the lie on a large scale, Moscow and the national CPs organised, among other things, the famous trips to the Soviet Union of workers' delegations, a stay during which all the "pomp" of the regime were shown to "political tourists" who were then mandated to preach the good word in their factories and cells on their return. Here is how Henri Guilbeaux described this masquerade:

"When the worker goes to Russia he is carefully selected, he can only go there in groups chosen from Party members but also elements known to be ‘sympathizers’ from the trade unions and the socialist party, who are very suggestible and easy to brainwash. Delegates thus ‘elected’ form a workers' delegation. Once arrived in Russia, these delegates are officially received, escorted, pampered, celebrated. Everywhere they are accompanied by guides and translators. They are given presents. (...) Wherever they go, they are told: "This belongs to the workers, and here it is the workers who direct". On their return, the workers' delegates who have been identified as being the most able to say good things about the USSR are put on a pedestal. They are then invited to come and give their impressions in public meetings.”[28]

These political brainwashing trips had as their sole objective to maintain the myth of "socialism in one country", a true falsification of the programme defended by the revolutionary movement which, since its origins, has been an international movement precisely because, as Engels wrote in 1847, the political offensive of the working class against the ruling class takes place from the outset at a world level: “The communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilised countries (…) It will have a powerful impact on the other countries of the world, and will radically alter the course of development which they have followed up to now, while greatly stepping up its pace. It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.” [29]

Socialism in one country meant the defence of national capital and participation in the imperialist game. It also meant the dissipation of the revolutionary wave. Under these conditions, Stalin became a respectable man in the eyes of the Western democracies, now anxious to facilitate the insertion of the USSR into the capitalist world. While the world bourgeoisie had not hesitated to establish a military cordon around Russia at the time of the revolution, this policy changed radically once the danger had dissipated. Moreover, following the crisis of 1929, the USSR became a central issue and the whole Western bourgeoisie tried to attract the good graces of Stalin. Thus, the USSR joined the League of Nations in 1934 and a mutual security pact was signed between Stalin and Laval, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose communiqué the following day illustrated the anti-working class policy of the USSR: "Mr. Stalin understands and fully endorses the national defence policy made by France to maintain its armed force in terms of its security". As we showed in our pamphlet The collapse of Stalinism:

"It was this policy of alliance with the USSR that would allow, in the aftermath of the Laval-Stalin pact, the constitution of the ‘Popular Front’ in France, signalling the reconciliation of the PCF with social democracy for the needs of French capital in the imperialist arena: after Stalin decided in favour of the arming of France, suddenly the PCF in turn voted for military credits and signed an agreement with the radicals and the SFIO."

The Stalinist terror, or the liquidation of the old guard of the Bolshevik Party

The whole bourgeoisie understood that Stalin was the man of the situation, the one who was going to eradicate the last vestiges of the revolution of October 1917. Besides, the democracies were more benevolent towards him when he began to break up and exterminate the generation of proletarians and revolutionaries who had participated in the revolution of October 1917. The liquidation of the old guard of the Bolshevik Party expressed Stalin's determination to avoid any form of conspiracy around him in order to consolidate his power; but it also struck a blow to the consciousness of the proletariat of the whole world by pushing it to defend the USSR against so-called traitors to the revolutionary cause.

In these conditions, the European democracies did not hesitate to support and participate in this macabre enterprise. If they were very enthusiastic when it came to bleating beautiful hymns to Human Rights, they were much less willing to welcome and protect the main members of the workers' opposition, starting with Trotsky, its principal representative. After being expelled from Russia in 1928, the latter was greeted by a Turkey hostile to Bolshevism, who, in cahoots with Stalin, let him enter the territory without a passport at the mercy of the residue of white Russians determined to kill him. The former chief of the Red Army escaped several murder attempts. His Calvary continued after leaving Turkey when all the democracies of Western Europe, in agreement with Stalin, refused to grant him the right of asylum; "Chased by murderers in the pay of Stalin or the remains of white armies, Trotsky would be sentenced to wander from one country to another until by the mid-30s, the whole world became for the former head of the Red Army a ‘planet without a visa’".[30] Social democracy proved the most zealous to serve Stalin. Between 1928 and 1936, all Western governments collaborated with him and closed their borders to Trotsky or, as in Norway, put him under house arrest by prohibiting any political activity and any criticism of Stalin. In another example, in 1927 Christian Rakovsky, USSR ambassador in Paris, was recalled to Moscow following the request of the French government who considered him "persona non grata" after he signed the platform of the Left Opposition. The "homeland of the rights of man and of the citizen" delivered him ignobly to his executioners and added its stone to the building of the great Stalinist purges. And yet today these same democracies and their shoddy intellectuals denounce them loudly in order to make people forget that they themselves participated in these killings.

For all the oppositionists, the "great democracies" were nothing more than antechambers of the Stalinist death camps or the playgrounds of the GPU agents, authorised to penetrate their territories to silence the oppositionists. Similarly, the Western press relayed the smear campaign, designating the accused as Hitler's agents, justifying the purges and convictions by relying, without questioning them, on the minutes of the court sittings. Of course, the Communist parties, oozing with zeal, went the furthest in the slander and justification of such a mockery of justice. After the conviction of the sixteen defendants of the first Moscow Trial, the central committee of the PCF and the cells of several factories passed resolutions approving the execution of these "Trotskyist terrorists". The newspaper L'Humanité also distinguished itself by calling for the murder of the "Hitler-Trotskyists". But perhaps the most foul celebration of Stalinist terror is Hymn to the GPU, a so-called poem by Louis Aragon[31] in 1931, who, after being a poet in his youth, became a Stalinist preacher and never, till his last breath, stopped singing the praises of Stalin and the USSR!

Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Smirnov, Evdokimov, Sokolnikov, Piatakov, Bukharin, Radek ... to name only the best-known of the condemned. Although some were more or less compromised in the process of Stalinisation, all these fighters of the proletariat embodied the legacy of October 1917. By liquidating them, Stalin murdered the revolution a little more; for behind the farce of these trials was hidden the tragedy of the counter-revolution. These great purges, far from expressing the purification of society for the "construction of socialism", marked a new assault on the memory and transmission of the legacies of the revolutionary movement.

Cultivated or discredited, the myth of communism in the Soviet Union has always been utilised by the bourgeoisie against the consciousness of the proletariat. If it had been thought that the break-up of the Eastern bloc between 1989 and 1991 would bring about the fall of this great deception, it was not so. On the contrary, the equation of Stalinism with communism has only been reinforced during the last thirty years, although among the revolutionary minorities Stalinism is recognised as the worst product of the counter-revolution.

Conclusion

One hundred years after the events, the spectre of the October 1917 Revolution still haunts the bourgeoisie. And to try to guard against a new revolutionary episode that would shake its world, it is bent on burying the historical memory of the proletariat. For this, its intelligentsia tirelessly strives to rewrite history until the lie takes the appearance of a truth.

Therefore, faced with the propaganda of the ruling class, the proletariat must plunge back into its history and strive to learn from past episodes. It must also question, and we hope that this article will give food for thought, the reasons that push the bourgeoisie to denigrate in an ever more infamous way one of the most glorious events in the history of humanity, this moment where the working class demonstrated that it is possible to envisage a society where the exploitation of man by man will end.

Narek

January 27, 2019.

Throughout the world attacks against the working class have widened and deepened[1]. And it's always on the backs of the working class that the dominant class tries to minimise the effects of the historic decline of its own mode of production. In the "rich" countries, planned job losses in the near future are piling up, particularly in Germany and Britain. Some so-called "emergent" countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, are already in recession with all that this implies for the aggravation of the living conditions of the proletariat. As to the countries that are neither "rich" nor "emergent", their situation is even worse. The non-exploiting elements in these places are plunged into an endless misery.

These latter countries particularly have recently been the theatre of popular movements against the endless sacrifices demanded by capitalism and implemented by governments which are often gangrened by corruption, discredited and hated by the population. Such movements have taken place in Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, Iraq, Iran, Algeria and Lebanon. These frequently massive mobilisations are, in some countries, accompanied by the unleashing of violence and bloody repression. The widescale movement in Hong Kong, which has developed not in reaction to misery and corruption, but to the hardening of the state’s repressive arsenal - particularly regarding extraditions to mainland China - has recently witnessed a new level of repression: the police have started firing live ammunition at the demonstrators.

If the working class is present in these "popular revolts", it's never as an antagonistic class to capital but one drowned within the population. Far from favouring a future riposte from the working class and, with it, the only viable perspective of a struggle against the capitalist system, these popular, inter-classist revolts serve to reinforce the idea of "no future", which can only obscure such a perspective. They strengthen the difficulties experienced by the working class in mounting its own response to the more and more intolerable conditions that are the result of the bankruptcy of capitalism. Nevertheless, the contradictions of this system cannot be eliminated and will become ever deeper, pushing the world working class to confront all the difficulties that it is presently undergoing.

Exasperation faced with the plunge into yet more misery

After years of repeated attacks, it's often an innocuous price rise that "sparks off the explosion".

In Chile, it was the fare increase on the Metro which was the final straw: "The problem is not the 30 centimes" (increase), "it is the 30 years" (of attacks), according to a slogan from a demonstrator. Monthly wages are below 400 euros in this country; precarious working is very widespread; costs of basic necessities are disproportionally high and the health and education sectors are failing, while to retire is to be condemned to poverty.

In Ecuador, the movement was provoked by a sudden increase in fares. This follows a list of price increases in basic goods and services, the freezing of wages, massive redundancies, an obligation to give a day's work "free" to the state, the reduction of days off and other measures leading to precarious working and a deterioration of living conditions.

In Haiti, fuel shortages hit the population as a supplementary catastrophe, leading to a general state of paralysis in what has long been one of the poorest countries in the region.  

If the economic crisis in general is the main cause of the attacks against living conditions, they overlap in some countries such as Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, with the traumatising and dramatic consequences of imperialist tensions and the endless wars ravaging the Middle East.

In Lebanon, it was the imposition of a tax on WhatsApp calls which provoked the revolt in a country with the highest debt per person in the world. Each year the government imposes new taxes, a third of the population are unemployed and the infrastructure of the country is second-rate. In Iraq, where the movement broke out spontaneously following calls on social media, the protesters demanded jobs and functioning public services while expressing their rage against a ruling class that they accuse of being corrupt. In Iran, the hike in fuel prices comes on top of a situation of profound economic crisis, aggravated by US sanctions on the country.

The impotence of these movements; the repression and manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie

In Chile, attempts of struggle have been diverted onto the barren grounds of a nihilist violence which is characteristic of capitalist decomposition. Favoured by the state, we've also seen eruptions of lumpen elements in minority and irrational acts of violence. This climate of violence has been well-used by the state in order to justify its repression and intimidate the proletariat. The official figures are 19 dead but like official figures everywhere, they greatly underestimate the slaughter. As in the worst times of Pinochet, torture has made its reappearance. But the Chilean bourgeoisie realised that brutal repression wasn't enough to calm the growing discontent. So the Pinera government held its hands up, adopted a "humble" posture and said that it "understood" the "message of the people", that it would "provisionally" withdraw the increases and open the door to a "social consultation". That's to say that the attacks will be imposed by "negotiation" from a table of "dialogue" around which will sit the opposition parties, the unions, the bosses - all "representing the nation" together[2].

In Ecuador, transport associations have paralysed traffic and the indigenous movement, together with other diverse groups, have joined the demonstrations. The protests of self-employed drivers and small business people take place as expressions of the "citizens" and are dominated by nationalism. It's in this context that the initial mobilisation of workers against the attacks - in the south of Quito, Tulcan and in the Bolivar province - constitute a compass for action and reflection faced with the surge in the mobilisation of the petty bourgeoisie.

The Republic of Haiti is in a situation close to paralysis. Schools are closed, the main roads between the capital and the regions are cut off by roadblocks, and numerous businesses have closed. The movement is often accompanied by violence while criminal gangs (among the 76 armed gangs reported in the territory at least 3 are in the pay of the government, the rest are under the control of an old deputy and some opposition senators), engage in abuses, blocking roads and hi-jacking rare cars. On Sunday October 27, a vigilante opened fire on protesters, killing one; he was lynched and burnt alive. Official figures put the number of deaths at twenty over two months.

Algeria. A human tide has again taken to the streets of Algiers on the anniversary of the beginning of the war against French colonisation. The movement is similar to that recorded at the heights of the "Hirak", a protest movement which has been taking place in Algeria since February 22. It is massively opposed to the general election proposed by the government and organised for December 12 in order to elect a successor to Bouteflika, with the aim of "regenerating" the system.

Iraq. In several provinces of the south, protesters have attacked the institutions and buildings of the political parties and armed groups. Public workers, trade unionists, students and schoolchildren, have demonstrated and begun sit-ins. While, according to the latest official figures, the repression has caused the deaths of 239 people, the majority hit by live ammunition, mobilisations have continued in Baghdad and the south of the country. Since the beginnings of the outburst, protesters have maintained that they will refuse any political recuperation of their movement because they want to totally renew the political class. They also say that it's necessary to do away with the complicated system of awarding posts by faith or ethnicity, a process eaten away by clientism - and one steeped in corruption - that excludes the majority of the population and young people in particular. Just recently, there have been massive jubilant demonstrations and strike pickets have paralysed universities, schools and administration. Elsewhere, nocturnal violence has been directed at the headquarters of the political parties and the militias.

Lebanon. General popular anger has transcended communities, faiths and all the regions of the country. The withdrawal of the new tax on Whatsapp calls has not prevented the revolt from spreading to the whole of the country. The resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri was only a small part of the population's demands. They are demanding the departure of the whole of the political class who they judge as corrupt and incompetent while demanding a radical change of the system.

Iran. As soon as the price increases in fuel were announced, violent confrontations between protesters and the forces of order took place, leading to deaths on both sides but particularly numerous on the side of the former.

The trilogy of inter-classism, democratic demands, and blind violence

In all these inter-classist, popular revolts quoted above and according to the information that we have to hand, the proletariat has only shown itself as a class in a minority way here and there, including in a situation like Chile where the prime cause of the mobilisations was clearly the necessity for defence against the economic attacks.

Often, even exclusively, the "revolts" take their aim at the privileged, those in power who are judged responsible for all the ills overwhelming the populations. But in this way, they leave out the system of which the privileged are just the servants. To focus the struggle on the fight to replace corrupt politicians is obviously an impasse because, whatever the teams in power, whatever their levels of corruption, all of them can only defend the interests of the bourgeoisie and implement policies in the service of a capitalism in crisis. It is a much more dangerous impasse in that it's somewhat legitimised by democratic demands "for a clean system", whereas democracy is the privileged form of the power of the bourgeoisie for maintaining its class domination over society and the proletariat. It's significant in this regard that in Chile, after the ferocious repression and faced with an explosive situation that the bourgeoisie had underestimated, it then passed onto a new phase of its manoeuvres through a political attack by setting up classic democratic organisms of mystification and isolation, ending up in the plan for a "new constitution" which is presented as a victory for the protest movement.

Democratic demands dilute the proletariat into the whole of the population, blurring the consciousness of its historic combat, submitting it to the logic of capitalist domination and reducing it to political impotence.

Inter-classism and democracy are two methods which marry up and complement each other in a terribly efficient way against the autonomous struggle of the working class. This is much more the case over the last few decades, since with the collapse of the eastern bloc and the lying campaigns on the death of communism[3], the historic project of the proletariat has temporarily ceased to underlie its struggle. When the latter manages to impose itself, it will be against the current of the general phenomenon of the decomposition of society where each for themselves, the absence of perspectives, etc., acquire an accrued weight.

The rage and violence which often accompanies these popular revolts are far from expressing any sort of radicalism. That's very clear when it's carried out by lumpen elements, whether acting spontaneously or given the nod and wink by the bourgeoisie, and engaging in vandalism, pillages, arson, irrational and minority violence. But, more fundamentally, such violence is intrinsically contained in popular movements where the institutions of the state are not directly called into question. Having no perspective for the radical transformation of society, abolishing war, poverty, growing insecurity and the other calamities of a dying capitalism, movements that end up in this impasse can’t avoid spreading all the defects of a decomposing capitalist society.

The degenerating protest movement in Hong Kong constitutes a perfect example of this in the sense that, more and more deprived of any perspective - in fact it can't have any, confined as it is to the "democratic" terrain without calling capitalism into question - it has turned itself into a giant vendetta of the protesters faced with police violence, and then the cops reply, sometimes spontaneously, to the violence they face. This is so clear that some elements of the bourgeois press have commented on it: "nothing that Beijing has done has worked, not the withdrawal of the extradition law, or police repression, or the ban on wearing face-masks in public. Henceforth, the youth of Hong Kong are no longer moved by hope but by the desire to do battle in the absence of any other possible outcome"[4].

Some people imagine, or want us to think, that any violence in this society which is exercised against the forces of state repression should be supported because it's similar to the necessary class violence of the proletariat against capitalist oppression and exploitation[5]. This shows a real contempt for the working class and it's a gross lie. In fact the blind violence of these inter-classist movements has nothing to do with the class violence of the proletariat which is a liberating force for the suppression of exploitation of man by man. By contrast, the violence of capitalism is oppressive, and has the primary aim of defending class society. The violence the inter-classist movement carries with it, in the image of the petty-bourgeoisie, has no future of its own. This is a class that can only go nowhere by itself and must end up rallying behind either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.

In fact the trilogy of "inter-classism, democratic demands, blind violence" is the trademark of the popular revolts which are hatching out all over the planet in reaction to the accelerated degradation of all the living conditions which affect the working class, other non-exploitative layers and the pauperised petty-bourgeoisie. The movements of the "gilets jaunes" that started in France a year ago squarely falls into this category of popular revolts[6]. Such movements only contribute to obscuring the real nature of class struggle in the eyes of the proletariat, reinforcing its present difficulties in seeing itself as a class of society, distinct from other classes and with its specific combat against exploitation and its historic mission of overthrowing capitalism.

It's the reason why the responsibilities of revolutionaries and the most conscious minorities within the working class is to work for the re-appropriation of its own methods, at the heart of which figures the mass struggle; general assemblies as places of discussion and decisions while defending themselves against sabotage by the unions and open to all sectors of the working class; extension to other sectors imposed against the manoeuvres of division and control practised by the unions and the left of capital [7]. Even if today these perspectives seem far away, and that is the case in most parts of the world, particularly where the working class is in the minority with a limited historical experience, these methods nevertheless constitute the only way forward, the only means of allowing the proletariat to recover its class identity and not get lost along the way.

Silvio. (17.11.2019)

 

Syrian Kurds throw potatoes at departing US troops

 

Trump’s telephone call to Erdogan on October 6 gave the “green light” for a major Turkish invasion of Northern Syria and a brutal clean-up operation against the Kurdish forces who have up till now controlled the area with US backing. It provoked a storm of outrage both among the USA’s NATO “allies” in Europe and large parts of the military and political establishment in Washington, most notably from Trump’s own former defence secretary “Mad Dog” Mattis. The principal criticism of Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds has been that it will undermine all credibility in the US as an ally you can rely on: in short, that it’s a disaster on the diplomatic level. But there is also the concern that the retreat of the Kurds will result in a revival of the Islamic Forces whose containment has been almost solely the work of the Kurdish forces supported by US air power.  The Kurds have been holding thousands of IS prisoners, and more than a hundred of them have already broken out of gaol[1].

Trump’s action has set off alarm bells among significant parts of  the US bourgeoisie, multiplying worries that his unpredictable and self-serving style of presidency is becoming a real danger for the US, and even that he is losing what little mental stability he possesses under the pressure of the office and above all of the current impeachment campaign against him. Certainly his behaviour is becoming increasingly bizarre, showing himself not only as an ignoramus (the Kurds didn’t support us on the Normandy landings…) but as a common mobster (his letter to Erdogan warning him not to be a fool or a tough guy, which the Turkish leader promptly threw in the bin, his threats to destroy Turkey’s economy…). He governs by tweet, takes impulsive decisions, disregards advice from his staff and then has to back-track the next minute – as witness the letter and the hasty dispatch of Pence and Pompeo to Ankara to cobble together a cease-fire in Northern Syria

But let’s not dwell too much on the personality of Trump. In the first place, he is merely an expression of the advancing decomposition of his class, a process which is everywhere giving rise to “strong men” who incite the lowest passions and rejoice in their disregard for truth and the traditional rules of the political game, from Duterte to Oban and from Modi to Boris Johnson. And even if Trump jumped the gun in his dealings with Erdogan, the policy of troop withdrawal from the Middle East was not the invention of Trump, but goes back to the Obama administration which recognised the total failure of US Middle East policy since the early 90s and the necessity to create a “pivot” in the Far East in order to counter the growing threat of Chinese imperialism. 

The last time the US gave a green light in the Middle East was in 1990 when the US ambassador April Glaspie let it be known that the US would not interfere if Saddam Hussein marched into Kuwait. It was a well-organised trap, laid with the idea of conducing a massive US operation in the area and compelling its western partners to join a grand crusade. This was a moment when, following the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989, the western bloc was already beginning to unravel and the US, as the only remaining super-power, needed to assert its authority by a spectacular demonstration of force. Guided by an almost messianic “Neo-Con” ideology, the first Gulf war was followed by further US military adventures, in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. But the waning support to these operations from its former allies, and above all the utter chaos they stirred up in the Middle East, trapping US forces in unwinnable conflicts against local insurgencies, has demonstrated the steep decline of the USA’s ability to police the world. In this sense, there is a logic behind Trump’s impulsive actions, supported by considerable sectors of the American bourgeoisie, who have recognised that the US cannot rule the Middle East through putting boots on the ground or even through its own air power. It will rely more and more on its most dependable allies in the region – Israel and Saudi Arabia – to defend its interests through military action, directed in particular against the rising power of Iran (and, in the longer term, against the potential presence of China as a serious contender in the region).

The “betrayal” of the Kurds

The ceasefire negotiated by Pence and Pompeo – which Trump claims will save “millions of lives” – does not seriously alter the policy of abandoning the Kurds, since its aim is merely to give Kurdish forces the opportunity to retreat while the Turkish army asserts its control of northern Syria.  And it should be said that this kind of “betrayal” is nothing new. In 1991, in the war against Saddam Hussein, the US under Bush Senior encouraged the Kurds of northern Iraq to rise up against Saddam’s regime – and then left Saddam in power, willing and able to crush the Kurdish uprising with the utmost savagery. Iran has also tried to use the Kurds of Iraq against Saddam. But all the powers of the region, and the global powers who stand behind them, have consistently opposed the formation of a unified state of Kurdistan, which would mean the break-up of the existing national arrangements in the Middle East.

The armed Kurdish forces, meanwhile, have never hesitated to sell themselves to the highest bidder. This is happening before our eyes: the Kurdish militia immediately turned to Russia and the Assad regime itself to protect them from the Turkish invasion.

Furthermore, this has been the fate of all “national liberation” struggles since at least the First World War: they have only been able to prosper under the wing of one or another imperialist power. The same grim necessity applies throughout the Middle East in particular: the Palestinian national movement sought the backing of Germany and Italy in the 1930s and 40s, of Russia during the Cold War, of various regional powers in the world disorder unleashed by the collapse of the bloc system. Meanwhile, the dependency of Zionism on imperialist support (mainly, but not only, from the US) needs no demonstration, but is no exception to the general rule. National liberation movements may adopt many ideological banners – Stalinism, Islamism, even, as in the case of the Kurdish forces in Rojava, a kind of anarchism – but they can only trap the exploited and the oppressed in the endless wars of capitalism in its epoch of imperialist decay[2] [49].

A perspective of imperialist chaos and human misery

The most obvious beneficiary from the US retreat from the Middle East has been Russia. During the 1970s and 80s, the USSR had been forced to renounce most of its positions in the Middle East, particularly its influence in Egypt and above all its attempts to control Afghanistan. Its last outpost, and a vital point of access to the Mediterranean, was Syria and the Assad regime, which was threatened with collapse by the war which swept the country after 2011 and the advances made by the “democratic” rebels and above all by Islamic State. Russia’s massive intervention in Syria has saved the Assad regime and restored its control to most of the country, but it is doubtful whether this would have been possible if the US, desperate to avoid getting stuck in another quagmire after Afghanistan and Iraq, had not effectively ceded the country to the Russians. This has sown major divisions in the US bourgeoisie, with some of its more established factions in the military apparatus still deeply suspicious of anything the Russians might do, while Trump and those behind him have seen Putin as a man to do business with and above all a possible bulwark against the seemingly inexorable rise of China.

Part of Russia’s ascent to such a commanding position in Syria has involved developing a new relationship with Turkey, which has gradually been distancing itself from the US, not least over the latter’s support for the Kurds in its operation against IS in the north of Syria. But the Kurdish issue is already creating difficulties for the Russian-Turkish rapprochement: since a part of the Kurdish forces are now turning to Assad and the Russians for protection, and as the Syrian and Russian military move in to occupy the areas previously controlled by the Kurdish fighters, there is a looming risk of confrontation between Turkey on the one hand and Syria and its Russian backers on the other. For the moment this danger seems to have been averted by the deal made between Erdogan and Putin in Sochi on 22 October. The agreement gives Turkey control over a buffer zone in northern Syria at the expense of the Kurds, while confirming Russia’s role as the main power-broker in the region. Whether this arrangement will overcome the long-standing antagonisms between Turkey and Assad’s Syria remains to be seen. The war of each against all, a central feature of imperialist conflict since the demise of the bloc system, is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in Syria.

For the moment Erdogan’s Turkey can also congratulate itself on its rapid military progress in northern Syria and the cleaning out of the Kurdish “terrorist nests”. The incursion has also come as a godsend to Erdogan at the domestic level: following some severe set-backs for his AKP party in elections over the last year, the wave of nationalist hysteria stirred up by the military adventure has split the opposition, which is made up of Turkish “democrats” and the Kurdish HDP

Erdogan can, for the moment, go back to selling the dream of a new Ottoman empire, Turkey restored to its former glory as a global player before it became the “sick man of Europe” at the beginning of the 20th century. But marching into what is already a profoundly chaotic situation could easily be a dangerous trap for the Turks in the longer run. And above all, this new escalation of the Syrian conflict will add considerably to its already gigantic human cost. Well over 100,000 civilians have already been displaced, greatly increasing Syria’s internal refugee nightmare, while a secondary aim of the invasion is to dump around 3 million Syrian refugees, currently living in dire conditions in Turkish camps, in northern Syria, largely at the expense of the local Kurdish population.

The baseless cynicism of the ruling class is revealed not only in the mass murder its aircraft, artillery and terrorist bombs rain on the civil population of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Gaza, but also by the way it uses those forced to flee from the killing zones. The EU, that paragon of democratic virtue, has long relied on Erdogan to act as a prison guard to the Syrian refugees under his “protection”, preventing them from adding to the waves heading towards Europe. Now Erdogan sees a solution to this burden in the ethnic cleansing of northern Syria, and threatens – if the EU criticises his actions – to channel a new refugee tide towards Europe.

Human beings are only of use to capital if they can be exploited or used as cannot fodder. And the open barbarism of the war in Syria is only a foretaste of what capitalism has in store for the whole of humanity if it is allowed to continue. But the principal victims of this system, all those whom it exploits and oppresses, are not passive objects, and in the past year or so we have glimpsed the possibility of mass reactions against poverty and ruling class corruption in social revolts in Jordan Iran, Iraq and most recently Lebanon. These movements tend to be very confused, infected by nationalist illusions, and cry out for a clear lead from the working class acting on its own class terrain. But this is a task not only for the workers in the Middle East, but for the workers of the world, and above all for the workers of the old centres of capital where the autonomous political tradition of the proletariat was born and has the deepest roots.  

Amos, 23.10.19

 

 

In the first part of this article, we recalled the circumstances in which the Third International (Communist International) was founded. The existence of the world party depended above all on the extension of the revolution on a global scale, and its capacity to assume its responsibilities in the class depended on the way in which the regroupment of revolutionaries from which it arose was carried out. But, as we showed, the method adopted in the foundation of the Communist International (CI), favouring the largest number rather than the clarification of positions and political principles, had not armed the new world party. Worse, it made it vulnerable to rampant opportunism within the revolutionary movement. This second part aims to highlight the content of the fight waged by the left fractions against the political line of the CI to retain old tactics made obsolete by the opening of capitalism’s decadent phase.

This new phase in the life of capitalism demanded a redefinition of certain programmatic and organisational positions to enable the world party to orient the proletariat on its own class terrain.

1918-1919: revolutionary praxis challenges old tactics

As we pointed out in the first part of this article, the First Congress of the Communist International had highlighted that the destruction of bourgeois society was fully on the agenda of history. Indeed, the period 1918-1919 saw a real mobilisation of the whole world proletariat,[1] firstly in Europe:

• March 1919: proclamation of the Republic of Councils in Hungary
• April-May 1919: episode of the Republic of Councils in Bavaria
• June 1919: attempts at insurrection in Switzerland and Austria.

The revolutionary wave then spread to the American continent:

• January 1919: “bloody week” in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where workers are savagely repressed.
• February 1919: strike in the shipyards in Seattle, USA, which eventually extends to the entire city in a few days. The workers manage to take control of supplies and defence against troops sent by the government.
• May 1919: general strike in Winnipeg, Canada.

But also Africa and Asia:

• In South Africa, in March 1919, the tramway strike spreads throughout Johannesburg, with assemblies and rallies in solidarity with the Russian Revolution.
• In Japan, in 1918, the famous “rice meetings” take place against the shipment of rice to Japanese troops sent against the revolution in Russia.

Under these conditions, revolutionaries of the time had real reasons to say that “The victory of the proletarian revolution on a world scale is assured. The founding of an international Soviet republic is underway”.[2]

So far, the extension of the revolutionary wave in Europe and elsewhere confirmed the theses of the First Congress:

“1) The present epoch is the epoch of the disintegration and collapse of the entire capitalist world system, which will drag the whole of European civilization down with it if capitalism, with its insoluble contradictions, is not destroyed.

2) The task of the proletariat now is to seize state power immediately. The seizure of state power means the destruction of the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie and the organization of a new apparatus of proletarian power.”[3]

The new period that was opening up, of wars and revolutions, confronted the world proletariat and its world party with new problems. The entry of capitalism into its decadent phase directly posed the necessity of the revolution and modified somewhat the form which the class struggle was to take.

The formation of left currents within the CI

The revolutionary wave had consecrated the finally found form of the dictatorship of the proletariat: the soviets. But it had also shown that the forms and methods of struggle inherited from the 19th century, such as trade unions or parliamentarism, were now over.

“In the new period it was the practice of the workers themselves that called into question the old parliamentary and unionist tactics. The Russian proletariat dissolved parliament after it had taken power and in Germany a significant mass of workers pronounced in favour of boycotting the elections in December 1918. In Russia as in Germany, the council form appeared as the only form for the revolutionary struggle, replacing the union structure. But the class struggle in Germany had also revealed an antagonism between the proletariat and the unions.”[4]

The rejection of parliamentarism

The left currents in the International organised themselves on a clear political basis: the entry of capitalism into its decadence phase imposed a single path; that of the proletarian revolution and the destruction of the bourgeois state with a view to abolishing social classes and constructing a communist society. From now on, the struggle for reform and revolutionary propaganda in bourgeois parliaments no longer made sense. In many countries, for the left currents the rejection of elections became the position of a true communist organisation:

• In March 1918, the Polish Communist Party boycotts the elections.
• On 22 December 1918 the organ of the Abstentionist Communist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), Il Soviet, is published in Naples under the leadership of Amedeo Bordiga. The Fraction sets out its goal as being to “eliminate the reformists from the party in order to ensure for it a more revolutionary attitude”. It also insists that “all contact must be broken with the democratic system”; a true communist party is possible only “if we renounce electoral and parliamentary action.”[5]
• In September 1919, the Workers’ Socialist Federation speaks out against “revolutionary parliamentarism”.
• The same is true in Belgium for De Internationale in Flanders and the Communist Group of Brussels. Antiparliamentarianism is also defended by a minority of the Bulgarian Communist Party, by part of the group of Hungarian Communists exiled in Vienna, by the Federation of Social Democratic Youth in Sweden and by a minority of the Partido Socialista Internacional of Argentina (the future Communist Party of Argentina).
• The Dutch remain divided on the parliamentary question. A majority of the Tribunists are in favour of the elections; the minority like Gorter is indecisive, while Panekoek defends an antiparliamentary position.
• The KAPD was also opposed to participation in elections.

For all these groups, the rejection of parliamentarism was now a matter of principle. This was actually putting into practice the analyses and conclusions adopted at the First Congress. But the majority of the CI did not see it that way, starting with the Bolsheviks; even if there was no ambiguity about the reactionary nature of trade unions and bourgeois democracy, the fight within them should not be abandoned. The circular of the Executive Committee of the CI of 1 September 1919 endorsed this backward step, returning to the old social democratic conception of making parliament a place of revolutionary conquest: “[militants] go into parliament in order to appropriate this machinery and to help the masses behind the Parliamentary walls to blow it up.”[6] 

The trade union question crystallises the debates

The first episodes of the revolutionary wave quoted above had clearly shown that the unions were obsolete organs of struggle; worse, they were now against the working class.[7] But more than anywhere else, it was in Germany that this problem was posed in the most crucial way and where revolutionaries managed to establish the clearest understanding of the need to break with trade unions and trade unionism. For Rosa Luxemburg, the unions were no longer “workers’ organisations, but the strongest protectors of the state and of bourgeois society. Therefore, it goes without saying that the struggle for socialisation cannot be carried out without involving the struggle for the liquidation of trade unions”.[8]

The leadership of the CI was not so far-sighted. Although it denounced the unions dominated by social democracy, it still retained the illusion of being able to reorient them on a proletarian path:

“What is now to happen to the trade unions? Along what path will they travel? The old union leaders will again try to push the unions onto the bourgeois road [...] Will the unions continue along this old reformist road? [...] We are deeply convinced that the answer will be no. A fresh wind is blowing through the musty trade union offices. [...] It is our belief that a new trade union movement is being formed.”[9]

It was for this reason that in its earliest days the CI accepted into its ranks national and regional unions of trades or industries. In particular, there were revolutionary syndicalist elements such as the IWW. If the latter rejected both parliamentarism and activity in the old unions, it remained hostile to political activity and therefore to the need for a political party of the proletariat. This could only reinforce the confusion within the CI on the organizational question since it included groups that were already “anti-organisation”.

The most lucid group on the trade union question remained without doubt the left-wing majority of the KPD which was to be excluded from the party by the leadership of Levi and Brandler. It was not only against unions in the hands of the social democrats but hostile to any form of trade unionism such as anti-political revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism. This majority was to found the KAPD in April 1920, whose programme clearly stated that:

“Aside from bourgeois parliamentarism, the unions form the principal rampart against the further development of the proletarian revolution in Germany. Their attitude during the world war is well-known […] They have maintained their counter-revolutionary attitude up to today, throughout the whole period of the German revolution.”

Faced with the centrist position of Lenin and the leadership of the CI, the KAPD retorted that:

“The revolutionising of the unions is not a question of individuals: the counter-revolutionary character of these organisations is located in their structure and in their specific way of operating. From this it flows logically that only the destruction of the unions can clear the road for social revolution in Germany.”[10]

Admittedly, these two important questions could not be decided overnight. But the resistance to the rejection of parliamentarism and trade unionism demonstrated the difficulties of the CI in drawing all the implications of the decadence of capitalism for the communist program. The exclusion of the majority of the KPD and the rapprochement of the latter with the Independents (USPD) who controlled the opposition in the official unions was a further sign of the rise of programmatic and organisational opportunism within the world party.

The Second Congress backtracks

At the start of 1920 the CI began to advocate the formation of mass parties: either by the fusion of communist groups with centrist currents, as for example in Germany between the KPD and the USPD; or by the entry of communist groups into parties of the Second International, as for example in Britain where the CI advocated the entry of the Communist Party into the Labour Party. This new orientation completely turned its back on the work of the First Congress that had declared the bankruptcy of social democracy. This opportunist decision was justified by the conviction that the victory of the revolution would result inexorably from the greatest number of organised workers. This position was fought by the Amsterdam Bureau composed by the left of the CI.[11]

The Second Congress, which ran from 19 July to 7 August 1920, foreshadowed a fierce battle between the majority of the CI led by the Bolsheviks, and the left currents, on tactical issues but also on organisational principles. The congress was held during a full “revolutionary war”,[12] in which the Red Army marched on Poland in the belief that it could join with the revolution in Germany. While remaining aware of the danger of opportunism and acknowledging that the party was still threatened by “the danger of dilution by unstable and irresolute elements which have not yet completely discarded the ideology of the Second International”,[13] this Second Congress began to make concessions regarding the analyses of the first congress by accepting the partial integration of certain social democratic parties still strongly marked by the conceptions of the Second International.[14]

To guard against such a danger, the 21 conditions of admission to the CI had been written against the right and centrist elements, but also against the left. During the discussion of the 21 conditions, Bordiga distinguished himself by his determination to defend the communist programme and warned the entire party against any concession in the terms of membership: 

“The foundation of the Communist International in Russia led us back to Marxism. The revolutionary movement that was saved from the ruins of the Second International made itself known with its programme, and the work that now began led to the formation of a new state organism on the basis of the official constitution. I believe that we find ourselves in a situation that is not created by accident but much rather determined by the course of history. I believe that we are threatened by the danger of right-wing and centrist elements penetrating into our midst.[15] […] We would therefore be in great danger if we made the mistake of accepting these people in our ranks. […] The right-wing elements accept our Theses, but in an unsatisfactory manner and with certain reservations. We communists must demand that this acceptance is complete and without restrictions for the future. […] I think that, after the Congress, the Executive Committee must be given time to find out whether all the obligations that have been laid upon the parties by the Communist International have been fulfilled. After this time, after the so-called organisation period, the door must he closed […] Opportunism must be fought everywhere. But we will find this task very difficult if, at the very moment that we are taking steps to purge the Communist International, the door is opened to let those who are standing outside come in. I have spoken on behalf of the Italian delegation. We undertake to fight the opportunists in Italy. We do not, however, wish them to go away from us merely to be accepted into the Communist International in some other way. We say to you, after we have worked with you we want to go back to our country and form a united front against all the enemies of the communist revolution.”[16]

Admittedly, the 21 conditions served as a scarecrow against opportunistic elements likely to knock on the door of the party. But even if Lenin could say that the left current was “a thousand times less dangerous and less serious than the error represented by right-wing doctrinarism”, the many regressive steps on the question of tactics strongly weakened the International, especially in the period to come, which was characterised by retreat and isolation contrary to what the CI leadership thought. Inexorably, these safeguards did not allow the IC to resist the pressure of opportunism. In 1921 the Third Congress finally succumbed to the mirage of numbers by adopting Lenin’s “Theses on Tactics”, which advocated work in parliament and the unions as well as the formation of mass parties. With this 180° turn, the party was throwing out of the window the 1918 programme of the KPD, one of the two founding bases of the CI.

The CI - sickness of leftism[17] or opportunism?

It was in opposition to the KPD's opportunist policy that the KAPD was born in April 1920. Although its program was inspired more by the theses of the left in Holland than those of the CI, it requested to be attached immediately to the Third International.

When Jan Appel and Franz Jung[18] arrived in Moscow, Lenin handed them the manuscript of what would become Left-wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder, written for the Second Congress to expose what he saw as the inconsistencies of the left currents.

The Dutch delegation had the opportunity to take note of Lenin's pamphlet during the Second Congress. Herman Gorter was commissioned to write a reply to Lenin, which appeared in July 1920 (Open Letter to Comrade Lenin). Gorter relied heavily on the text published by Pannekoek a few months earlier entitled World Revolution and Communist Tactics. It is not necessary to go back over the details of this polemic here.[19] However, it must be pointed out that the different issues raised echo perfectly the fundamental question: how did the entry into the era of wars and revolutions impose new principles in the revolutionary movement?? Were “compromises” still possible?

For Lenin, left-wing “doctrinairism” was a “childish sickness; “young communists”, still “inexperienced”, had given way to impatience and indulged in “intellectual childishness” instead of defending “the serious tactics of a revolutionary class” according to the “particularity of each country”, taking into account the general movement of the working class.

For Lenin, to reject work in the unions and parliaments, to oppose alliances between the communist parties and the social democratic parties, was a pure nonsense. The adherence of the masses to communism did not depend only on revolutionary propaganda; he considered that these masses had to go through “their own political experience”. For this, it was essential to enrol the greatest numbers in revolutionary organisations, whatever their level of political clarity. The objective conditions were ripe, the path of the revolution was all mapped out...

However, as Gorter pointed out in his reply, the victory of the world revolution depended above all on the subjective conditions, in other words on the ability of the world working class to extend and deepen its class consciousness. The weakness of this general class consciousness was illustrated by the virtual absence of a real vanguard of the proletariat in Western Europe, as Gorter pointed out. Therefore, the error of the Bolsheviks in the CI was “to try to make up for this delay through tactical recipes which expressed an opportunist approach where clarity and an organic process of development were sacrificed in favour of artificial numerical growth at any cost.”[20]

This tactic, based on the quest for instant success, was animated by the observation that the revolution was not developing fast enough, that the class was taking too long to extend its struggle and that, faced with this slowness, it was necessary to make “concessions” by accepting work in trade unions and parliaments.

While the CI saw the revolution as a somehow inevitable phenomenon, the left currents considered that “the revolution in Western Europe [would be] a long drawn out process” (Pannekoek), which would be strewn with setbacks and defeats, to use the words of Rosa Luxemburg. History has confirmed the positions developed by the left currents within the CI. Leftism was therefore not a “childish sickness” of the communist movement but, on the contrary, the treatment against the infection of opportunism that spread in the ranks of the world party.

Conclusion  

What lessons can we draw from the creation of the Communist International? If the First Congress had shown the capacity of the revolutionary movement to break with the Second International, the following congresses marked a real setback. Indeed, while the founding congress recognised the passage of social democracy in the camp of the bourgeoisie, the Third Congress rehabilitated it by advocating the tactic of allying with it in a “united front”. This change of course confirmed that the CI was unable to respond to the new questions posed by the period of decadence. The years following its founding were marked by the retreat and defeat of the international revolutionary wave and thus by the growing isolation of the proletariat in Russia. This isolation is the decisive reason for the degeneration of the revolution. Under these conditions, badly armed, the CI was unable to resist the development of opportunism. It too had to empty itself of its revolutionary content and become an organ of the counter-revolution solely defending the interests of the Soviet state.

It was in the very heart of the CI that left fractions appeared to fight against its degeneration. Excluded one after the other during the 1920s, they continued the political struggle to ensure the continuity between the degenerating CI and the party of tomorrow, by learning the lessons from the failure of the revolutionary wave. The positions defended and elaborated by these groups responded to the problems raised in the CI by the period of decadence. In addition to programmatic issues, the lefts agreed that the party must “remain as hard as steel, as clear as glass” (Gorter). This implied a rigorous selection of militants instead of grouping huge masses at the expense of diluting principles. This is exactly what the Bolsheviks had abandoned in 1919 when the Communist International was created. These compromises on the method of building the organisation would also be an active factor in the degeneration of the CI. As Internationalisme pointed out in 1946: “Today we can affirm that just as the absence of communist parties during the first wave of revolution between 1918 and 1920 was one of the causes of its defeat, so the method for the formation of the parties in 1920-21 was one of the main causes for the degeneration of the CPs and the CI”.[21] By favouring quantity at the expense of quality, the Bolsheviks threw into question the struggle they had fought in 1903 at the Second Congress of the RSDLP. For the lefts who were fighting for programmatic and organisational clarity as a prerequisite for CI membership, small numbers were not an eternal virtue but an indispensable step: “If ... we have the duty to confine ourselves for a time with small numbers, it is not because we feel for this situation a particular predilection, but because we have to go through it to become strong” (Gorter).

Alas, the CI had been born in the storms of revolutionary combat. In these conditions, it was impossible to clarify overnight all the questions it had to confront. Tomorrow's party must not fall into the same trap. It must be founded before the revolutionary wave breaks, relying on good programmatic bases but equally on principles of functioning reflected on and clarified beforehand. This was not the case for the CI at the time.

Narek

July 8, 2019.

We are publishing a number of documents emanating from the 23rd ICC Congress: reports that were discussed and ratified (or extracts from them) and resolutions that were adopted. This now includes an article on the overall work of the Congress and the report on the historic course with a short introduction. We add to this collection a report aimed at updating our analysis of decomposition which was ratified by the 22nd ICC Congress and which provides a framework for some of the reports to the 23rd Congress.

In the introduction to the previous article,[1] [90] we immediately drew the reader's attention to the importance of the issues dealt with in these terms:

"Although, in the face of new social movements, the South African bourgeoisie relied on its most barbaric traditional weapons, the police and military forces, the dynamic of class confrontation was unprecedented: the working class had never before shown such combativity and development of consciousness, faced with a bourgeoisie that had never had to develop such sophisticated manoeuvres, including extensive use of the weapon of rank and file unionism animated by the extreme left of capital. In this clash between the two real historic classes, the determination of the proletariat would go so far as to provoke the dismantling of the system of apartheid, resulting in the unification of all fractions of the bourgeoisie with the aim of confronting the surge in the struggle of the working class.”

And we then showed in detail the extent of the combativity and the development of class consciousness within the South African proletariat, expressed, for example, by placing its struggles in the hands of hundreds of struggle committees called “civics” (Community Based Organisations). We also showed how the bourgeoisie was finally able to overcome the magnificent combativity of the South African working class by relying on its main pillars, namely "white power" (under apartheid), the ANC and radical unionism. Indeed, the overall balance sheet of this battle between the working class and the bourgeoisie shows the leading role played by rank and file unionism in diverting genuine proletarian struggles onto a bourgeois terrain.

Speaking of radical unionism, we said:

“… its main contribution was undoubtedly the fact of having succeeded in knowingly constructing the “democratic/national unity” trap in which the bourgeoisie was able to imprison the working class. Moreover, taking advantage of this climate of “democratic euphoria”, largely as a result of the liberation of Mandela and company in 1990, the central power could rely on its “new union wall” consisting of COSATU and its “left wing” to systematically divert the struggle movements into demands for “democracy”, “civil rights”, “racial equality “, etc. (…) Indeed, between 1990 and 1993, when a transitional government of “national unity” was formed, strikes and demonstrations became scarce or had no effect on the new government. (…) Besides, this was the central objective of the bourgeoisie’s project when it decided the process which led to the dismantling of apartheid and to the “national reconciliation” of all the bourgeois factions that had been killing each other under apartheid. This project would be implemented faithfully by Mandela and the ANC between 1994 and 2014, including the massacre of workers resisting their exploitation and repression.”

In this article, we aim to show how the ANC’s project was implemented methodically by its successive leaders, in the first place by Nelson Mandela. We will show to what extent, having fought the old "white power", the South African working class was able to deal with the new “black power”. Indeed, the South African proletariat did not lose its combativity, as we will see later, but it faced many serious difficulties. In addition to its daily struggle for the improvement of its living conditions, it also had to confront diseases like AIDS with its terrible ravages, the corruption of the regime in power, and the many forms of social violence related to the decomposition of the capitalist system; murders, pogroms, etc. At the same time, as usual, it continued to face a repressive, bloodthirsty power, one that caused the deaths of many miners at Marikana in 2012. But the fact remains that the South African proletariat has already shown its capacity to play an important role as part of the world proletariat for the communist revolution.

The ANC in the exercise of power

In 1994, at the end of the period of the “transitional government”, general elections were held and won triumphantly by the ANC which took all the levers of power to govern the country according to the orientations of South African national capital, with the support, or goodwill, of the principal white South African leaders who had fought against it for so long.

Now for Mandela the serious business could begin, namely the recovery of a national economy severely battered not only by the economic crisis in this period but also the consequences of the workers' resistance to exploitation. So in its first year of office in 1995, the Mandela government decided on a series of austerity measures, including a 6% cut in civil servants' salaries and 10% in spending on health. From that moment on, the question posed was how the working class would react to the attacks of the new regime.

First strike movement of the era of President Mandela

Against all odds, the working class, though stunned by all the propaganda about the “national union" or "new democratic era", could not let such an aggressive attack go by without reacting. We saw the outbreak of the first strike movements under the Mandela government, particularly in transport and public services. For its part, as expected, the new bourgeoisie in power soon showed its true face as the dominant class by violently repressing the strikers, a thousand of whom were arrested, without counting the number of wounded by police dogs. Parallel to the government and police repression, the South African Communist Party and COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions), both members of the government, being unable to prevent the outbreak of strikes, began to violently denounce the strikers, accusing them of sabotaging the policy of national “recovery” and "reconciliation". An important fact should be noted here: while COSATU trade union leaders along with the government denounced and repressed the strikers, the base unionists remained “bonded” with the workers, claiming to defend them against the repression descending on them. We must see here a certain power of the new regime because while associating COSATU with the management of the affairs of capital it did not forget the importance of relying on the sound instrument of recuperation of the workers' struggles constituted by base unionism, of which many of those in government had had practical experience. [2] [90]

The ANC deploys a new ideological device to deflect workers' combativity

Pursuing the implementation of its austerity measures, the new governmental team launched ideological manoeuvres to get them accepted by creating structures claiming to give legitimacy to its economic and political orientation. So, under the guise of the "Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC), in 1996 the Mandela government introduced a programme called "Reconstruction, Negotiation and Reconciliation", then in the following year “Growth, Employment and Redistribution" (GEAR). In fact these gadgets hid the same initial economic orientation whose application could only aggravate the living conditions of the working class. From then on, for the new regime, the question was how to get the "pill” accepted by the masses of workers, some of whom had just violently demonstrated their refusal of such austerity measures. And in this context, with the fear of a workers' response in opposition to the government plan, we saw the first open expression of (tactical) divergences within the ANC:

“(...) Is the ANC's political line still really at the service of its former supporters, serving the greatest number of people, especially the most deprived, as it claims? COSATU and the SACP (South African Communist Party) question it more and more, often, even if it is not frontally. They criticize the ANC for not representing the interests of the poorest, especially the workers, for losing interest in job creation and not paying enough attention to the access of all citizens to proper conditions of life. (...) This criticism has been abundantly relayed by intellectuals of the left and often virulently. (...) These divergent points of view nevertheless give rise to questions and debates. Is there a workers’ party to represent workers' interests in their own right? The SACP (South African Communist Party) has for a while evoked the prospect of an autonomous candidacy for elections and some within COSATU have even drafted a project for a workers' party.”[3] [91]

As can be seen from this quote, the governmental team publicly displayed its divisions. But this was above all a manoeuvre or more classically a division of labour between the right and the left at the summit of power, whose main purpose was to deal with the eventual workers' reaction.[4] [92] In other words, the threat of a split to create a "workers' party to represent workers' interests" was above all a cynical political trick aimed at diverting the combativeness of the working class.

The fact remains that the Mandela government decided to continue its austerity policy by taking all the necessary measures for the recovery of the South African economy. In other words, it was no longer a question of the “national liberation” struggle or “defending the interests of the poorest” preached hypocritically by the left of the ANC. And, at first, this policy of economic austerity, repression and intimidation on the part of the “new power of the people” had an impact on the working class, causing great disappointment and bitterness in its ranks. There then followed a period of relative paralysis of the working class in the face of persistent economic attacks by the ANC government. On the one hand, a good number of African workers, who had hoped for faster access to the same rights and benefits as their white comrades, were tired of waiting. On the other hand, the latter, with their racist unions (albeit very small) threatened to take up arms in defence of their “gains” (the various privileges accorded under apartheid).

This was a situation that could not objectively favour the struggle, let alone the unity of the working class. Fortunately, this period was only short-lived, because three years after its first reaction against the austerity measures of the ANC government under Mandela, the working class again reacted by resuming the fight, but much more massively than before.

1998: first massive struggles against the Mandela government

Encouraged no doubt by the way in which it had mastered the situation in the face of the first strike of its reign against its first austerity measures, the ANC government now made them even harder. But without realising, it created the conditions for a broader workers' response:

"(...) In 1998, it was estimated that 2,825,709 days of work were lost from the beginning of January to the end of October. The strikes were essentially for economic demands, but they also reflected the strikers’ political discontent with the government. Indeed, far from living better, many South African workers have seen their economic situation deteriorate, contrary to the commitments of the RDP (Reconstruction and Development Program). As for the unemployed, more and more numerous in the absence of new jobs and with many industries (especially in the textile and mining industries) closing or relocating, their situation was becoming more and more critical. It may be thought that, in addition to the financial demands made by the unions, the strikes also showed the first signs of the erosion of national enthusiasm for government policy.

The movement was widespread since strikes affected sectors as varied as textiles, chemicals, the automobile industry and even universities or security companies and commerce, often long, two to five weeks on average, and sometimes marked by police violence (a dozen strikers killed[5] [93]) and serious incidents, almost all for demands for salary increases. (...) Faced with strikes, the employers initially adopted a hard line and threatened to reduce their workforce or replace the strikers with other workers, but in most cases they were forced to honour the strikers’ demands."[6] [94]

As we can see, the South African working class did not wait long to resume its struggles against the ANC regime, just as it had opposed the attacks of the old apartheid regime. It is all the more remarkable that Mandela's government proceeded in the same way as its predecessor by firing on a great number of strikers, killing some, with the sole purpose (of course unacknowledged) of defending the interests of South African national capital. And without causing any public protest from the "humanist democrats". Indeed, it is significant to note that few media outlets (or field investigators) commented, or even described, the crimes committed by the Mandela government in the ranks of the striking demonstrators. Clearly, for the media and the bourgeois world in general, Mandela was still both an "icon" and an "untouchable prophet”, even when his government massacred workers.

For its part, the South African proletariat demonstrated in this way its reality as the exploited class by struggling courageously against its exploiter whatever the colour of their skin. And by its pugnacity it managed quite often to push back its enemy, as the bosses were forced to honour its claims. In short, there was here an expression of an internationalist class whose struggle constituted a clear unmasking of the lie that the interests of black workers merged with those of their own black bourgeoisie, namely the ANC clique.

Precisely, by uniting the ANC, the CP and the COSATU trade union in the same government, the South African bourgeoisie wanted, on the one hand, to convince the (black) workers that they had their own “representatives” in power to serve them, while also planning to leave the rank and file of COSATU in opposition in case it would be necessary to recuperate their struggles. Clearly, the ANC government thought it had done everything to guard against any consequent reactions from the working class. But in the end Mandela and his companions found the opposite.

In 1999 Mandela is replaced by his heir Mbeki but the struggles continue

In that year, following the presidential elections won by the ANC, Mandela gave way to his “foal” Thabo Mbeki who decided to continue and amplify the same austerity policy initiated by his predecessor. To begin with, he formed his government with the same factions as before, namely: the ANC, the CP and the COSATU central union. And immediately his government was formed, it imposed a wave of austerity measures hitting with full force the key economic sectors of the country, resulting in pay cuts and the deterioration of living conditions of the working class. But, also like Mandela, the next day, hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike and descended en masse into the streets and, as in the apartheid era, the ANC government sent its police to violently repress the strikers, causing a large number of casualties.

But above all it was remarkable to see how quickly the South African workers realised the capitalist and anti-working class nature of these attacks that the ANC team in power had made it suffer. The most significant thing in the workers' response was that in several industrial sectors workers decided to take charge of their own struggles without waiting for, or even acting against, the unions: "(...) the Autofirst strike, which began outside of the union and despite it, is a good example; especially since far from being an isolated case this type of strike tended to become widespread after 1999, including in large factories where the workers went on strike in spite of the unfavourable advice of the union, and even its formal opposition to the conflict".[7] [95]

This was a striking demonstration of the return of combativity accompanied by an attempt to take charge of the struggles that the working class had already experimented with under the apartheid regime. Consequently, the ANC had to react by readjusting its message and its method.

The ANC resorts to “racialist” ideology in the face of the new workers' combativity

To counteract the militancy of the workers which tended to outflank the unions, the Mbeki government and the ANC decided to resort to the ideological legacy of the " national liberation struggle", including (among other things) the "anti-white" rhetoric of this period:

"The return in a renewed form in the governmental political discourse of the question of colour, especially in a number of statements castigating Whites - a notion that must be examined if (and in this case how) it acts as a, racial, social, historical or other marker, and if it also operates in people's ways of thinking.

As a corollary of this new presidential policy, the tensions within the triple alliance (ANC, COSATU, SACP South African Communist Party), still in place after many threats of a split especially on the eve of the 2004 elections, were more and more obvious and more and more vivid. They show the difficulty of the ANC, the former national liberation party, to retain its popular legitimacy once in power and in charge of governing for the benefit, no longer only of the oppressed of yesteryear but for all the inhabitants of the country."[8] [96]

But why was the "rainbow “government, the "guarantor of national unity", which held all the levers of power, suddenly forced to resort to one of the old facets of the ANC of yesteryear, namely denouncing the "white power" (which is presented as preventing the power of the blacks)? The author of the quotation seems to us very indulgent with the leaders of the ANC, when she seeks to know about this "notion that must be examined" to know "if it acts as a, racial, social, historical or other marker". In reality this "notion", behind which lurks the idea that “the whites still hold power at the expense of blacks", was used here by the ANC in yet another attempt to divide the working class. In other words, by doing so, the government hoped to deflect demands for improvements in living conditions into racial issues.

Part of the working class, notably the militant base of the ANC, could not help being "sensitized” by this devious anti-white or even "anti-foreigner” rhetoric. We also know that the current President Zuma, with his populist accents, frequently exploits the "racial question” especially when he finds himself in difficulty faced with social discontent.

Anti-globalisation ideology to the rescue of the ANC

To deal with social unrest and the erosion of its credibility, the ANC decided in 2002 to hold a World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (the "Durban Social Forum"). The whole galaxy of anti-globalisation organisations participated, including several South African ones characterised as "radical” like the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the Landless People's Movement, very active in the strikes of the 2000s. In other words, in a context of radicalisation of workers' struggles the ANC apparatus sought the ideological contribution of the anti-globalisation movement:

"Furthermore, workers' strikes outside the trade unions broke out as in Volkswagen Port Elizabeth in 2002 or in Engen in Durban, in 2001. Some of these actions, like those of the TAC, regularly won victories over government policy. However, on the one hand, no opposition party really relayed these points of view in the parliamentary arena; on the other hand, the capacity of these organisations to influence sustainably, and on their own strengths (without becoming institutionalised or entering the government), the decisions of the state, remained fragile[9] [97]

Here we see a double problem for the ANC government: on the one hand, to prevent or divert strikes tending to escape the control of the unions close to it, and on the other hand, how to find a “credible” parliamentary opposition  with an apparent capacity to "durably influence" the decisions of the state.  Regarding this last point we will see later that the problem has not been resolved at the time of writing this article. On the other hand, regarding the first, the ANC, was able to expertly rely on the anti-globalisation ideology well embodied by some of the groups pushing for the radicalisation of struggles, in particular the TAC and the Landless People's Movement.

Indeed, “anti-globalisation” ideology came at the right time for an ANC government in search of new "ideological breath", all the more so as this movement was on the rise at the global media level. We should note also that in this same context (in 2002) the ANC was campaigning for the re-election of its leaders, for whom it was then timely to show their closeness to the anti-globalisation movement. But this was not enough to restore the credibility of the ANC leaders with the South African masses. And for good reason…

A deeply corrupted ruling class coming from the "national liberation struggle"

Corruption, that other "supreme disease” of capitalism, is a characteristic widely shared among the ANC leaders. Certainly, the capitalist world is very rich in examples of corruption, so it may be useless to add this one. In fact, it is the opposite in that many are still those "believers" in "exemplary symbolic capital" and the "probity" of the old heroes of the national liberation struggle who are the leaders of the ANC.

By way of introduction we reproduce here a quote from an organ of the bourgeois press, namely Le Monde Diplomatique, one of the ANC’s greatest “old supporters”:

“The system of ‘legalised corruption’

Since the presidency of Mr. Thabo Mbeki (1999-2008), the collusion between the business world and the black ruling class is obvious. This mix of people finds its embodiment in the person of Mr. Cyril Ramaphosa, 60 years old, designated successor of Mr. Zuma, elected vice-president of the African National Congress in December 2012. On the eve of the massacre of Marikana (...), Mr. Ramaphosa sent an email message to Lonmin's management, advising it to resist the pressure of the strikers, who he called ‘criminals’.

A McDonald's South Africa owner and president of the MTN telecommunications company, among others, Mr. Ramaphosa is also the former secretary general of the ANC (1991-1997) and the National Union of Mineworkers (1982-1991). A central player in the negotiations for the democratic transition between 1991 and 1993, he was be ousted by Mr Mbeki from Nelson Mandela's succession race. In 1994, he returned to business, boss of New African Investment (NAIL), the first black company listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and the first black billionaire of the ‘new’ South Africa. He now runs his own company, Shanduka, active in mining, agribusiness, insurance and real estate.

Among his brothers-in-law are Jeffrey Radebe, Minister of Justice, and Patrice Motsepe, mining tycoon, boss of African Rainbow Minerals (ARM). This had profited from Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) implemented by the ANC: supposed to profit the ‘historically disadvantaged’ masses, according to the ANC’s phraseology, this process of ‘the economic rise of the black people’ in fact favoured the consolidation of a bourgeoisie close to power. Mr. Moeletsi Mbeki, the youngest brother of the former head of state, academic and patron of the audiovisual production company Endemoi in South Africa, denounced a system of ‘widespread corruption’. It highlights the perverse effects of BEE: ‘cosmetic’ promotion of black directors fronting large white firms, huge salaries for limited competences, a sense of injustice among white professionals, some of whom prefer to emigrate.

If the adoption of a BEE charter in the mining sector, in 2002, put 26% in black hands, it also promoted a number of ANC barons to important leadership positions. Mr. Mann Dipico, former governor of North Cape Province, is vice-president of the De Beers diamond group's South African operations. BEE has also favoured the anti-apartheid elders, who have strengthened their position of influence in power. In 2009 Mr. Mosima (‘Tokyo’)) Sexwale, head of the Mvelaphanda mining group, took the leadership of the ministry of human settlements (slums).

As for Patrice Motsepe, he stands out in the 2012 Forbes List as the fourth richest man in South Africa ($2.7 billion). He did a great service to the ANC by announcing on January 30 the gift of half of his family assets (100 million euros) to a foundation that bears his name, to help the poor. Even if they do not emulate this, we cannot blame the black elite for not sharing its money".[10] [98]

This is a ruthless description of the system of corruption instituted by the ANC leaders on their arrival at the South African post-apartheid summit of power. Clearly, like gangsters, it is a question of sharing the spoils that their former white rivals held exclusively under the old regime, distributing posts according to the balance of power and alliances within the ANC. As a result, the struggle for the "power of the black people" was very quickly forgotten in the race for posts that led to the "capitalist paradise", getting richer faster to become (symbolically) multimillionaires in a few short years. Like this former great trade union leader and prominent member of the ANC, Mister Ramaphosa:

"The black bourgeoisie lives far from townships, where it does not distribute its wealth, or very little. Its tastes for luxury and opulence came to the fore under the presidency of Mr. Mbeki (1999-2008), thanks to the growth of the 2000s. But since Mr. Zuma came to power in 2009, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the South African Council of Churches have not ceased to denounce a ‘moral decline’ much more serious than the exorbitant price of the sunglasses of those nicknamed the Gucci revolutionaries. ‘Relationships can be openly venal’, smiles a black business lawyer who prefers to remain anonymous. ‘We talk about sex at the table, and not just about our polygamous president! Corruption spreads ...’ So much so that when a former De Beer executive is accused of corruption by the press, he says: ‘You get nothing for mahala ... (You get nothing for nothing)”.[11] [99]

It is amazing what this quote shows, notably the involvement of the successors to president Mandela, in the construction of the system of corruption under their respective reigns. But we also know that corruption in the ANC exists at all levels and in all places, giving rise to insidious and violent struggles, as in mafia gangs. Thus, Mbeki took advantage of his presidency of the state apparatus and the ANC to, by means of "low blows", oust his ex-rival Cyril Ramaphosa in 1990 and then sacked Zuma, his vice-president, sued for rape and corruption. Evidently these last two (while fighting each other) were able to reply by means as violent as they were obscure against their common rival. Zuma, who had the wit to pretend to be the victim of the umpteenth plot hatched by his predecessor Mbeki "known for his intrigues" (Le Monde Diplomatique). On the other hand, it is worth mentioning the characteristic act of violence that took place in December 2012 in Parliament, where, in the midst of preparations for their congress, ANC members came to blows to get their respective candidates passed by throwing chairs and exchanging punches.

And during all this time the "liberated people" of apartheid are immersed in misery and disease (for example one in four South Africans does not have enough to eat): “Meanwhile the level of despair is visible to the naked eye. In Khayelitsha, they drown their grief in gospel, a popular music that sounds everywhere, but also in dagga (cannabis), Mandrax or tik (methamphetamine), a drug that ravages the township.”[12] [100]

What a sad dive into the horror of a moribund economic system which plunges its people into the abyss with no way out!

AIDS comes in the midst of the misery and corruption of the ANC's power

Between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s the working class was not only battling against economic misery but also struggling against the AIDS epidemic. All the more so since the then head of government, Thabo Mbeki, had for a long time refused to recognize the reality of this disease, going so far as to cynically refuse to properly invest against its development.

“Another major element of the situation in South Africa since 2000 is precisely the proven and devastating spread, finally publicly recognized, of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. South Africa boasts the sad record as the most affected country in the world. In December 2006, the UNAIDS and WHO report indicated there were an estimated nearly 5.5 million HIV-positive people in South Africa, a rate of 18.8% among adults aged between 15 and 49 years and 35% among women - who are the most affected - seen in antenatal clinics. The total mortality in the country, from all causes, increased by 79% between 1997 and 2004, mainly because of the impact of the epidemic.

(...) Beyond this calamitous health check, AIDS has become one of the country's major problems. It decimates the population, leaves entire generations of children orphaned, but its impact is such that it also threatens the productivity and social equilibrium of the country. Indeed, the active population is the section most affected by the disease and the lack of income generated by the inability of an adult to work, even informally, sometimes plunges whole families into misery when survival depends sometimes only on these revenues. Social benefits are now granted by the state to families affected by the disease, but they remain insufficient(...) AIDS has indeed invaded all spheres of social life and the daily lives of everyone who is infected with the disease and/or affected by the death of a family member, a neighbour, a colleague...

(...) It seems to me that the closing of the negotiation sequence that was already taking shape in 1999, with the publication of the GEAR, was confirmed by Thabo Mbeki's denial of the link between HIV and AIDS in April 2000. Not so much because of the immense controversy that this statement has aroused in the country and around the world but for tackling the epidemic, which represented a major challenge for the construction of the country and its unity, marking that it was not, in his view, to be one of the main concerns of the state".[13] [101]

As this quotation shows, on the one hand, the AIDS epidemic was (and continues to) wreak havoc in the ranks of the South African proletariat and in the (mostly poor) populations in general, and on the other, government officials did not care, or only partially, about the plight of the victims even though official reports (from the UN) amply illustrated the massive presence of the virus in the country. In fact, the Mbeki government was in denial in not even seeing that AIDS has now invaded all spheres of social life, including the daily life of the productive forces of the country, in this case the working class. But the most cynical in this case was the then health minister:

“Faithful to then President Thabo Mbeki, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang (...) has no intention of organizing the distribution of ARVs [antiretroviral drugs] in the public health sector. She argues that they are toxic, or that one can be healed by adopting a nutritious diet based on olive oil, garlic and lemon. The conflict ended in 2002 before the Constitutional Court: is the public hospital authorised to administer to HIV-positive mothers a nevirapine tablet that drastically reduces the risk of the child being infected during childbirth? The government is doomed. Other trials will follow, imposing in 2004 the start of a national treatment strategy."[14] [102]

This is the abject attitude of an irresponsible government faced with the millions of AIDS victims left to their own devices, where it had to wait until the intervention of the Supreme Court to stop the criminal madness of the ANC and Mbeki government faced with the rapid development of AIDS, which has largely contributed to the fall in life expectancy from 48 in 2000 to 44 in 2008 (when infected patients died by the hundreds every day).

The decomposition of capitalism aggravates social violence

Readers of the ICC’s press know that our organization regularly deals with the effects of decomposition (the final phase of the decadence of capitalism) on all aspects of social life. These are manifested more bluntly in certain areas, especially the former "Third World" in which South Africa is located.

Despite its status as the continent's leading industrial power with relative economic development, South Africa is one of the countries in the world where you are more likely to die by homicide and where violent aggressions of all kinds are the daily lot of the populations and, of course, within the working class. For example, in 2008 South Africa experienced 18,148 murders, or a rate of 36.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, which puts the country in second place behind Honduras (with a rate of 61 per 100,000 inhabitants). In 2009, a study by the South African Council of Medical Research found that the rate of female homicides committed by male partners was five times higher than the global average.

The killings happen day and night in all places, at home, in the street, on transport, café terraces, sports grounds. Alongside the killings there is the explosion of other violence: incidents of sexual violence against women and children amounted to 50,265 in 2008.

The most sordid thing in this situation is undoubtedly the fact that the South African government turns out to be at best powerless and at worst indifferent or complicit when we know that members of its own police participate in this violence; in South Africa the police are as corrupt as the other institutions of the country and, as a result, many cops are implicated in the vicious killings. Indeed, when the police do not participate directly in the killings, they behave like gangs that racketeer and beat up people, so much so that the latter who suffer violence daily have little confidence in the police to protect them. As for the bourgeoisie meanwhile, many of its members prefer to be protected (in their well-barricaded houses) by heavily armed guards and other "security agents", whose numbers sources indicate today far exceed those of the national police.

The pogrom, epitome of violence

The pogrom, another barbaric aspect of social violence, has raised its head episodically in South Africa since 2008, and again very recently in 2019.

“A wave of xenophobic violence has caused the deaths of ten immigrant workers in South Africa since September. A continental economic giant, the country is ravaged by inequality. Unemployment affects 40% of the working population and especially black people” (Le Monde Diplomatique, October 2019)

We know that the decomposition of the capitalist system encourages nihilism, undermines the spirit of human and class solidarity; and in these cases, we can consider that some victims of poverty can become the killers of their class brothers, thus becoming accomplices of their class enemy at the head of bourgeois power. The real responsibility for all this lies with the leaders of the ANC and their boss Cyril Ramaphosa, ex-president Zuma’s successor who was elected in February 2018 on the basis of untenable promises like “the fight against unemployment”, “a better life for all”, or “free schooling for poor families”. In fact, faced with the abominable murders of immigrants he first turned a blind eye and said nothing, before reacting hypocritically without accepting any responsibility for the massacres: “On Tuesday, the South African president, after an inexplicable silence, finally admitted that the attacks were an expression of what in current language in South Africa is termed ‘xenophobia’…but that according to him, South Africa ‘is not xenophobic’. Since the big upsurge in violence in 2008 (which accounted for 60 to 100 victims), an anti-foreign discourse, which seems to be a disturbing reflection of what comes out of the extreme right in Europe, with occasional borrowings from Donald Trump, has been circulating in the elite, and can’t fail to impregnate the poorest layers who are exposed to very difficult living conditions”(Le Monde, 5 September 2019)

And another press organ described more clearly the abject attitude of the “elites”, behind which lies the ANC: “The most widespread stereotypes about the migrants derive from official speeches which present them as criminals, as people who carry diseases and try to marry South Africans to get hold of immigration papers” (Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2018)

So we see very clearly that the ANC leaders in power describe black African immigrants in words very similar to those of the extreme right. The behaviour of the South African regime is all the more absurd when we know that the entire working class is the targeted here, because it has been drawn from many sources, including under apartheid. As in 2008, the pogromists are described by the media, randomly, as the "left-behind", "delinquents/traffickers", the "precarious/unemployed ...” In short, a mixture of the "declassed", "nihilists" and the simply frustrated, without hope and without proletarian consciousness. The pogroms of September 2019 inevitably draw comparisons with 2008. In June that year nearly one hundred immigrant workers died, victims of pogroms perpetrated by armed gangs in the slums of Johannesburg. Groups equipped with knives and firearms appeared at nightfall in dilapidated neighbourhoods looking for "foreigners" and began to beat, to kill, even burn alive the inhabitants and chase thousands more.

The first massacres took place in Alexandra, in a huge township (slum) located next to the business district of Johannesburg, the financial capital of South Africa. The xenophobic attacks spread gradually to the other localities of this region with the total indifference of the country’s authorities. Indeed, it took 15 days of killings for President Mbeki’s government to decide to react weakly (cynically in fact) by sending the police to intervene in certain areas while letting the massacres continue in others. Most of the victims were from neighbouring countries (Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Congo, etc.). There are nearly 8 million immigrants of whom 5 million are Zimbabweans who work (or search for work) in South Africa, particularly in arduous jobs such as mining. Meanwhile others live precariously by starting businesses to survive. But what is more inhumanely terrible in this pogrom is the fact that many victims were there because they were starving in their countries of origin, as in the case of the Zimbabwean survivor quoted by the weekly Courrier international:

“We are starving and our neighbours are our only hope. (...) There is no point in working in Zimbabwe. You do not even earn enough to stay in the worst suburbs of Harare (the capital). (...) We are willing to take risks in South Africa; this is our life now (...) But if we don’t do it, we will still die. Bread today costs 400 million Zimbabwean dollars (0.44 euros) and one kilo of meat 2 billion (2.21 euros). There is nothing more than more than porridge in the shops, and the people who work cannot live on their wages". [15] [103]

Faced with the horrible murders in 2008 and 2019, the ANC leaders use the same criminal methods against the working class

The importance of the imperialist factor in the situation

The other factor weighing on the budgets of these two states is their leaders’ search for imperialist influence. Moreover, if we talk about the "imperialist question” here, it is above all its effects on the relations between the classes, where the bourgeoisie subjects the working class to an economic war effort at home and to killings abroad. To be clear, the South African and Zimbabwean governments compete with the imperialist powers (large and small) who seek to control the regions of Southern Africa and the Great Lakes, by proclaiming themselves "local gendarmes". Thus, these two were massively involved in the wars that ravaged this area in 1990-2000 which caused more than 8 million deaths. It is with this in mind that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe embarked on a decade-long war in the DRC (ex- Zaire), where he dispatched some 15,000 men at an exorbitant economic cost estimated at 1 million dollars a day (representing over 5.5% of annual GDP). This disastrous military adventure was undoubtedly an accelerator of the total ruin of the economy of Zimbabwe, a country that until the 1990s was considered the "breadbasket" of Southern Africa. Moreover, among the causes of the deteriorating economic situation in Zimbabwe we must also emphasize the total embargo imposed by the western imperialist powers against the “dictatorial regime" of Robert Mugabe (who died in 2019). Indeed, he refused to comply with the Western "democratic governance model" by doing everything to cling to the power he had held between 1984 and 2017, when he was “deposed” and replaced by his former right-hand man Emmerson Mnangagwa. And the latter proved himself a worthy heir of Mugabe, wasting no time in carrying out the repressive role of his predecessor against recent movements of struggle against endemic poverty.  

Regarding the specific role of South Africa in the imperialist wars in Africa we refer readers to the International Review nos. 155 and 157. But let us point out that before they came to power, Mandela and his companions were already fully involved in imperialist struggles for influence and then continued, for example, going as far as to dispute with France, in 1990-2000, its influence in Central Africa in the Great Lakes region.

The return of strikes and other social movements

One of the major characteristics of South Africa since the apartheid era is that, when there are no strikes, social tensions give rise to protests, sometimes to other types of violent clashes. For example, according to police data, the country experienced three riots per day on average between 2009 and 2012. And according to a South African researcher quoted by Le Monde Diplomatique[16] [104], this is an increase of 40% compared to the period 2004-2009.This situation is probably related to the violent relations that already existed between the colonial empires and the population of this country, well before the official establishment of apartheid, when successive leaders at the head of the South African state always resorted to violence to impose their order – bourgeois order of course[17] [105]. This is amply proven throughout the history of the class struggle in South Africa, in the era of industrial capitalism. Indeed, the working class saw its first deaths (4 miners of British origin) when it launched its first strike at Kimberley, the "diamond capital", in 1884.

For its part, the population, in this case the black majority of the working class, has always been forced to use violence, especially during apartheid, where its human dignity was simply denied on the historical pretext that it belonged to an "inferior race". Thus, in the light of all these factors, we can speak of a "culture of violence" as a component of the relations between the bourgeoisie and the working class in South Africa. And the phenomenon persists and grows today, that is to say under the rule of the ANC.

Bloody repression of the strike at Marikana in 2012

This movement was preceded by more or less significant strikes, such as that of 2010, by the workers responsible for building the stadiums to host the World Cup that year. A strike was launched by the unions in that sector threatening not to complete the work before the official start of the competition. With this "union blackmail", the striking workers were able to obtain substantial salary increases of 13% to 16%. There was strong discontent throughout the country over the deteriorating living conditions of the population and it is in this context, two years after the final whistle of the World Cup, that the strike erupted in Marikana. From August 10, 2012, the employees of the Marikana pits went on strike to support the lowest paid workers by demanding that the minimum wage be raised to 1250 euros, a demand rejected by the mining employers and the NUM (the largest of the unions affiliated to COSATU).

"The social tension was palpable since, on August 16, 2012, police killed thirty-four miners (and wounded seventy-eight) on strike in Marikana, a platinum mine near Johannesburg. For the population, what a symbol! The forces of a democratic and multiracial state, led since 1994 by the African National Congress (ANC), fired on demonstrators, as in the days of apartheid; on these workers who constitute its electoral base, the overwhelming black and poor majority of South Africa. In this industrialised country, the only emerging market south of the Sahara, poor households, 62% black and 33% Métis, represent more than twenty-five million people, or half of the country's population, according to figures published at the end of November by the national institutions.

The shock wave is comparable to that of the Sharpeville Massacre, whose memory events in Marikana have awakened. On 21 March 1960, the apartheid regime's police (1948-1991) killed sixty-nine protesters protesting in a township against the pass imposed on "non-whites" to go to the city. When the news of the tragedy arrived in Cape Town, the people of Langa, a black township, reduced the public buildings to ashes.

The same chain reactions occur today. In the wake of Marikana, employees in the mining, transport and agriculture sectors are multiplying wildcat strikes. (...) Result: vineyards burned, shops looted and showdowns with the police. All against a background of the strikers’ dismissal. (...) At Lonmin, the miners won, after six weeks of action, an increase of 22% and a premium of 190 euros.

(...) Today, the black unions, with more than two million members, demand from the government a real social policy and better working conditions for all. But – a South African peculiarity here - they are ... in power. With the South African Communist Party and the ANC, since 1990 they have constituted a "revolutionary" tripartite alliance that is supposed to work for the transformation of society. Communists and trade unionists represent the left wing of the ANC, which the party is trying to restrain by distributing power. Communist leaders regularly hold ministerial positions, while those of Cosatu sit on the National Executive Committee of the ANC. Their challenge to the ANC’s liberal management of the economy ANC loses credibility.

(...) For the first time, in Marikana, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), affiliated to Cosatu and among the largest in the country, has been overwhelmed by social conflict. (For a contractor), ‘The politicization of social conflicts, which involve the questioning of the ANC or its leaders, scares the big mining groups.’" [18] [106]

In the tragic events of Marikana we once again witnessed a real class confrontation between the new bourgeoisie in power and the South African working class. Already, without causing much noise, during a strike in 1998-99 the government of Mandela himself had massacred a dozen workers. But the tragedy of Marikana is unprecedented and rich in lessons that we will probably not be able to draw within the framework of this article. But we can say from the outset that the miners who died or were wounded in rising up against the misery imposed by their class enemy deserve a great tribute and salute from their class brothers and sisters everywhere. Especially since at the end of the day none of the perpetrators of this slaughter were sentenced and the ANC president, Jacob Zuma, simply appointed a commission of inquiry that waited two years to make its report that (cynically) simply advocated: "A criminal investigation under the direction of the prosecution against the police" which "points out the responsibilities of Lonmin. On the other hand, it exempts the political leaders of the time".[19] [107]

This conflict shows us the profound and definitive anchoring of the ANC in the camp of the South African national capital, not only at the level of the state apparatus, but also its individual members. Thus, it has previously been shown (see above) that many ANC leaders are at the head of large fortunes or successful businesses. In the course of the Marikana movement, the miners had to face the interests of big bosses including Doduzane Zuma (son of the current South African head of state), the head of "JLC Mining Services", which is very active in this sector. From then on we can understand better why this boss and company categorically rejected accepting the merits of the strikers’ demands by counting first on the police repression and the sabotaging work of unions close to the ANC to overcome the strike.In this conflict we could see the abject and totally hypocritical behaviour of COSATU and the Communist Party, pretending to "support" the strike movement, even as the government of which they are decisive members launched its bloodthirsty dogs on the strikers. In reality, the government's left was preoccupied above all by the eruption into the movement of a radicalised minority of its union base tending to escape its control:

"President Jacob Zuma did not move until a few days after the events. And he did not meet the miners, but the leadership of Lonmin. His political foe, 31-year-old Julius Malema, former president of the ANC Youth League, who was expelled from the party in April for ‘indiscipline’, took the opportunity to occupy the field. Becoming the spokesman of the disappointed base, he sided with the strikers. He accompanied them to court, where they were initially themselves charged with murder under a former apartheid riot law. This law allowed it to return a charge of murder against simple protesters, accusing them of having provoked the security forces. In the face of the outcry, the charge against two hundred and seventy miners was finally lifted and a commission of inquiry appointed. Mr Malema took this opportunity to call yet again for the nationalisation of mines and to denounce collusion between the regime, the black bourgeoisie, unions and ‘big capital’".[20] [108]

Clearly, on one side, we see President Zuma acting without mercy against the strikers, even avoiding meeting them; on the other side, we see this young Malema take advantage of his exclusion from the ANC to present an ultra-radical image with the sole purpose of recuperating the workers outraged and revolted by the attitude of the government forces in this conflict. To do this he pushed for the creation of a new miners' union in radical opposition to the NUM (which is linked to the regime). This explains the highly manoeuvrable and acrobatic attitude of the left wing of the ANC, which simultaneously wanted to assume its governmental responsibilities and preserve its credibility with unionised strikers, particularly its militant base. Fundamentally, this was a division of labour between the leaders of the ANC in order to break the movement in case the deaths would not be enough.

What about the symbolic aspect of this slaughter? Indeed, as noted in the quote above, what a symbol for the population! The forces of a democratic and multiracial state fired on protesters just like in the time of apartheid! As this witness (obviously a survivor of the carnage) describes:

"I remember one of our guys told us: ‘Let’s go’ by raising his arms in the air, says a witness. A bullet hit him in two fingers. He was hurt. Then he got up and said, ‘Men, let's go’. A second time, the cops hit him in the chest, and he fell to his knees. He tried to get up again, and a third bullet hit him in the side. Then, he collapsed, but he was still trying to move ... The man just behind him, who wanted to surrender too, then took a bullet in the head, and collapsed next to the other guy."[21] [109]

Here it is, the ANC police, facing the working class in struggle, adopting the same method, the same cruelty, as the apartheid regime. Of course, the gangster Zuma has now been replaced by his rival Ramaphosa, but the same anti-working class policies of the ANC continue.

For us, marxist revolutionaries, what the behaviour of the present-day South African leaders in this butchery ultimately shows is that before being black-white-yellow ... the oppressors of the strikers are above all capitalist barbarians defending the interests of the dominant class, and this is why Mandela and his companions were put at the head of the South African state by all the representatives of big capital in the country. One can equally see in this tragic event for the working class another far more symbolic aspect in the former apartheid country: the fact that the police chief who led the bloody operations against the strikers was a black woman. This shows us, once again, that the real divide is not race or gender but class, between the working class (of all colours) and the bourgeois class. And this is true despite all those who claimed (or still believe!) that the leaders of the ANC (Mandela included) would defend the same interests as the (black) South African working class.

As for the latter, it must know that before and after the tragedy of Marikana, it always faces the same enemy, namely the bourgeois class which exploits, beats it and does not hesitate to assassinate it. That's what the current leaders of the ANC do, and that's what Nelson Mandela did when he governed the country himself. Although the latter died in 2014, his legacy is assured and assumed by his successors. Until his death, Mandela was the reference point and the political and "moral" authority of the ANC leaders; likewise he was the icon of all the capitalist regimes on the planet who, moreover, honoured him by awarding him the "Nobel Peace Prize", in addition to other titles like "hero of the anti-apartheid struggle and man of peace and reconciliation of the peoples of South Africa". Consequently, it was this capitalist world (from the representative of North Korea to the President of the United States through the representative of the Vatican) which was present at his funeral to pay him a final tribute for "services rendered".

We now come to the end not only of this article, but also of the series of four articles. It is now necessary to conclude what we wanted to be a "contribution to a history of the workers’ movement".

What balance sheet to draw?

Given the breadth of the questions posed, at least one additional article would be needed to draw all the necessary lessons. We will limit ourselves here to succinctly expounding only a few elements of a balance sheet by trying to highlight the most important.

The starting question was: is there a history of class struggles in South Africa? We think we have highlighted this by delving into the history of capitalism in general and that of South African capitalism in particular. To do this, we immediately sought enlightenment from the revolutionary marxist Rosa Luxemburg on the conditions for the birth of South African capitalism (see The Accumulation of Capital), and for the rest we relied for sources on various researchers whose work seems consistent and credible. Capitalism did indeed exist in South Africa as early as the 19th century, and it engendered two historical classes, namely the bourgeoisie and the working class, which have never ceased to clash for more than a century. The problem is that since then we never heard of class struggles, especially because of the monstrous system of apartheid against which Nelson Mandela and his companions fought in the name of the "struggle for national liberation". As we wrote in the first article in the series: "Mandela’s media image veils everything else to the point where the history and struggles of the South African working class before and during apartheid are either completely ignored or distorted by being systematically categorised under the rubric of ‘anti-apartheid struggles’ or ‘national liberation struggles’".[22] [110]

Readers who have read this entire contribution can see the glaring reality of real class struggles and of many victorious or glorious struggles of the working class in South Africa. In this sense we want to focus more particularly on two highlights of the class struggle led by the South African proletariat: on the one hand, during and against the First World War and, on the other, its decisive struggles at the time of the international recovery of the class struggle in the 1960s-70s, after the long period of counter-revolution.

In the first case, as soon as the 1914-18 war broke out, a minority of the working class showed its internationalist spirit by agitating and calling for opposition to this slaughter:

“(...) In 1917, a poster appears on the walls of Johannesburg, convening a meeting for July 19: ‘Come and discuss issues of common interest between white and indigenous workers.’ This text is published by the International Socialist League (ISL), a revolutionary syndicalist organization influenced by the American IWW (...) and formed in 1915 in opposition to the First World War and the racist and conservative policies of the South African Labour Party and craft unions.”[23] [111]

This was an exemplary act of class solidarity in the face of the world's first butchery. This proletarian and internationalist gesture is all the stronger when we also know that this same minority was at the origin of the creation of the truly internationalist Communist Party of South Africa before it was definitively "Stalinised" at the end of the 1920s.

In the second case, the massive struggles in the 1970s and 80s undermined the apartheid system, culminating in the Soweto movement of 1976: “The events of Soweto in June 1976 were to confirm the political change underway in the country. The youth revolt in the Transvaal combined with the rebirth of the black workers’ movement to unleash the major social and political movements of the 1980s. After the strikes of 1973, the clashes of 1976 ended the period of defeat.”[24] [112]

At a given moment, the level of combativeness and working class consciousness had "tipped the scales" of the balance of forces between the two historical classes. And the bourgeoisie took note of this when it decided to dismantle the system of apartheid, resulting in the reunification of all factions of capital in order to cope with the resurgence of working class struggle. Very concretely, to reach this stage of development of its combativity and class consciousness, the working class had to take control of its struggles by, for example, setting up hundreds of struggle committees (the “civics”) to express its unity and its class solidarity during the struggle, to a large extent going beyond the "racial question". These civics, a high-level expression of the Soweto movement, were the culmination of a process of maturation begun in the wake of the massive struggles of the years 1973-74.

To cope with this magnificent workers’ struggle, the bourgeoisie, was able to rely in particular on the formidable weapon of "base unionism", without ever forgetting for a moment its repressive arsenal.

Although geographically removed from the most experienced and concentrated battalions of the world proletariat in the old capitalist countries, the South African proletariat has demonstrated, in practice, its ability to assume a very important role in the path to the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of communism. Certainly, we know that the path will be long and chaotic, and with enormous difficulties. But there is no other.

Lassou (October 2019)

 

[1] [113] See "From the Soweto Movement of 1976 to the coming to power of the ANC in 1993” in International Review No. 158.

[2] [113] These were in particular members of COSATU, which came out of the Federation of South African Trade Unions, as we can see in IR 158: “FOSATU made use of its ‘genius’ for organising, to the point of being simultaneously heard by both the exploited and the exploiter in order to astutely ‘manage’ the conflicts between the two antagonists – which meant, in the final analysis, serving the bourgeoisie…At the beginning of the 80s, the union current developed an original union project, with the idea of being explicitly independent from the main political forces; it was formed around networks of intellectuals and students…presenting itself as a ‘union left’ and ‘political left’, and a number of its leaders were influenced by the ideology of Trotskyism and critical Stalinism”

[3] [114] Judith Hayem, La figure ouvrière en Afrique du Sud, Editions Karthala, 2008, Paris. According to her editor, Judith Hayem "is an anthropologist, lecturer at the University of Lille 1 and a member of CLERSE-CNRS. Specializing in labor issues, she carried out factory surveys in South Africa, but also in England, the United States and France. Since 2001, she has continued her research in South Africa around mobilisations for access to HIV/ IDS care in the mines”.

[4] [115] Moreover, 10 years after this episode the various components of the ANC are still together at the head of the South African government, at least as we write these lines in autumn 2017.

[5] [116] Our emphasis. In a footnote the cited author specifies the number of victims in these terms: “it is estimated that 11 to 12 people lost their lives, and that many others, strikers or non-strikers, and replacement workers were wounded". And all without any comment, as if the author sought to downplay the importance of the massacre or to preserve the image of Chief Officer Mandela, "the icon of the Democrats".

[6] [117] Judith Hayem, Op. Cit.

[7] [118] Judith Hayem, Op. Cit.

[8] [119] Judith Hayem, Op. Cit.

[9] [120] Judith Hayem, Op. Cit.

[10] [121] Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2013.

[11] [122] Ibid.

[12] [123] Ibid.

[13] [124] Judith Hayem, Op. Cit.

[14] [125] Manière de voir, supplement to Le Monde Diplomatique, November 2015.

[15] [126] Courrier International, May 29, 2008.

[16] [127] Ibid

[17] [128] See the article “A history of class struggle in South Africa” in International Review, No. 154, which shows (among other examples) that in order to overcome a miners' strike in 1922 the South African government decreed martial law and brought together some 60,000,000 men equipped with machine guns, cannons, tanks and even aircraft. In the end, 200 workers were killed and thousands more wounded or imprisoned.

[18] [129] Le Monde Diplomatique, Ibid.

[19] [130] Manière de voir, Ibid.

[20] [131] Le Monde Diplomatique, Ibid.

[21] [132] Manière de voir, Ibid.

[22] [133] See International Review, No. 154

[23] [134] Ibid.

[24] [135] See International Review No. 158.

 

Introduction

The communist revolution can only be victorious if the proletariat arms itself with a political party of the vanguard able to take up its responsibilities, as the Bolshevik party was able to do in the first revolutionary attempt in 1917. History has shown how difficult it is to construct such a party. It is a task which demands numerous and diverse efforts. It demands, above all, considerable clarity around programmatic questions and the principles of organisational functioning, a clarity which is necessarily based on the entirety of the past experience of the workers’ movement and its political organisations.

At each step in the history of this movement, certain currents have stood out as the best expressions of this clarity, as the ones which have been able to make a decisive contribution to the future of the struggle. This has been the case with the marxist current ever since 1848, a time when large sectors of the proletariat were still heavily influenced by the petty bourgeoisie conceptions that were vigorously combated in chapter three of the Communist Manifesto, “Socialist and Communist Literature”. It was even more the case within the International Workingmen’s Association founded in 1864:

“But this association, formed with the express aim of welding into one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe and America, could not at once proclaim the principles laid down in the Manifesto. The International was bound to have a programme broad enough to be acceptable to the English trade unions, to the followers of Proudhon [137] in France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and to the Lassalleans [138] in Germany.

Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working class, which was sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion… And Marx was right. The International, on its breaking in 1874, left the workers quite different men from what it found them in 1864... In fact, the principles of the Manifesto had made considerable headway among the working men of all countries” (Engels, Preface to the 1888 English edition of the Manifesto).

It was finally within the Second International, founded in 1889, that the marxist current became hegemonic thanks in particular to the influence of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. And it was in the name of marxism that Rosa Luxemburg in particular engaged in the fight against the opportunism which, from the end of the 19th century, was gaining ground in this party and the whole of the International. It was equally in the name of marxism that the internationalists during the First World War waged the struggle against the betrayal of the majority of the Socialist parties, and that, under the impulsion of the Bolsheviks, they founded the Third, Communist International in 1919. And when the latter, following the failure of the world revolution and the isolation of the revolution in Russia, in turn followed a path of opportunist degeneration, it was once again the marxist current of the communist left – represented notably by the Italian and Dutch-German lefts - which led the battle against this degeneration. Like the majority of the parties of the Second International those of the Third ended up, with the triumph of Stalinism, going over to the camp of the capitalist enemy. This treason, this submission of the Communist parties to the imperialist diplomacy of the USSR, provoked many reactions alongside those of the communist left. Some of them were led to a “critical” return into the fold of social democracy. Others tried to remain in the camp of the proletariat and the communist revolution, as was the case, after 1926, with the Left Opposition animated by Trotsky, one of the great names of the October 1917 revolution and the foundation of the Communist International.

The world communist party which will be at the head of the proletarian revolution of the future will have to base itself on the experience and reflection of the left currents which detached themselves from the degenerating Communist International. Each of these different currents drew their own lessons from this historic experience. And these lessons are not all equivalent. Thus there are profound differences between the analyses and politics of the left communist currents which were formed right at the beginning of the 1920s and the “Trotskyist” current which appeared much later and which, while situating itself on a proletarian terrain, was from the start strongly marked by opportunism. It is obviously not by chance that the Trotskyist current joined the bourgeois camp faced with the test of the Second World War whereas the currents of the communist left remained loyal to internationalism.

Thus the future world party, if it is to make a real contribution to the communist revolution, can’t take up the heritage of the Left Opposition. It will have to base its programme and its methods of action on the experience of the communist left. There are disagreements among the existing groups who have come out of this tradition, and it is their responsibility to continue confronting these political disagreements so that the new generations can better understand their origins and significance. This is the sense of the polemics which we have already published with the Internationalist Communist Tendency and the Bordigist groups. That said, beyond these divergences, there exists a common heritage of the communist left which distinguishes it from other left currents which came out of the Communist International. Because of this, anyone who claims to belong to the communist left has the responsibility to know and to make known the history of this component of the workers’ movement, its origins in reaction to the degeneration of the parties of the Communist International, and the different branches which compose it (the Italian left, the German-Dutch left etc). It is above all important to draw out very precisely the historic contours of the communist left and the differences which separate it from other left currents of the past, notably the Trotskyist current. This is the object of the present article.

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On the blog Nuevo Curso we can read an article that tries to explain the origins of the Communist Left[1] [139]: "We call the Communist Left the internationalist movement that began fighting against the degeneration of the Third International, seeking to correct the errors inherited from the past reflected in its programme, starting from 1928 faced with the triumph of Thermidor[2] [140] in Russia and the counter-revolutionary role of the International and the Stalinist parties"[3] [141].

What does this mean, exactly? That the Communist Left began its struggle in 1928? If that is what New Course thinks, it is wrong since the Communist Left arose in response to the degeneration of the Communist International as early as 1920-21, at the Second and Third Congresses of the International. In that agitated period where the last possibilities of the world proletarian revolution were being played out, groups, nuclei, of the Communist Left in Italy, Holland, Germany, Russia itself and later in France and other countries, carried out a fight against the opportunism that was corroding the revolutionary body of the Third International to its very roots [4] [142]. Two of the expressions of this Communist Left expressed themselves very clearly at the Third Congress of the CI (1921), carrying out a severe but fraternal criticism of the positions adopted by the International:

 "It was in the 3rd Congress of the CI those that Lenin called ‘leftists’, regrouped in the KAPD, stood up against the return to parliamentarism, to trade unionism, and showed how these positions went against those adopted in the First Congress, which had tried to draw out the implications for the struggle of the proletariat of the new period opened by the First World War.

It was also in this Congress that the Italian Left, which led the Communist Party of Italy, reacted vigorously - although in deep disagreement with the KAPD - against the unprincipled policy of alliance with the ‘centrists’ and the disfiguring of the CPs by the mass entry of fractions exiting social democracy”[5] [143].

In the Bolshevik Party itself "from 1918, the ‘Left Communists’ Bukharin and Ossinsky, had begun to warn the party against the danger of carrying out a policy of state capitalism. Three years later, after having been excluded from the Bolshevik party, Miasnikov's ‘Workers’ Group’ continued the struggle underground in close relationship with the KAPD and the Bulgarian Communist Workers’ Party until 1924 when it disappeared under the repeated blows of state repression. This group criticised the Bolshevik party for sacrificing the interests of the world revolution for the sake of defending the Russian state, reaffirming that only the world revolution could allow the revolution to survive in Russia” (ibid).

Thus the different currents of what became the Communist Left had been seeking a profound programmatic alternative - even though still in the process of elaboration - to the degeneration of the International in 1920-21. They made mistakes, as they were often groping in the dark in the face of major historical problems. However, for Nuevo Curso "it can be said that the historical time of the Communist Left ended in the decade between 1943 and 1953 when the main currents that had maintained an internationalist praxis within the Fourth International denounced the betrayal of internationalism and elaborated a new platform that started with the denunciation of Stalinist Russia as a capitalist, imperialist state".

This passage tells us, on the one hand, that the Fourth International was the home of groups with "an internationalist praxis", and, on the other hand, that after 1953 "the historical time of the Communist Left ended in the decade between 1943 and 1953". Let us examine these assertions.

What was the IVth International and what was the contribution of its nucleus, the Left Opposition?

The Fourth International was constituted in 1938 on the basis of the Left Opposition whose initial origins lie in Russia with the Manifesto of the 46 in October 1923, to which Trotsky adhered and, at an international level, in the appearance of groups, individuals and tendencies that from 1925-26 tried to oppose the increasingly overwhelming triumph of Stalinism in the Communist Parties.

These oppositions expressed an undoubted proletarian reaction. However, this reaction was confused, weak and contradictory. It expressed a superficial rejection of the rise of Stalinism. The Opposition in the USSR, despite its heroic battles, "showed itself incapable of understanding the real nature of the phenomena of Stalinism and bureaucratisation, a prisoner of its illusions about the nature of the Russian state. It also became the champion of state capitalism, which it wanted to promote through an accelerated industrialisation. When it fought against the theory of socialism in one country, it did not manage to break with the ambiguities of the Bolshevik party on the defence of the ‘Soviet fatherland’. And its members, Trotsky at the head, presented themselves as the best supporters of the ‘revolutionary’ defence of the ‘Soviet fatherland’. It conceived itself not as a revolutionary fraction seeking to safeguard theoretically and organisationally the great lessons of the October Revolution, but only as a loyal opposition to the Russian Communist Party”. This led it towards all kinds of ‘unprincipled alliances’ (thus Trotsky sought the support of Zinoviev and Kamenev who hadn't stopped slandering him since 1923)”[6] [144] (ibid.).

As for the International Left Opposition, “it laid claim to the first four congresses of the CI. At the same time, it perpetuated the practice of maneuvres that already characterised the Left Opposition in Russia. To a large extent this opposition was an unprincipled regroupment that was limited to making a ‘left’ critique of Stalinism. All true political clarification was forbidden in its ranks and it was left to Trotsky, regarded as the very symbol of the October Revolution, to act as the spokesman and ‘theoretician’" (ibid).

With these fragile foundations, the Left Opposition founded in 1938 was a "Fourth International" born dead to the working class. Already in the 1930s, the Opposition had been unable to "resist the effects of the counterrevolution that was developing on a world scale on the basis of the defeat of the international proletariat" (ibid) because throughout the different localised wars that were preparing the holocaust of the Second World War, the Opposition developed a "tactical perspective" “of supporting one imperialist camp against another (without openly admitting it).” This tactic “was put into practice by Trotskyism under multiple guises in the 1930s: support for ‘colonial resistance’ in Ethiopia, China and Mexico, support for republican Spain, etc. Trotskyism's support for Russian imperialism's war preparations was equally clear throughout this period (Poland, Finland 1939), concealed behind the slogan ‘defence of the Soviet fatherland’[7] [145]. This, together with the tactic of entryism in the Socialist parties (decided in 1934), ensured that "the political programme adopted in the founding congress of the IVth International, written by Trotsky himself, took up and aggravated the orientations that preceded that congress (defense of the USSR, workers’ united front, erroneous analysis of the period ...) but also had as its axis a repetition of the minimum program of a social democratic type (‘transitional’ demands), a programme rendered obsolete by the impossibility of reforms since the entry of capitalism in its phase of decadence, of historical decline" (op cit note 4). The IVth International defended "participation in the trade unions, critical support for the so-called ‘workers’’ parties, ‘united fronts’ and ‘anti-fascist fronts’, ‘workers’ and peasants’ governments’ and, prisoner of the experience in the USSR, state capitalist measures: the expropriation of private banks, the nationalisation of the credit system, the expropriation of certain branches of industry (...) and the defence of the degenerated Russian workers’ state. And at the political level, it envisaged the democratic and bourgeois revolution in the oppressed nations taking place through the struggle for national liberation". This nakedly opportunist programme prepared the way for the betrayal of the Trotskyist parties through the defence of their respective nation states in 1939-41.[8] [146]  Only a few individuals, and in no way "currents with an internationalist praxis" as Nuevo Curso claims, tried to resist this reactionary course! Among them Natalia Sedova, Trotsky's widow, who broke in 1951, and especially Munis, whom we will talk about below.

The continuity of the Communist Left, a programmatic and organisational continuity

It is therefore necessary to understand that the struggle to elaborate a programmatic framework that serves the development of proletarian consciousness and prepares the premises for the formation of the world party is not the task of unconnected personalities and circles, but the fruit of an organised, collective struggle that forms part of the critical historical continuity of communist organisations. That continuity passes, as we affirm in our Basic Positions, through “the successive contributions of the Communist League of Marx and Engels (1847-52), the three Internationals (the International Workingmen’s Association, 1864-72, the Socialist International, 1889-1914, the Communist International, 1919-28), the left fractions which detached themselves from the degenerating Third International in the years 1920-30, in particular the German, Dutch and Italian Lefts”[9] [147].

We have already seen that this continuity could not pass down either from the Left Opposition or from the Fourth International[10] [148] Only the Communist Left could do it. But according to Nuevo Curso, "the historical time of the Communist Left ended in the decade between 1943 and 1953”. They give no explanation for this, but in their article they add another sentence: "The Communist Left who were left out of the international regroupment – the Italians and their French derivatives – would arrive, although not all of them, not completely and not always on coherent positions, at a similar picture in the same period".

This passage contains numerous "enigmas". To begin with, which are the groups of the Communist Left that were left out of the "international regroupment"? What international regroupment is meant here? Of course, Bilan and the other currents of the Communist Left rejected the illusion of "going towards a Fourth International"[11] [149]. However, from 1929 they did everything possible to argue with the Left Opposition, recognising that it was a proletarian current, albeit gangrened by opportunism. However, Trotsky obstinately rejected any debate[12] [150]; only some currents such as the League of Internationalist Communists of Belgium or the Marxist Group of Mexico accepted the debate and this brought an evolution that led them to break with Trotskyism[13] [151]. 

Nuevo Curso tells us that those groups that remained "on the margin of the international regroupment "would arrive, although not all of them, not completely and not always on coherent positions, at a similar picture in the same period". What did they "lack"? Where were they "incoherent"? Nuevo Curso does not clarify anything. We are going to demonstrate, using a table that we put together in an article entitled What are the differences between the Communist Left and the Fourth International[14] [152]? In the same way, these groups had positions consistent with the programme of the proletariat and were in no way "similar" to the opportunist mire of the Opposition and the groups who had a so-called "internationalist praxis" in the Fourth International:

COMMUNIST LEFT	LEFT OPPOSITION
Based on the First Congress of the CI and critically considers the contributions of the Second. Rejects most of the positions of the Third and Fourth Congresses	Based on the first 4 Congresses without critical analysis
Looks critically at what is happening in Russia and comes to the conclusion that the USSR should not be supported as it has fallen into the hands of world capitalism.	Views Russia as a degenerated workers’ state that must be supported in spite of everything
Refuses to work in the trade unions (German-Dutch Communist Left) and will end up coming to the conclusion that they have become organs of the state.	Recommends trade unions as workers' bodies and considers it necessary to work within them
Denounces national liberation	Supports national liberation
Denounces parliamentarism and participation in elections	Supports participation in elections and "revolutionary parliamentarism."
Undertakes the work of a Fraction to draw lessons from the defeat and lay the foundations for a future reconstitution of the World Party of the proletariat.	Undertakes "opposition" work that could even lead to entryism in the social democratic parties.
During the 1930s, and especially through Bilan, considers that the world was on course for the Second World War; that the party could not be formed under such conditions, but that lessons had to be learnt and the future prepared. That is why Bilan proclaims: "The watchword of the hour is not to betray".	In the midst of the counterrevolution, Trotsky believes that the conditions for forming the party have been met and in 1938 the Fourth International is constituted.
Denounces World War II; condemns both sides in the conflict and advocates world proletarian revolution	Calls on workers to choose sides among the World War II contenders, thus abandoning internationalism

We add to the above table a point that seems to us to be very important in order to really contribute to the proletarian struggle and to advance towards the world party of revolution: While the Communist Left carried out an organised, collective and centralised work, based on loyalty to the organisational principles of the proletariat and on the historical continuity of its class positions, the Left Opposition was an agglomeration of heterogeneous personalities, circles and groups, united only by the charisma of Trotsky who was entrusted with the work of "political elaboration".

To top it all off, Nuevo Curso puts the Communist Left and the communisers (a modernist movement radically alien to marxism) in the same bag: "So-called ‘left communism’ is a concept that encompasses the Communist Left -especially the Italian and German-Dutch currents-, the groups and tendencies that give it continuity, from ‘Councilism’ to ‘Bordigism’ and the thinkers of ‘communisation’”. And because an image is worth a thousand words, they place a photo of Amadeo Bordiga[15] [153] in the middle of the denunciation of the "communisers," which implies that the Communist Left is linked to them or shares positions with them.

Munis and a so-called "Spanish Communist Left"

Thus, according to Nuevo Curso, revolutionaries today don’t have to look for the bases of their activity in the groups of the Communist Left (the ICT, the ICC, etc.) but in what might have come out of the programme of capitulation to capitalism elaborated by the Fourth International and concretely, as we will see below, of the work of the revolutionary Munis. However, in a confusing and convoluted way, Nuevo Curso implies, without stating it clearly, that Munis is the most important link in a supposed "Spanish Communist Left", a current that according to Nuevo Curso "founded the Spanish Communist Party in 1920 and created the Spanish group of the Left Opposition to Stalinism in 1930, then the Communist Left of Spain, participating in the foundation of the International Opposition and also serving as a seed and reference point for the communist lefts in Argentina (1933-43) and Uruguay (1937-43). It took up a revolutionary position on the workers' insurrection of July 19, 1936 and was the only marxist tendency to take part in the revolutionary insurrection of 1937 in Barcelona. It denounced the betrayal of internationalism and the consequent departure from the class terrain in the Second Congress of the Fourth International (1948), leading a split by the remaining internationalist elements and the formation of the ‘International Workers Union’.”

Before going on to analyse Munis' contribution, let’s analyse the supposed "continuity" between 1920 and 1948.

We cannot now enter into an analysis of the origins of the Communist Party in Spain (PCE). From 1918 on, there were some small nuclei interested in the positions of Gorter and Pannekoek, who ended up discussing with the Amsterdam Bureau of the Third International which grouped together the Left groups within the Third International. From these nuclei the first Communist Party of Spain was born, but they were forced by the CI to merge with the centrist wing of the PSOE, which was in favour of adhering to the Third International. As soon as possible we will make a study of the origins of the PCE, but what is clear is that, beyond some ideas and an unquestionable combativity, these nuclei did not constitute a real organ of the Communist Left and did not have any continuity. Later, Left Opposition groups emerged and indeed took the name "Communist Left of Spain," led by Nin. This group was divided between supporters of merging with the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc (a Catalan nationalist group linked to the right opposition against Stalinism, a tendency which in Russia was headed by Bukharin) and those who advocated entryism in the PSOE, seduced by the radicalisation of Largo Caballero (former state adviser to the dictator Primo de Rivera) who had begun posing as the "Spanish Lenin". Munis was among the latter, while the majority, led by Nin, would merge with the Bloc to form the POUM in 1935. Thus of the "Communist Left" they had nothing more than the name they gave themselves to be "original", but the content of their positions and of their actions was indistinguishable from the prevailing opportunist tendency in the Left Opposition.

As for the existence of a Communist Left in Uruguay and Argentina, we have studied the articles published by Nuevo Curso to prove its existence. As far as Uruguay is concerned, it was the Bolshevik Leninists that was one of the rare groups that, within Trotskyism, took an internationalist position against World War II. This has much merit and we salute it warmly as the expression of a proletarian effort, but reading the Nuevo Curso article shows that this group could barely carry out an organised activity and moved in a political environment dominated by the Peruvian APRA, a bourgeois party from head to toe that flirted with the already degenerated Communist International: "We know that the League met with the ‘antidefensistas’ in Lima in 1942 at the home of the founder of the APRA, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, only to verify the profound differences that separated them.  (…) After the failure of their ‘anti-defence’ contact they were subjected to the witch-hunt organised against the ‘Trotskyists’ by the government and the Communist Party. Without international references - the IVth International only gave them the option of giving up their criticism of the ‘unconditional defence of the USSR’ - the group was disbanded"[16] [154].

What Nuevo Curso calls the Argentine Communist Left are two groups that merged to form the Internationalist Communist League and remained active until 1937 to be finally destroyed by the action of Trotsky's supporters in Argentina. It is true that the League rejected socialism in one country and called for socialist revolution in the face of "national liberation," but while we recognise the merit of its struggle, its arguments are very flimsy. In Nuevo Curso we find quotes from one of the most important members of the group, Gallo, affirming:

“What does the struggle for national liberation mean? Doesn't the proletariat as such represent the historical interests of the Nation in the sense that it tends to liberate all social classes by its action and to overcome them by its disappearance? But in order to do so, it needs precisely not to be confused with national interests (which are those of the bourgeoisie, since this is the ruling class), which on the internal and external terrain contradict each other sharply. So that slogan is categorically false (...) affirming our criterion that only socialist revolution can be the stage that corresponds to colonial and semi-colonial countries”. Prisoner of the dogmas of the Opposition on national liberation and incapable of breaking from them, the group affirms ‘The IV International does not admit any slogan of ‘national liberation’ that tends to subordinate the proletariat to the ruling classes and, on the contrary, assures that the first step of proletarian national liberation is the struggle against them"[17] [155]. The confusion is terrible: the proletariat should undertake a proletarian "national liberation", that is, the proletariat should carry out a task that really belongs to the bourgeoisie.

Critical review of Munis' Contribution

Very late on, (in 1948!), there emerged from the rotten trunk of the IVth International some promising tendencies (the last in the Trotskyist movement[18] [156]): those around Munis and Castoriadis. In the article “Castoriadis, Munis, and the problem of breaking with Trotskyism”[19] [157] we make a very clear distinction between Castoriadis who ended up as a staunch propagandist for Western capitalism and Munis who always remained loyal to the proletariat[20] [158].

This loyalty is admirable and is part of the many efforts to advance toward a communist consciousness. However, this is one thing; quite another is that the work of Munis was more an example of individual activity than something linked to an authentic, organised proletarian current, something that could provide the theoretical, programmatic and organisational basis for continuing the work of a communist organisation today. We have shown in a number of articles that Munis, because of his origins in Trotskyism, was not able to carry out this task[21] [159]. 

Ambiguities about Trotskyism

In an article written in 1958, Munis makes a very clear analysis denouncing the American and English leaders of the Fourth International who shamefully reneged on internationalism, correctly concluding that "the Fourth International has no historical reason for existence; it is superfluous, its very foundation must be considered an error, and its only task is to trail after Stalinism, more or less critically”[22] [160]. However, he believes that it can be of some use to the proletariat, as it would appear that "it has a possible role left to play in countries dominated by Stalinism, mainly in Russia. There the prestige of Trotskyism still feels enormous. The Moscow trials, the gigantic propaganda carried out for almost fifteen years in the name of the struggle against Trotskyism, the incessant slander to which it was subjected under Stalin and which his successors maintain, all contribute to making Trotskyism a latent tendency of millions of men. If tomorrow – and this is a very possible event - the counter-revolution were to yield to a frontal attack by the proletariat, the Fourth International could quickly emerge in Russia as a very powerful organisation".

Munís repeats, with respect to Trotskyism, the same argument that he uses against Stalinism and Social Democracy: that EVERYTHING CAN SERVE THE PROLETARIAT. Why? Because Stalinism has designated it "public enemy number one," just as right-wing parties present social democrats and Stalinists as dangerous revolutionaries. He adds another argument, equally typical of Trotskyism regarding social democrats and Stalinists: "There are many workers who are followers of these parties”.

That the parties of the left are rivals of the right and are vilified by it does not make them "favorable to the proletariat", and in the same way their influence among the workers does not justify supporting them. On the contrary, they must be denounced for the role they play in the service of capitalism. To say that Trotskyism abandoned internationalism and to immediately add that "it might still have a possible role to play in favour of the proletariat" is a very dangerous incoherence that hinders the necessary work of distinguishing between genuine revolutionaries and capitalist wolves who wear the skin of a "communist" or "socialist" lamb. In the Communist Manifesto, the third chapter entitled "Socialist and Communist Literature" clearly establishes the border between "reactionary socialism" and "bourgeois socialism" that it sees as enemies and the currents of "critical utopian socialism" that it recognises as part of the proletarian camp.

The "transitional demands"

The Trotskyist imprint is also found in Munís when he proposes "transitional demands" along the lines of the famous Transitional Programme that Trotsky put forward in 1938. This is something we criticised in our article “Where is the FOR going?”:

“In its 'For a 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’.

“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 appetising carrots in order to push the workers towards their 'party'”.

“We see here a gradualist vision where "the leading party" administers its miraculous potions to lead the masses to "final victory," which is done at the price of sowing dangerous reformist illusions in the workers and embellishing the capitalist state by hiding the truth that its "democratic liberties" are a means of dividing, deceiving and diverting workers' struggles. Communists are not a force outside the proletariat, armed with the skills of revolutionary leadership and thus able to point the workers in the right direction. As early as 1843, Marx criticised this idea of prophets bringing redemption: ‘we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to’”[23] [161].

Voluntarism

The work as a fraction that the Left Opposition was incapable of conceiving allows revolutionaries to understand at what moment we are in the relationship of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, to know if we are in a dynamic that allows us to advance towards the formation of the world party or, on the contrary, if we are in a situation where the bourgeoisie can impose its trajectory on society, leading it to war and barbarism.

Deprived of that compass, Trotsky believed that everything was reduced to the ability to gather a large mass of affiliates that could serve as a "revolutionary leadership”. Thus, as world society moved toward the massacres of World War II punctuated by the massacres of Abyssinia, the Spanish war, the Russian-Japanese war, etc., Trotsky believed he saw the beginning of the revolution in the July 1936 French strikes and the Spanish workers' brave initial response to Franco's coup.

Unable to break with this voluntarism, Munís repeats the same mistake. As we wrote in part two of our article on Munis and Castoriadis,

“Underlying this refusal to analyse the economic dimension of capitalism’s decadence there lies an unresolved voluntarism, the theoretical foundations of which can be traced back to the letter announcing his break from the Trotskyist organisation in France, the Parti Communiste Internationaliste,  where he steadfastly maintains Trotsky’s notion, presented in the opening lines of the Transitional Programme, that the crisis of humanity is the crisis of revolutionary leadership”.

Thus Munis wrote: ‘The crisis of humanity – we repeat this a thousand times along with L.D. Trotsky – is a crisis of revolutionary leadership. All the explanations which try to lay the responsibility for the failure of the revolution on the objective conditions, the ideological gap or the illusions of the masses, on the power of Stalinism or the illusory attraction of the ‘degenerated workers’ state’, are wrong and only serve to excuse those responsible, to distract attention from the real problem and obstruct its solution. An authentic revolutionary leadership, given the present level of the objective conditions for the taking of power, must overcome all obstacles, surmount all difficulties, triumph over all its adversaries’” [24] [162]

Thus, a "real revolutionary leadership" would suffice to sweep away all the obstacles, all the adversaries. The proletariat would not have to rely on its unity, solidarity and class consciousness but entrust itself to the goodness of a "revolutionary leadership”. This messianism leads Munis to a delirious conclusion: "The last war offered more revolutionary opportunities than that of 1914-18. For months, all European states, including Russia, appeared battered and discredited, liable to be defeated by a proletarian offensive. Millions of armed men confusedly aspired to a revolutionary solution (...) the proletariat, organised on a revolutionary basis, could have launched an insurrection across several countries and spread it throughout the continent.. The Bolsheviks in 1917 did not, by a long shot, enjoy such vast possibilities”[25] [163]

Unlike World War I, the bourgeoisie had conscientiously prepared for the defeat of the proletariat before World War II: massacred in Germany and Russia, enlisted under the banner of "anti-fascism" in the democratic powers, the proletariat could only put up a weak resistance to the massacre. There was the great proletarian shock in northern Italy in 1943 that the democratic allies let the Nazis bloodily crush[26] [164], some strikes and desertions in Germany (1943-44) that the allies nipped in the bud with the terrible bombings of Hamburg, Dresden etc., bombings without any military objective but aimed only at terrorising the civilian population. Also the Commune of Warsaw (1944) that the Russian army let the Nazis suppress.

Only by abandoning oneself to the most suicidal illusions could one think that at the end of the Second World War “the proletariat, organised on a revolutionary basis, could have launched an insurrection across several countries”. With these fantasies little can be contributed to the formation of a proletarian organisation.

Sectarianism

A fundamental pillar of the revolutionary organisation is its openness and willingness to discuss with the other proletarian currents. We have already seen how the Communist Manifesto regarded with respect and a spirit of debate the contributions of Babeuf, Blanqui and utopian socialism. Therefore, in the Resolution on proletarian political groups adopted by our 2nd International Congress, we pointed out that “the characterization of the various organisations who claim to defend socialism and the working class is extremely important for the ICC. This is by no means a purely theoretical or abstract question; on the contrary, it is directly relevant to the attitude the Current has towards these organisations, and thus to its intervention towards them: on whether it denounces them as organs and products of capital; or whether it polemicizes and discusses with them in order to help them evolve towards greater clarity and programmatic rigour; or to assist in the appearance of tendencies within them who are looking for such clarity."[27] [165].

Contrary to this position, Trotsky, as we saw before, rejected debate with Bilan and, instead, opened the door wide to a so-called "left wing of social democracy".

Munis was also affected by sectarianism. Our article in homage to Munis[28] [166] acknowledges with appreciation that “in 1967, along with comrades from the Venezuelan group Internacialismo, he participated in efforts to restore contacts with the revolutionary milieu in Italy. Thus, at the end of the ‘60s, with the resurgence of the working class onto the scene of history, he took his place alongside the weak revolutionary forces existing at that time, including those who were to form Révolution Internationale in France. But at the beginning of the ‘70s, he unfortunately remained outside the discussions and attempts at regroupment which resulted in particular in the constitution of the ICC in 1975.”. This effort had no continuity and as we say in the above-mentioned article (“Castoriadis, Munis and the problem of breaking with Trotskyism, second part”) "the group suffered from a tendency towards sectarianism which further weakened its capacity to survive.

The example of this attitude referred to in the tribute is the rather showy departure of Munis and his group from the second conference of the communist left, citing his disagreement with the other groups on the problem of the economic crisis”. 

However important, a disagreement over the analysis of the economic crisis cannot lead to the abandonment of debate among revolutionaries. This must be done with the utmost tenacity, with the attitude of "convincing or being convinced", but never slamming the door on the first few exchanges without having exhausted all possibilities of discussion. Our article rightly points out that such an attitude affects something vital: the construction of a solid organisation capable of maintaining continuity. The FOR did not survive the death of Munís and disappeared definitively in 1993, as indicated in the article

“Today the FOR no longer exists. It was always highly dependent on the personal charisma of Munis, who was not able to pass on a solid tradition of organisation to the new generation of militants who rallied round him, and which could have served as a basis for the continued functioning of the group after Munis’ death”.

Just as the negative weight of the Trotskyist heritage prevented Munís from contributing to the construction of the organisation, so the activity of the revolutionaries is not that of a sum of individuals, even less that of charismatic leaders: it is based on an organised collective effort. As we say in our “Report on the function of the revolutionary organisation” from 1982, "The period of illustrious leaders and great theoreticians is over. Theoretical elaboration has become a truly collective task. In the image of millions of 'anonymous' proletarian fighters, the consciousness of the organisation develops through the integration and surpassing of individual consciousness in a single, collective consciousness”[29] [167]. More profoundly, “The working class doesn't give rise to revolutionary militants but to revolutionary organisations: there is no direct relationship between the militants and the class. The militants participate in the class struggle in so far as they become members and carry out the tasks of the organisation"[30] [168].

Conclusion

As we stated in the article we published at his death in 1989: "However, despite the serious errors he may have made, Munis remained to the end a militant who was deeply loyal to the combat of the working class. He was one of those very rare militants who stood up to the pressures of the most terrible counter­revolution the proletariat has ever known, when many deserted or even betrayed the militant fight; and he was once again there alongside the class with the historical resurgence of its struggles at the end of the ‘60s.

Lenin said that, for revolutionaries, "after their death they are turned into harmless icons, canonised, their names consecrated for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes, in order to deceive them”. Why does Nuevo Curso fill its blog with photos of Munis, publish some of his texts without the slightest critical eye? Why do they elevate him to the icon of a "new school"?

Perhaps we are looking at a sentimental cult of a former proletarian combatant. If that is the case, we must say that it is an enterprise destined to create more confusion because its theses, turned into dogmas, will only distill the worst of his errors. Let us remember the accurate analysis of the Communist Manifesto with respect to the utopian socialists and those who later tried to vindicate them

“Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat”.

Another possible explanation is that the authentic Communist Left is being attacked with a spam "doctrine" built overnight using the materials of that great revolutionary. If such is the case, it is the obligation of revolutionaries to fight such an imposture with the maximum energy.

C.Mir 4-7-19

 

[1] [169]  https://nuevocurso.org/la-izquierda-comunista-no-fue-comunista-de-izquierda/ [170] Available in English here: https://www.workersoffensive.org/single-post/2019/05/23/The-Communist-Left-Was-Never-Left-Communist [171]

[2] [172]  In an article on the series on communism (“1924-28: the triumph of Stalinist State capitalism”) we criticised the use of the term "Thermidor", very typical of Trotskyism, to characterise the rise and development of Stalinism. The Thermidor of the French Revolution (July 28, 1794) was not properly speaking a "counter-revolution" but a necessary step in the consolidation of bourgeois power that, beyond a series of concessions, would never return to the feudal order. On the other hand, the rise of Stalinism since 1924 meant the definitive restoration of capitalist order, and Stalin’s USSR did not represent, as Trotsky always erroneously thought, a "socialist terrain" where "some conquests of October" would remain. This is a fundamental difference that Marx already noted in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: ”Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day – but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly”. "(the Thermidor was precisely one of those moments of "assimilation" of the political conquests of the bourgeoisie, giving room to the more moderate factions of this class and more inclined to make a pact with the feudal forces, who remained powerful.

[3] [173]  Readers can find a great deal of material on the historical communist left on our website: https://en.internationalism.org/go_deeper [174]

[4] [175]  “Trotskyism, child of the counter-revolution” in World Revolution 11; online in Spanish as: https://es.internationalism.org/cci/200605/914/el-trotskismo-hijo-de-la-contrarrevolucion [176]

[5] [177]   In 1926 the United Opposition was formed, bringing together the previous groups from the Manifesto of the 46 with Zinoviev and Kamenev – the latter two being experts in manoeuvering and bureaucracy

[6] [178]  “Trotskyism, defender of imperialist war” https://es.internationalism.org/cci/200605/917/el-trotskismo-defensor-de-la-guerra-imperialista [179]

[7] [180]   All this is amply documented in “Trotskyism, defender of imperialist war”

[8] [181]   Among the individuals and small groups that opposed the betrayal of the organizations of the Fourth International, we should also add the RKD of Austria (see below) and the Greek revolutionary Stinas who remained faithful to the proletariat and denounced nationalism and the barbarism of war. See International Review 72 “Memoirs of a revolutionary (A. Stinas, Greece): Nationalism and antifascism”, https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR072_stinas.htm [182]

[9] [183]   See for example “The communist left and the continuity of marxism”, https://en.internationalism.org/the-communist-left [184]; International Review 9, “Notes towards a history of the Communist Left (Italian Fraction 1926-1939)” https://en.internationalism.org/content/2555/notes-towards-history-communist-left-italian-fractions-1926-1939 [185]

[10] [186]  As the Gauche Communiste de France wrote in its journal Internationalisme: “Trotskyism, far from favouring the development of revolutionary thought and of the organisms (fractions and tendencies) which express it, is an organised milieu for undermining it. This is a general rule valid for any political organisation alien to the proletariat, and experience has demonstrated that it applies to Stalinism and Trotskyism. We have known Trotskyism over 15 years of perpetual crisis, through splits and unifications, followed by further splits and crises, but we don’t know examples which have given rise to real, viable revolutionary tendencies. Trotskyism does not secrete within itself a revolutionary ferment. On the contrary, it annihilates it. The condition for the existence and development of a revolutionary ferment is to be outside the organisational and ideological framework of Trotskyism”.

[11] [187]  See for example Bilan number 1, 1933, organ of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, the article “Towards a Two and Three Quarters international?”, which criticises Trotsky’s perspective of moving towards the formation of a Fourth International

[12] [188]  See for example, Trotsky y la Izquierda italiana (Textos de la Izquierda comunista de los años 30 sobre el trotskismo) https://es.internationalism.org/cci/200605/919/anexo-trotsky-y-la-izquierda-italiana-textos-de-la-izquierda-comunista-de-los-anos-30 [189]

[13] [190]  See for example “The Mexican Communist Left”, https://en.internationalism.org/series/1250 [191]

[14] [192]  https://es.internationalism.org/cci-online/200706/1935/cuales-son-las-diferencias-entre-la-izquierda-comunista-y-la-iv-internacional [193] .

[15] [194]  Born in 1889 and died in 1970, he was a founder of the Communist Party of Italy and made an important contribution to the positions of the Communist Left, especially up until 1926

[16] [195]  https://nuevocurso.org/hubo-izquierda-comunista-en-uruguay-y-chile/ [196]

[17] [197]  https://nuevocurso.org/la-izquierda-comunista-argentina-y-el-internacionalismo/ [198]

[18] [199]  A third tendency should be added: the Austrian RKD, which detached itself from Trotskyism in 1945. Internationalisme discussed seriously with them, although they eventually drifted into anarchism.

[19] [200]  “Castoriadis, Munis, and the problem of breaking with Trotskyism” in International Reviews 161 and 162; https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201711/14445/communism-agenda-history-castoriadis-munis-and-problem-breaking-tr [201], and https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201808/16490/castoriadis-munis-and-problem-breaking-trotskyism-second-part-cont [202]

[20] [203]  In 1948-49, Munis discussed a great deal with comrade MC, a member of the GCF; and in this period his definitive break with Trotskyism came to fruition.

[21] [204] See “Farewell to Munis, a revolutionary militant” https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200908/3077/farewell-munis-revolutionary-militant [205]; “Polemic: Where is the FOR going”,  International Review 52, https://en.internationalism.org/content/2937/polemic-where-going [206];  “The confusions of Fomento Obrera Revolucionario (FOR): Russia 1917 and Spain 1936”, International Review 25, https://en.internationalism.org/content/3100/confusions-fomento-obrero-revolucionario-russia-1917-and-spain-193 [207] Book review:  JALONES DE DERROTA PROMESAS DE VICTORIA, https://es.internationalism.org/cci/200602/753/1critica-del-libro-jalones-de-derrota-promesas-de-victoria [208] ,

[22] [209]  http://marxismo.school/ICE/1959%20La%20IV%C2%AA%20Internacional.html [210] 

[23] [211]  Letter to Arnold Ruge,  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm [212]

[24] [213]  https://www.marxists.org/francais/4int/postwar/1947/06/nt_19470600.htm [214] We should add, as an example of this blind voluntarism and against a background of defeat, the tragic experience of Munis himself. In 1951 a boycott of trams exploded in Barcelona. It was a very combative reaction by the workers in the black night of the Franco dictatorship. Munis moved there in the hope of "promoting the revolution", without understanding the relationship of forces between the classes. Internationalisme and MC advised him against this adventure. However, he insisted on it and was arrested, spending 7 years in Franco's prisons. We appreciate the militant's combativity and we are in solidarity with him; however, the revolutionary struggle requires a conscious analysis and not a simple voluntarism or, even worse, a messianism, believing that by being "present" among them, the masses will be able to reach the "New Jerusalem".

[25] [215]  From an article by Munis “La IV Internacional” http://marxismo.school/archivo/1959%20La%20IV%c2%aa%20Internacional.ht [216]

 [26] [217] See “1943, The Italian proletariat opposes the sacrifices demanded for the war”, International Review 75, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/075_1943.html [218]

[27] [219]  Resolution on proletarian political groups, International Review 11, https://en.internationalism.org/content/4091/resolution-proletarian-political-groups [220]

[28] [221]  “Farewell to Munis…”

[29] [222]  “Report on the function of the revolutionary organisation”, International Review 29 https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR029_function.htm [223]

[30] [224]  Report on the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organization”, International Review 33, https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR033_functioning.htm [55]“( see note 21)