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.